Week 4

Hi guys,

This week the team put a lot of emphasis on the brake systems and making the body panels.
On tuesday I made a bushing for the for the break pedal (its a little cylinder that the break pedal sits on and creates an axis for the pedal to rotate on) and drilled holes into the brake pedal because the bushing was just a bit to big. To make the bushing I had to use the horizontal bandsaw to cut the pipe and the lathe to fine tune the the bushing to about four digits. Afterwards I realized that the plasma cut holes in pieces for the pedal were just a bit too small and that I had to use the milling machine again to make them larger. The team also finished getting last year's Baja car working again so we could test some of more of this year's parts.

On Thursday I spent most of the time setting up a jig to drill a hole into brake calibers on the milling machine. The hard part about it was the calibers jut out at 45 degree angle to the calibers and needed to be set up so the milling drill could come down on the caliber. To achieve this angle I had to use gauge blocks (super smooth blocks that stick together when rubbed against each other used for precision measurements) and propped up the caliber to the desired height and angle. However I couldn't actually drill the holes because some of the college freshman messed up a centering tool that I needed to drill the holes accurately.






Finally on Saturday, The whole day I spent sheering, shaping and filing body panels.
I started making the front and triangle panels while learning how to use the sheering machine.



All the panels that go on the car need to filed down and there shouldn't be sharp points. After dremeling and filing the edges, moved onto a larger side panel as well as finishing the firewall paneling that the other interns were working on.  





In addition to all the work I did while at ASU, I also have been watching Solidworks tutorials and designing some basic pieces to practice using the tools in the program. Some of the tools I used for these two parts (not actual parts on the car but just for practice) were extruding, cutting, and mirroring tools.