Tuesday – A Typical Day in the Office….

Looking better each day

To everyone that may smell a little… skunky

Hey everyone!

Another day in the shop, except fot the fact that today marks the day that is exactly half way through the build season. Congratulations to everyone that is involved with this great effort, we are halfway there!! Besides that, we made more progress on the drive base assembly. Further progress however, is delayed until Friday, when we waterjet more parts for the robot, mainly the conveyor side panels and shooter components. Pictures of the drive base below.

The marketing team is in full swing today, having finished quite a bit of work on the website. It looks great, so go check it out! (skunkworks1983.com). The team has also designed the new shirt. It is under wraps until it is actually printed, produced, and delivered, but you guys will be the first to get a picture, skunk’s honor. The sponsor posters have also been designed, along with new banners. Nice job guys!

The biggest problem to date has been the weight of the robot. To quote Ken “we will be pretty light… probably famous last words though.” And indeed, we are in the process of shaving off every tenth of a pound we can, be it from the type of material we use or the amount of “cheesing” we do to the material.

I dont have much more to say today, other than thanks for reading and:

Stay Smelly!

Liam Burke

Looking more like a drive base each day

These wheels aren't going to look like this during competition. I hope.

Spellbinding (or should I say Riveting?) Chassis

Today was another 9:30am meeting with a very busy shop. We worked on the chassis of the practice robot with the competition one following close behind. It is fun to watch both robots taking form as they are bound to be identical twins at the end (almost). One thing though was that after celebrating for riveting a whole side of the chassis, Ken pointed out that we put it on facing the wrong way! So, we sighed as we drilled through the rivets in both the practice and competition chassis. It was twice the work but definitely a learning experience. I imagine we need to pay more attention to instructions next time, but at least we got a lot of practice drilling…

Anyway, today we also used plenty of the Cleko-Loc tools and fasteners. The little Clekos were actually pretty ingenious. They are little clamps in a sense; only they have the shape of small cylinders and work at clamping two pieces of sheet metal together through a hole. We used those to align the metal sheets and lots of our rookies got a chance to practice drilling, pop riveting and working with Clekos.  As we build, the practice robot gives us something to learn from and it is sure helpful in scenarios like this.

On a side note, I was exploring around the internet and found this really nice article. It is from an alumnus from team 1024, Kil-A-Bytes and she is talking about FIRST impact in her life. I just thought you may find a connection to it since it ringed familiar to me.

“I couldn`t wait till school started because preseason would start, then I couldn`t wait until second semester started so that build season would start and then March meant competition season and so on. My team was a family to me. For 46 days, we spent almost every day together, we ate together, we did homework together, we disagreed with one another, we argued and of course we build a pretty darn cool robot together.” 

http://blog.techpointyouth.org/blog/blog/first-robotics-competition-a-student-perspective

 

As of right now we have 23 days, 6 hours and 36 minutes. By tomorrow we should have the chassis for the practice robot finished, and hopefully the competition one by Tuesday.

Let’s keep up the great work!

Camila

Competition Chassis