2nd Semester Week 13: 5/1-5/8

The main focus this week for the motor team was to work with bogie interaction team to integrate the motors, motor's wheels, and axle onto the drive bogie. During this integration process, both teams ran into quite a bit of an issue with manufacturing the hole on the drive bogie for the axle to be fitted into. It was originally planned so that hole sizes of approximately 1.010 inches were to be water jet cut into the four supporting plates of the drive bogie; however, bogie interaction team wasn't able to have those holes made during the water jet process. This means that we had to use a drill press to create the 1-inch holes. The problem with drilling the one-inch holes manually is that it would be quite difficult to have all four holes on the four plates to align properly for the axle to slide through.

To resolve the issue, we filed and milled out the holes to a greater size for the axle to be fitted into. To further secure the axle, we incorporated face mounted lock collars to fix the axle into place. After the axle was fitted, we then threaded on the motors onto the axle using a torque wrench. One issue we found during the installation of the wheels/motors was that since the axle was made of aluminum it was very prone to having its thread stripped. To prevent this, a future suggestion would be to use steel for the axle instead of 2024 aluminum. In addition, we found that using a torque wrench to torque down the motor with its standard lock nut and lock washer to 50 ft-lb was sufficient in locking the axle in place. Further testing of the whole full scale assembly is still needed to confirm this.

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