Half of our materials are in!
We got our aluminum plates and started to work on them, but we encountered a problem: one of the plates were cut a little off.
We had to switch the design up a little to overcome this mishap. At first, we wanted to just buy more plates, but Pete advised us to check the scraps of Bonderson Lab. The worker on lab duty was reluctant to go look for us, but Pete insisted (thankfully). The worker found a LONG aluminum plate that Cal Poly is selling for $18, saving us $30 in costs!
We also had some trouble in the lab, the 2 tools we needed, the vertical band saw and the coarse sander were broken.
We had to use a horizontal band saw which has a lower precision level compared to the vertical one. The first pieces we cut were pretty off, but after our 3rd one, we got into a habit of aligning the blade with our cut line, and it worked perfectly!
Using a finer sander made sanding less efficient and made our fingers extremely hot. So, we opted to just use paper sanders. We ended up with beautifully smooth aluminum plates and very dirty hands.
Some of us took home a few nicks and burns, but our whole team learned a lot of new things about using tools in lab.
We hope to gather the rest of our materials before the next lab session, and maybe you will get to see our prototype very soon!
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