Week 11


This week more progress was made towards the junction design. To correct the interfering solids caused by the 8"x2" track rails, those were replaced with 6"x2" ones instead. This also allowed us to increase the opening in the rails back to the spacing from Futran's design. These finalized dimensions can be seen on our team blog.  Lots of progress was made towards the junction assembly as well. The assembly is coming together well. The inner rails where they split off were extended to ensure they meet up with one of the support trusses, and don't need to be joined without a brace, while the angle cut in the bent was was fixed to ensure there is no gap between the rails. This part is circled in red in the figure below. I am currently brainstorming how to design the new truss parts to support the widened track at the junction, as well as the junction it self, and plan to have a working design done this weekend.
 
Figure 1: Current Progress on the Junction. Red highlights where the large changes were made.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 14

This week we made a decent start on our final build. I was not able to get as much as I wanted done due to limited access at the times I was available. On Thursday I was able to get all the new hangers for track junction welded together with the parts that Master Metal supplied.  While I was doing that Evelia was able to make a trip to pick up the lumber for our other track modifications. On Tuesday Evelia was able to pick up the rest of the lumber we will need to build the track as well as the bent pipe for the third rail. I was able to cut and tack the crossbeam supports for the third rail into place and plan to fully weld those into place tomorrow as well as finish preparing for our final presentation on Friday.
Read more

Project Beginnings

Over the past week I have been going through last year's reports from the full scale track team and supports and railings team, as well as the summer group's track expansion team. Based on what I read, as well as the recommendations to futures teams from the reports, I think there are two things that the full scale guideway team should focus on this year. First I think that we need to review the summer team's design on the track junctions, and finalize either their design, or a all new one. The team did great work over the summer, but as their goal was to add the expansion to the wooden system that was built last year, their design focused on expanding that model. While we can use, or base a new design off of their work, we also need to ensure we design the junction with long term use in mind, out of metal, and ensure that the bogie cannot physically fall off the tracks at any point. Secondly, we need to make progress towards designing the curved portions of the track.
Read more

Week 5

This week work was done towards sorting through the design files from last year.  It appears that the team from last year already broke down the truss assembly provided by Futran into separate components so that they could get a quote from Vander-Bend last year. This was something I was going to tackle this coming week but may no longer need too.  However, an assembly of the parts was not put together from what I can tell, so that is one thing I will cover in the next couple of days.  The files were also spread out over four separate folders so the need to be organized into a better file system. I took the time to look through the itemized quote they received as well, and the ~$12000 looks like it covered almost all the components necessary to built it with one major caveat, it did not include the tracks itself.   The quote also did not include all the hardware required to assemble the entire guideway structure, which will likely run up to a few hundred dollars due to the quantity, s
Read more