Sunday, December 8, 2013

Fail Early, Fail Later, Fail Always- 12/8

December 8, 2013

Deliverable: Project documentation and prototype refinement. 

We got our welded model on Thursday, and to the chagrin of everyone involved, our bike stand can hold a bike quite well and even support the weight of bike + rider, but once the person starts pedaling, what we want to happen fails in several places. First, the two sides of the bike do not assume equal weight of the bike, and inevitably the bike stand, with bike and rider on top, starts to tip towards one side. Second, because the bike is tipping, the wheel, which should be comfortably suspended and spinning between the two sides, tilts far enough to one side that it catches the posts of the bike stand, preventing the wheel from spinning.

Although our final project is due on Monday, we're going to spend the class period (a) adding to the design, and (b) finalizing our project report. For the design, we're going to try to add triangles to the bottom of each of the four corners in the hopes of added stability. That will cause the legs to splay away from the bike, so we will have to cut leg posts about 10". As for the report, if we can fix our design we'll base our report off of the new final design. If not, the theme of our report will be "We tried really hard," and hopefully our documentation will help future groups perfect the design.

No comments:

Post a Comment