INDN 341: Progress Update 4

Sadly on Tuesday night, calamity struck. I caught my thumb in the face sander of the linishing belt in the metal workshop. After a day and a half in hospital followed by reconstructive plastic surgery to my thumb, I returned to the workshop to help my group with getting the project done. Unfortunately because of my injury, we've lost both time and manpower (I'm not allowed to do anything with machinery or beyond light work for 6 weeks). Sadly as a result we've had to cut some things from the project in order to get it done in time (we decided to reject an extension).

Before I injured myself, I was working on a different shroud for the wheel, one that was a lot lighter and constructed out of an old bike guard. I widened it with the help of some mild steel wire, which I then welded together.

By doing that I could then chop the keg remainder in half and then use the two halves for the booth. I welded the two halves of the keg piece on as the sides for the booth, and they work really well there. I also stripped the paint off the booth, and now it's pretty much all got a raw sanded steel look to it. I love the aesthetic.

Once I returned, we discussed plans and decided to scrap the fogger and just focus on the dripping and the ultimate destruction, the trough. We also looked at powering the whole device and getting it moving. To do that, we attached an internal cog made of lasercut acrylic to the bigger of the two wheels. This is then connected to a small construct involving a much smaller cog (40 teeth versus the 680 on the wheel!) and a small worm drive mounted to the fork of the wheel.

Here you can see the rope we found at the Wellington port mounted around the wheels. We were very kindly given it by some of the port workers. According to them it's extremely strong and able to withstand a lot of punishment, while at the same time being okay with being bent into extreme shapes. This aspect was key, given the fact that we have to have the rope move through some tight bends around the trough.

To force the rope into the trough, we made a little construct that forced the rope below the confessions into the water of the trough. This little section though proved to cause a lot of friction issues, and is resultantly the part that's causing the most difficulty with the turning. Unfortunately given the circumstances that we've had to go through, the amount of time that we've had hasn't quite allowed us to resolve that problem. But, other than that, we've tested everything, and everything works. Even the motor worked for some parts of the wheel, but the wonkiness of the wheel caused some issues (as I said it would!) for overall smoothness on the motion. It's not ideal functionality, and the motor isn't quite up to scratch in terms of power.

All things considered though, we did an amazing job. Everything works except for one thing, and that's a result I think we can all be very proud of, given all the bad luck we've had.