Howdy readers, this is your Chief Engineer speaking to let you know that CRUSH HAS CONQUERED turbulence!
let me put that in understandable language:
We love Crush, but his biggest flaw was that he had very ugly buoyancy blocks last year and poor hydrodynamics, so my goal this year was to clean up the mess.
PHASE ONE – Buoyancy revision:
I designed a lot of the new buoyancy blocks (shout out to Chris and Bumjoon for designing blocks as well!) to fit around the crush’s two capsules, and all be in streamlined shapes. The biggest challenge for this was the machining. Previously we had only done 2D shapes for the blocks, but these new blocks had to have complex 3D geometries to fix nicely around Crush’s two capsules. The most difficult block was the “BigTop” block. This block was split into three pieces: the Left, Right, and (unsurprisingly) the Middle block. Big thank you to Parker and Pierson for learning CAM and machining the L/R blocks! Sisyphus is to his stone as I am to the middle block. I had to machine one side, then flip the block over and do the other side, which is more difficult than it sounds, as there’s no easy way to tell the CNC mill where the block is once it’s flipped. After some deep thinking, I machined holes and flat edges onto an aluminum plate in order to have a way to find the coordinates “zero” position, and also mount my block. See below for some of my beautiful workholding!
All of our blocks came out wonderfully and were successfully integrated onto Crush for our pool test!!!!
So what’s next?
PHASE TWO – The Case
I have designed a case to fit around all of the new buoyancy blocks and make Crush hydrodynamic!
Above is a highly simplified model, but Crush is now our little bean :). The one thing preventing us from ordering our case is that we need a way to remove and re-add our camera easily so we can take on/off the case. We have multiple mechanical members working on a mount, and hopefully it will be done this week! Here’s a prototype of one of our designs.
Crush’s case will be ready this summer so LOOK OUT!