Quote:
Originally Posted by Conor Ryan
Can you walk us through your manufacturing process? From the video it looked pretty cool.
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After we finished an extensive CAD model we started the fabrication process. Usually, we travel to GM's Milford Proving Grounds to use their waterjet, milling machines, and lathes, but for this particular chassis we routed all the aluminum on our new Velox 5050 CNC router. We did all of the turning and milling in our robotics workshop in our school. We bought all of our stock from onlinemetals.com. (The cool looking shapecutter in the video was a plasma cutter. This summer we created a relationship with our local community college and they were nice enough to let us make use of their new plasma cutter. We only ended up using it on our rocker chassis.)
We started with the parts to make a single module so that our programmers could have some time with it. We routed the plates from 0.25 6061 aluminum sheet. This was some of our first work on the router so it was a learning process in terms of feeds and speeds.
While some members routed parts, others were milling and turning. We assembled the first module, tested it out, and made some slight improvements like access to gears and faster toolpaths. After that it was just repeating the same process untill we had 4 modules. For the 0.125 5052 parts we were able to make a toolpath that cut all of them at once, and that saved a lot of time.
We have a relatively old brake that still works pretty well so thats how we created flanges on the 0.125 material. We used a lexan bellypan so tearing through that on the router was fun.
After we cut all the parts, it was all just assembly and programming.
It was a lot of work, mistakes, and learning, but I think all in all it turned out pretty well.