This week our students had the week off, per school rules. Coach Mike and I met Wednesday 8/2 with a plan that was developed with the students help and a lot of Coach Lucas’s insight. We dialed in to what we needed done and completed our task. There was a couple of trial fittings to make sure things were done well. Coach Mike did a great job leading the project.
The issues we are addressing three holes in succession that are positioned below the bumper bracket. They screws that were occupying those holes were holding a modified bracket that attached part of our frame to our upper robot components. What happened is that since 2 screws were holding two pieces together that have a lot of tension and movement. It caused the screws to start to pull on the aluminum and pull the threads right thru, causing more movement and more potential damage that we wanted.
So the short term plan in order to get our robot sponsor “show off” ready was to fill the 2 holes with riv-nuts and bolts to strengthen them. We have a few other ideas for long term fixes but this was a quick fix that will be effective for the time being. In fact our students will be modifying this design in the very near future, and assembling what they come up with.
So we had to disassemble the front frame to drill new holes for the nuts and bolts.
Once that was off we decided to just use the holes that already existed and to just make them large enough to be able to install the riv-nuts. After successfully drilling them out and then installing the nuts we needed to drill the holes on the brackets to make sure the bolts fit thru.
All the holes were drilled out now we just had to assemble and put everything back together and make sure it all fits together. The tricky part was to make sure the current battery bracket set up would fit and a battery would fit in the space allocated for one.
So the problem we had with the new bolts is that with the washers on the battery would not fit.
So the fix we decided on was to remove both sets of washers (for now) so the battery would fit. All said and done everything is back together and everything fits. It’s like we never even took it apart. Fun project done in just a couple hours.
What projects are your team working on right now? Are you having issues? Are you breaking stuff and failing, only to learn and succeed after? Are you having fun???
Let us know, share.