Despite trying a number of V-belts from Grainger, we still hadn't found a decent replacement for the drill press, so we had to find other things to work on this weekend. We do have a lot of drilling and countersinking to do, and we're waiting for more parts to show up, so we decided to tackle the things we could actually finish without the drill press. Hit Back after viewing an image.
We started out with some 3/4" UHMW blocks loaded into Milly's vise and a quick G-code script to cut out the wheel holes. We did three blocks, just to be on the safe side.
Another G-code script later, and we had cut the lip in the other side of the block for the top plates. Unfortunately we were down to two blocks at this point, because of a mistake mixing X for Y, and ruining a piece.
Here we've been scribbling to determine the paths for the half-inch end mill for the next two G-code scripts to cut out the insides of the chassis.
The outsides were easy. We had issues a while back trying to cut the whole block because the UHMW flexes in the vise, so we used aluminium spacers to prevent that from happening this time.
And success! Two fairyweight chassis blocks ready for the internals to be added, and no errant cuts. We still need to cut slots for the arm, so that's out next task.
Et voila! We've cut the slots for the arms, and the waterjetted top plates fit great! We finally have a fairyweight chassis to work with ... just as soon as the drill press is back in business.
We spent an hour trying to get the weapon motors mounted in the antweight, but the #2-56 nuts were too big to fit against the weapon motor can, so we decided to sand them down a bit and try again.
Yay! After fiddling around for quite a while longer we finally had the weapon motors installed, and they look good! We Dremelled the titanium gears out to fit the motors and Super-Glued them to the motors earlier this morning.
Here we've tested the fit with the weapon ring, and life is good, although this isn't quite as good as we had in our mind's eye, because there's the potential for the ring to move out of alignment if the two weapon motors aren't perfectly in sync, so we may have to add the idlers back in to this design.
Here we've milled down the lower UHMW ring by 1/32" and the titanium ring moves pretty smoothly, so hopefully we won't need to add bearings to the UHMW.
Subscribe
