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

OMAX! (With a capital O,M,A and X which this blog denies me)

I was planning on writing the blog without personal perspective. So far, I have been breaking my rules quite often. Why stop now?…

I arrived at OMAX early. You might ask, but why? Well, I was going in early, because Kevin has helped me down the path to a possible internship for this summer. With resume in hand, he took me to meet my interviewer/boss-to-be. It turns out, I already knew him! He went over my paperwork and talked with me for a while. My experience with 3D modeling and having been around/familiar with the water-jetting process for several years is certainly an advantage!

Everything went well, some of the team passed by us on their way to the machines. He started wrapping things up and we walked to the cutting room. It’s exciting to think that I’ll be able to work from May-August. I still don’t think it’s sunk in completely. I am going to be playing with water-jets and other big kid toys, I’ll be working on projects and with teams of engineers. Not only that, but I’m getting PAID to do it!

Enough about me, back to the story. So we had two machines running tonight. One was cutting out aluminum name plates for people (see below), while the other focused on the real work.

After everybody got their cool swag, the second machine was used for parts as well. We got a lot done and had the biggest student crowd we’ve ever had. We spoke with the V.P.,  Dr. Olsen about this year’s competition and design. He was excited and said that the customers always come up with the coolest uses for the machines! Here are some of the parts we worked on tonight:

The presentation in the morning went well too. The board members think it’s a pretty exciting game and they like our approach. I apologize as I am SO done with this post. This week has been killer, I want to get some sleep, because I get to do it all over again tomorrow!

Good night.

P.S. Shout out to Drew for the nice pictures!