Exam and More MCM

Last week we did a lot of of our MCM manufacturing because we knew that this week we would be pretty busy with our exam. We took it on Tuesday, and from what we surveyed, no one finished and everyone was just happy to have it over. We did a lot of touching up of our main components, added an angle to our wedge. We also made threads within our wedge with a hand tap. There were two problems that arose with the hand-tap, our part was too thick to have the tap go through all the way. Marv was able to help by forcing a screw of the same size through the bar-stock, therefore forcing threads. The other problem was from the type of threads. It turns out that the threaded rod has Sharp V threads, while the hand-tap provided to us is Unified because when the edges of the threads were compared, one was sharp and the other was rounded. This means that it is very hard for the threaded rod to go through our wedge, which means we might have to find a new hand tap or re-do the tapping with a slightly bigger diameter. The rod has to go through the wedge easily in a power-screw formation. This will allow for our motor to raise and lower the wedge without a lot of torque needed, therefore extending the life of the motor.
This coming week, we are going to have to assemble all of our parts as well as finish the rest of our engineering. We will also have to get a head start on the rest of the manufacturing finished earlier on in the week, that way we can allow for the most time possible to test our machine.