Week #15

Today, we meet for our final day of instruction of this semester.

With the fabricated wooden pieces ready, we needed to create footings so that the structure could stand up. Fortunately Winter was able to contact a Civil Engineering professor and set up a day and time to get our wooden columns fashioned with concrete footings.

Winter, Claude and I met up with this professor and he squared us away with one of his students to help create concrete footings for our wooden columns. Claude left the CE lab to work on designed the clamps via solidworks on his laptop. Winter and myself stayed to help and learn to process of creating concrete footings by mixing the concrete. The whole process was quite enjoyable since this was both Winter and myself's first time every being exposed to any concrete mixing.

Luckily we were able to finish with the final prototype and brought it to the final class session. During the final class session, everyone presented information in a show-and-tell manner to the instructors.

Good Luck with Finals & Happy Holidays!

Week #14

This week the team had to complete the final presentation, work on the first draft of the final report due later and complete the final prototype. This week was very hectic and stressful, but the team was able to get everything done. Everyone completed their parts on the final presentation after following the grading rubric and its structure.

After we finished creating the presentation, the final prototype had to be created. Winter and I fabricated wood pieces on Friday evening. We were only able to get half of the columns completed by the time we had to get kicked out because it was getting late.

Finally, later Friday evening the first draft of the final report was due, so everyone completed what they could.

Week #12 & #13

This week, we have freshly laser cut materials for our second prototype and now our plan is to assemble everything. We created this prototype to show how they could interlock and connect with each other similarly to how puzzle pieces connect. Now, the team understands the best route of connecting the columns together, This was an important process to go through so we do not run into any complications if we were to work on the metal sheets on our own.

Later this week the team met up with Scott Bryant from Vander-Bend. Vander-Bend is a metal company which has worked with previous members of the Spartan Superway before. The team was accompanied by Dr Furman, Ron Swenson and another sub-team at Vander-Bend's location.

For the 13th week, the team continued to work on the bill of materials in preparation for the end of the semester prototype for the class.

Week #11

This week we were asked to create another rapid prototype to show how columns could interlock with each other if the metal sheets weren't long enough, to get a longer column size. The team agreed to get together and meet at the ME106 lab to laser cutter this design for proof concept of it working. Claude was teaching us how to use the laser cutter, so the team learned a lot. After we laser cut the pieces, began to see how everything fit together.