5) The Manufacturing Process

The manufacturing process was a long and laborious one. During the entire time there a series of mishaps as we attempted to maneuver our way through the issues of tolerances, strength of materials, and ease of manufacturing parts for the entirety of our system.

The process began with the creation of our materials list. As we researched for parts we realized that buying individual gears to specification would be inordinately expensive so we would have to design and manufacture our own. We began with 3D printing some gears to determine what would be a good size and fit for the system. It turned out that if we wanted them to be printed at the highest quality it would take hours. This became unfeasible when it came to the larger parts so we had to lower the quality settings to speed up the process, but this was at the cost of part quality. As we printed each part, there were inevitable issues either with the specifications, design, tolerances, or print quality, resulting in our having to reprint every part several times before we had something worthy of use for the final product. This was largely a learning process as we realized the intricacies of accounting for design error, tolerances, and material quality. 

For the links, we decided we would use lasercut wood and this turned out to be a much faster process with much fewer errors since we knew exactly what we had to do. 

Below are some images of our journey as we ventured to finally put all the pieces together: