Week 6: The nuts and bolts of assembling the car

Bad pun totally intended.

Lesson of the week: Screwing and unscrewing nuts and bolts is harder than it looks. You think it's just taking a wrench/ratchet and turning it, right? Well nope. First, there's the fact that you need two wrenches/ratchets turn it. Using only one simply turns the nut along with the bolt. But, much more importantly, is that the thing you're trying to tighten simply won't cooperate. Sometimes, gravity causes the part to push on the nail. Other times, the holes don't line up, and a one minute task becomes ten as you try to align them.

By now, the Baja team is in full assembly mode. Whereas before Spring Break (ASU Spring Break is the week before BASIS's), most of the time was spent making/trying out new parts, testing, and creating the cost and design reports, most of our time now is spent assembling. For some of the more experienced members, this includes welding and cutting sheet metal, but for us interns, it mostly meant screwing and unscrewing stuff. Specifically, this included transporting the gear box from the old car to the new, installing the shocks (used to dampen the many bumps along the race course), and installing the suspension.

I estimate that by the end of this week, the car should be completely finished, with the exception of testing. Which is good, as Nick (the team leader) wants a full month of testing before the first competition at the end of April. Right now, most of the chasis is done, and the other parts (brake, engine, wheels, seats) still have to be installed. But that (I think) involves little more than what we've done recently.

Weeks 4 and 5: More work and Fusion360

While on-site, not much more than the usual happened. I helped make/supervise a machine make parts. The car's supposed to be finished by Wednesday, so that will be interesting.

However, what did happen was that a few days ago, I downloaded Fusion360, which is a computer aided design (CAD) program. For those of you unaware, CAD programs allow you to design parts, and often come along with more software that allow you to create instructions for machines to make the part. (This is known as Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software.) There are many out there, including Solidworks (which is used in most colleges) and AutoCAD. Fusion360 was recommended by the Baja people because it offers a 3-year free educational license. (So if current BASIS student who wants to go into engineering happens upon this, I highly recommend you downloading it.) I'm still not sure how all these softwares differ from each other, but they are certainly fascinating.

It just so happens that I also need the CAD software for a class I'm in. I've been using that to gain a basic knowledge of how these programs work. Below is a picture of something I created for it. I'm also using the CAM aspect of it to try and model how a machine would make it, and it's quite interesting.