This was a productive week for the small-scale track team. The team spent a total of three full days out of the week in the SSDC to complete more manufacturing work. Since Bryan was designated with the welding duties, he finished tack welding all of the nuts on the support structures. In addition, the sleeve that is found on the top of the support assembly was made this week as well. Kevin and Angelo worked to prepare these components by cutting up the square tubing in a 45-degree angle and drilling holes into them so that a weld nut could be welded into the component. This week we finalized all of the support leveling structures and started cementing all of these parts.
Since progress with the support structures was coming along nicely, the team looked ahead and wanted to tackle the issue with bending metal into concentric bends. Since the previous track manufacturing team's metal bender proved to create a bow with the bent aluminum, we could not utilize the methods they used last year. Kevin put together his own version of a metal bender utilizing some spare parts around the SSDC. By testing this mechanism and creating some bends, it proved to work well. This was a promising development within the team. Moving forward, we are going to tackle how to manufacture the curves and switch subassemblies that are essential to this track's design. The image for Kevin's metal bender can be found below:
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