Monday After School Day 3 - Mechanical Challenges
We discovered today that building an elevator that runs up and down on rails is really hard. This project is full of mechanical challenges, so in order to improve our chances at solving some of them, we split into two groups. One group set to work on the elevator carriage, while the other began to figure out how to make the wheels and guide rails.
The carriage team measured the space that the elevator will go in and began making a sturdy floor for the carriage that should hopefully support and lift our target weight of 100 pounds. The particular challenge of this aspect of the project will be making a carriage that is optimized to be lightweight yet strong, and the team is on the path toward meeting this goal!
Meanwhile, the rail team brainstormed and started to build small prototype guide rails. We immediately ran into problems when one of our first guide rail designs actually prevented the wheel from running along the rail at all. However, with some careful measurement and a detailed examination of the system, the problem was soon found to be an issue of guide spacing. The session ended before a second iteration of the prototype could be built, so now we've got our work cut out for us next time!
