Full Scale Bogie Improvements

Figure: Shaft being prepared on the Lathe. The week before we got our raw materials into the laser cutting shop to get it cut into the parts that are needed. The water jet at school was broken, so we had to find a third party to cut our parts for us.  While these parts are being cut, I worked on the shaft that will go into the rotary part of the bogie. I used the Lathe to carve up a shaft to our specifications and we were able to successfully get it done in the shop itself. On Tuesday we got our parts in, along with the parts for the other teams. Due to some miscommunication from the vendor, we didn't get some of the parts to our specification. Now we are tasked to work with the parts which we are given with in order to get it to the right specifications. We are currently using a hole screw to enlarge the size of the hole for the thrust bearing. We tried the whole day to do that with a milling machine but no progress was made. With the help of Prof. Furman, we are going to the

(Figure: Z-Bracket used to rotate the slave bogie) This week we were mainly tasked with finalizing the design ready to be prototype next week. With the help of the new teammate, Allen, we were able to move forward with designing our bogie faster. This week we finally started working towards our final designs that Dan helped us with. As discussed last week, instead of making a new mechanism, our focus is to rotate the slave bogie (front end of the bogie) relative to the rest of the bogie. We are using the forces that are transmitted from the glide rail to turn the bogie. We used a combination of thrust and flanged bearings to make the body rotate without any resistance. I worked on the Z bracket which is the pivot point for the bogie. While designing this part and the available space was the factor of consideration. We created the bracket to fit right in the previous made slot, which make an angle of rotation for 8 ° while the original goal was 6 °. The upcoming weeks are we plan on

Figure: A low profile Lazy Susan which is the main steering mechanism for the bogie The main goal of this week was to get a firm idea on how we are going to improve the bogie by doing research and by getting our CAD drawing ready so that we can move on to the prototyping phase. My main role in the team is to figure out a steering mechanism for the bogie. We had multiple big ideas but that meant we had to change the bogie completely. Due to the short amount of time we were given, we had to move on to better solutions which meant improving on the current design to bogie to accommodate for a steering system. We got a lot of help from Prof. Furman, Eric and Dan (member of the previous years bogie team), with their help we were able to finalize on a better yet simple idea to turn the bogie. Our plan now is to install a low profile Lazy Susan between the front part and the frame of the bogie so that the front part can pivot on the Lazy Susan's to make turns. This will eliminate the