Mendelmax 2.0- Frame Assembly

Assembling the Frame. Lots of little bits and pieces- the most time consuming part here was finding them all and getting everything ready.  Once the parts had all of the nuts and bolts in them, sticking them together was pretty simple.  A lot like playing with a really expensive erector set, but MORE fun!  Overall the directions were pretty accurate for this part. I had a few questions and made a few notes and suggestions, but it mostly went together pretty quickly.

The help.  He lasted about 15 minutes.



Assembling the base.  Pretty straight forward- lay the parts out, install the screw and T-nuts, then slide the parts together, align with a square, and tighten.  As long as you follow the instructions and get the parts in the right orientation, it's a snap.







Putting the top to cross bars on was a little trickier- they have to be straight and level, and when you tighten the screws in the end the bars want to twist.  With a helper, its not hard at all to hold the square across the platform while tightening the screws.
 

Getting ready to assemble the uprights:



Assembling the uprights. Here are the T-nuts I was talking about earlier.  You have to leave them REALLY loose to get them to start in the channels on the extrusions.


 
Here are two plates ready for installation.






It can be a little tricky lining up the T-nuts with the slots...




 
First uprights installed. 






Top Brackets ready to go on.




Top Brackets installed.




Second set of uprights installed.  At this point, all of the screws up top are just loosely tightened- all of this will need to be adjusted and squared still, and then all the screws get tightened.




Z- axis guide plates installed.  The hole to the right is for the guide rod.  The bigger hole on the left is under the z-axis screw, but it doesn't attach there, not quite sure what the hole is for.




Top brackets ready to be installed.




Cross bar preperation.








Top cross bar and brackets installed.  With everything set in place, I took some time with the square and tightened all of the screws.  The bracket with the holes in this picture will most likely need to be loosened and repositioned later- the stepper motor goes in the big hole and the z-axis guide rod attaches to the small hole in the front- both of which will need some tweaking to get the z-axis to move freely.





Frame DONE! Sure looks pretty!



Time Spent on this step: 1 hr 10 min.
Total time so far: 3 hrs 10 min.

Just want to mention again, the times I'm posting include time taken for studying the directions as I build (not counting the time I spent reading over them before the build), taking pictures, making notes, and finding all of the hardware.  I feel it could be done a lot quicker if you were trying to get it done fast.

Mendelmax 2.0 HAS ARRIVED!

My kit showed up on Valentines day!  I hot footed it down to the office to pick it up between classes, and here's what I got.

Surprisingly smallish box, but heavy.  Lots of aluminum in there, and several pounds of stainless hardware!



Very efficiently packed- everything was tightly wrapped up and looks to have made its voyage in great shape.



First things first, print a set of instructions, available here through google docs: http://www.makerstoolworks.com/suppo...ssembly-guide/ .  Keep in mind, the instructions are a work in progress right now and there are several others like me that are making suggestions and changes to them as we assemble our kits. 



Here's a breakdown of all of the parts in the box.

Hardware. Not pictured is a box of washers, and also a set of allen wrenches- the cool ones with the balled ends for getting in hard to reach places!  Everything, as you can see, is clearly labeled and very well sorted out.



More specialty hardware. I was afraid to open the bag for fear that I'd loose something...  It has the belts, bushings, bushing housings, "cars", derlinger (?) nuts, couplers, and all of the fancy odd-ball hardware.



Printed parts.  Not sure why the bearing was in the bag with these, but there you go.



Laser cut parts.  Most of them are of excellent quality.  Anodizing looks good- a few minor scratches here and there but nothing I'm worried about.  There was one part that the laser cutter didn't make very clean cuts on (at least, that's my opinion), but it its 100% functional so I'm not worried about it.



Extruded parts and rails. Not much to say here, they all looked great, and cut pretty much perfectly to square.



Heated bed parts.  Aluminum sheet for a heat spreader at the far right, sheet of glass (survived the shipping!) in the middle, and the heater on the left.



AND- some pretty darn cool customer service and a bit of BLING.  If you can't read the letter, they threw in $5 just in case some hardware was missing so I could go purchase it.  So far (and I'm actually getting close to done with the kit as I type this) I haven't had any missing parts.



I got kit # 6 of 40.   Let the fun begin!

As I mentioned, I have a lot of this already done, and am now typing up the assembly process.  There are a TON of pictures already posted on my thread on adventure rider here:  http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=854167 .  I will continue to post pics there first to help organize my thoughts, and then re-post them here with more details on the assembly process.

dorkpunch cafe

Update on the dorkpunch cafe.  Been a heck of a learning experience.  I've already posted a few pics of the windscreen, seat bump, and part of the tank.  I have learned a LOT about hammering and forming aluminum, and am even comfortable enough now with the edge former that one of my students is trying a project out on it (a Captain America shield).  Used the radius fingers I built to make rounded edges on the tank.  Keep practicing the TIG after school and I'm getting better but as you will find out a little later in this post, I have a long ways to go (and a need for a better machine).

Here's where we're at.  You've already seen the windscreen:





and the seat bump:





Here was the first attempt at the seat bump.  I was trying to make compound (?) curves... a little beyond my capabilities right now.








I made a seat pan out of some scrap wood and mounted my seat bump to it.  The sheet metal on the wood covers a cutout so the wood sits down over the shape of the frame.  The wood will be covered with a thin foam and then a custom sewn (yup, going to teach myself how to sew...) seat cover.  The "lid" will be hinged at the bottom under the seat cover so I can keep papers and maybe a spare plug or oil in there.  Haven't decided on a tail light yet.











Next was the tank.  I had drawn up an idea in Sketchup and had some fairly accurate measurements.  I used those to make the paper tank for test fitting and to see how I like the style.  I wasn't sold on the shape, but I figured the bottom of the tank wouldn't change so I started there.









Tacked it together with my TIG and started on the top.  I already posted a few pics of this so here are a few of the old ones along with a few new.  I fully expected to have to re-do the tank a time or two, but its turning out a lot better than I expected.











I think these next few pics look GREAT, which of course means I'm about to screw something up.









So... You see where I tacked the back half of the tank to the front?  Well, I thought I was getting along well enough with my welder to give it a go.  I still can't get pretty beads consistently on the this stuff, but I figured this part was going to get ground down smooth anyways so what could it hurt?

It became painfully obvious that my welder coupled with my (lack) of skills is not going to work for this project.  My welder only goes down to about 30 amps.  I think thats about the max I want to start, and then it needs to drop to maybe half that.

I'm embarrassed to post these but here you go anyways.  If you look really close you can see a crack at the back edge of the weld where I ground through trying to get it flat.  I didn't take any pics of the underside but there are some huge nasty boogers hanging off the inside from piling the filler in to keep from blowing holes.  Yuck.






I tried a couple of corners too.  They turned out okay, but still have the nasty boogers inside from too much rod.




Oh well... hack the back part off just in front of the weld and start over.  I'm *almost* back to where I was.





Progress, bit by bit.  Only get a few minutes here and there before I go home or a little more time on a weekend if I go in, so I fully expect this project to take at least another three years.

Pinewood Derby, Year 2!

The results are in!

Had our second pinewood derby this morning!  We kind of forgot about it until a week ago so the car was a little rushed...  Isaac came up with a pretty good design, and then on the way to the shop drew a totally different design on the side of the car.  It turned out pretty nice.















The races this year were great- had some fellow with an AWESOME track setup come in and run the races- the kids loved every minute of it.  Last year, the races were run on a track that was hand built probably 40 years ago, only had two lanes, and one of the lanes was noticeably slower than the other so each race had to be run twice- once in each lane just to be fair.  Kids still had fun on it, but they got a little ansy waiting for their turn.

This years track had all the bells and whistles- instant replay photo finish, time recording, and speed calculations converted to scale speed.  He even gave us a printout after the race of all of the times, which will also be posted up later on his website:  pwderbyracing.com !

















He even won 3rd place!  We had two different groups racing together, I think the other group was quite a bit faster but I'm not going to complain!






The hard part now is going to be keeping him from playing with the car... I think they have "regional" tournament in another few weeks.  He got invited last year, but had already destroyed his car.

Here's a vid of the race.  Love the instant replay!  He won at 176 mph.




After the races were all done, he brought out the "circles of death".



Isaac's made it through the loops both times, and after it was all over the guy used his car as a good design example.  He thought that was pretty cool.

That's all for now, all though I do plan on posting an update on the Cafe project later today or tomorrow.