A brand new week! What shall week 9 hold for us? We are as excited as you to find out!
First and foremost, if you still remember, last Friday, we tested multiple clamp-grips, and where necessary, redesigned and reprinted them. Now, they were all ready for another round of testing, together with the clamps.
The first clamp to be tested is the black one that would grip sideways. The video below shows the optimised clamp, which is a pull clamp, with the black grip.
Similar to the red sideway grip that locks onto the brown metal tubing, we designed an almost identical, mirror-image pink grip that locks onto the adjacent brown metal tubing, rotating inwards from the right, with the help of a pull clamp.
Thirdly, we also designed and built a new clamp that fits nicely onto one of the rectangular boxes on the pneumatic unit. As this clamp comes down vertically from the top of the unit, we were cautious of the clearance, and took care to make it as short as possible (please see the photo and video below).
You might also remember that our clamp grip with 3 holes did not fit into the unit last week. Our redesigned clamp grip now, does. 🙂 *Insert big smiley face*
First, you can see below that in the originally printed grip, the two holes that are supposed to fit into the nuts on the unit are just slightly off from the nuts (short of reach) and they cannot reach the nuts. We coupled the revised clamp with a push clamp, as seen in the video that follows.
All in all, most of today was spent re-optimising all clamps to ensure they can fully tighten and secure the unit. Other than the ones already shown above, this included adding reinforcements in the form of more heavy-duty angled brackets (circled with blue and red) into the aluminium profiles of the clamping mechanism.
Optimisation also included drilling and filing the profiles to ensure that whatever M6 screws we needed would go fully into the profiles and be flush with the outer edge of the profiles, without protruding out of the profile (similar to what we did last week with the short aluminium supports on the clamping mechanism) (please scroll down to the end of that post).
Here is a neat video showing all the clamps working so far!!!
Other than the clamps, we also ordered more aluminium rods from the friendly Mr Raman from the SPMS workshop.
Lastly, we are starting to consider the control method for the actuators in the lifting arm. In the next post, we will elaborate in detail the options we considered and the method we eventually go with.