Spartan Superway

Today, our team gave a presentation of our current design and calculation work that has been completed so far.  The remainder of the class was spent identifying the problems with the current track bender and how it can be improved.  Some of the problems are listed below: 1. The wheels used to bend the rails were not aligned. 2. The back wooden plank that is suppose to keep the rail straight was loose and would tend to lean side to side 3. The bottlejack platform was not large enough to keep it in place while bending. 4. The handle bar not being perfectly locked in place also added to the issue of rails not bending perfectly Our proposed solution is to rearrange the track bender to lay horizontally and flat.  This would solve most of the problems with the current track bender and in the process of reconstructing it we could improve it further.

This week the Small Scale Track (SST) team met with small scale controls and small scale bogey to further our plans.  We split off into our respective sub groups and SST decided to add support brackets to each turn section of the track.  Most of the binding and failure happens here and we found that holding a bracket in this location fixed a lot of our issues. One concern we had with this bracket is the play that the wheels have in them during the turns.  To deal with this issue, the curved supports will be widened by 0.5".  The 3D modeling of this part has started.  We discussed the option of meeting with one of our sponsors to get injection molding done and decided that if we were to go with injection molding that the track brackets were the best thing to get injection molded because they are the most mass produced item in our design and only one mold would be needed.