Spartan Superway

The other small scale teams were not able to get their designs working by Friday night, so the first testing happened during the demonstration.  There were some problem areas of the track that we did not notice (and could not notice) before testing began, but these can be polished up by next years team.  The demonstration went well overall, and next years team should be well prepped to continue our work.  We will leave behind a fully assembled track, functioning track bender, and spare parts for them to work with.  It has been a good year with Spartan Superway, and we wish future years' teams the best of luck.

This week we prepared for our showing of the track at our in house makersfaire on Saturday.  The track is fully complete, but we are waiting on the other small scale teams so that we can begin testing.  We are right up on our deadline now, so it is a daunting prospect going into our demonstration without any testing beforehand.  We will be returning on Thursday and Friday night for testing and adjustment of any problem areas.

This week we started assembling all of the new curved sections of the track and new brackets to see how everything would fit together.  We were hoping that the other small scale teams would be ready to start testing, but they are facing harddrive failures and having difficulties coding, so hopefully next week we can begin testing the track.

This week we obtained all of the rails to be bent and started into the full swing of manufacturing our new curved sections.  We have found out how to consistently get bends in our rails using a step by step process.  We are following last years advice and having only one person (me) manufacture the rails so that there is not measurement bias or manufacturing differences between users of the track bender.  We have begun receiving 3D printer samples from makerspace and found out that they are having great difficulties in getting us our orders, so we will need to revisit this.