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Additionally, to visualize and create a prototype for the quick return mechanism we laser cut and printed all the necessary links and roughly assembled them to gain an understanding of what our final product would look like. This prototype helped us plan for the size constraints we had in order to provide necessary torque.
4.3 Assembly
As we began our final assembly we started with the quick return mechanism because we felt that it needed the most room and was a very important aspect of our design. Our assembly process was driven mainly by space constraints, and after mapping out all of the elements in our design we drilled holes into the wood and acrylic to fasten them to the base. Everything that is bolted together in our design uses M3 bolts, they were readily available and easy to design for. For rotating components we used 6mm axles and 6mm (13mm OD) bearings in order to keep everything the same diameter, so that we could switch out parts if needed. We positioned the quick return mechanism so that there was space for the bottle opener to attach to the bottle cap and space to fit the Geneva mechanism behind it all. Standoffs were added in order to align the bottle cap with the bottle opener and to create space for the gears and align them on the same plane. One problem we ran into was meshing our gears together, which was challenging when mounting the gears to the wall. The quick return mechanism went together fairly quickly, but the gear train and the Geneva mechanism took a lot of time to line up and get into place.