[Nick Bouressa]

I'm scared now!

Last week we mounted our forklift style lifter and arm to our chassis to test stability. But mech team was still around the robot discussing were to put the winch for our lifter(when we "installed" it, it could not move up or down) when all of a sudden the robot started to spin around very quickly! And the fully extended fiberglass arm acted like a giant lever against my dads leg. Which put alot of torquing force on our lift (made of 80-20) after the robot was disabled we found that our 1/8 aluminum plated holding the arm to the lift bend like a paper clip, and the standard 80-20 braces holding the two sides of the elevator sheared in half! So we had to fabricate new bearing plates out of lexan (our theory is aluminum and lexan both bend but lexan bends back) and super strong new cross braces on our lift.

Honestly I'm glad this happened when it did as oppose to at GSR because we would not have been able to fix it! I am also concerned about the stability of our chassis because it is made of the same material as our lift was when it broke.


*No one was hurt*
*And yes, we learned to stay away from the robot when its live*