Building--hurrah

Our order arrived from Mcmaster today! Lots of fun stuff :)

Chrissy and crew piled into a convertible bug with the 8' and 6' long pieces of 80-20 (what a sight) and made a visit to IDEO. Jim cut the 80-20 to length (thanks, Jim!), and the assembling has begun.

Accomplished so far:
-80/20 for arm, tower, and chassis cut to length
-Chassis assembled except for bottom layer (with the wheels, etc)

To do:
-assemble arm/tower
-drill 3/8" holes in pieces of 80/20 for wheel axles (I started drilling 1/4" pilot holes, but stopped when I realized that the shape of 80/20 means that they won't actually be able to function as pilot holes). Plan 2) Make another visit to Jim tomorrow or Thursday to get this holes drilled. If he's unavailable, do it in our shop... Whoever does this, remember that the holes for the middle wheels have to be 1/8" lower.
-assemble bottom of chassis with wheels/axles and put together with the rest of chassis
-tape together sheets of foamcore to make a thicker piece to use as a ramp

Other decisions made/things to purchase:
-We're going to buy the adaptor that allows us to use 2 CIM motors with one transmission box (we have the additional 2 CIM motors already from previous years)
-Buy one 8" dia, 1" wide IFI wheel, but we do NOT need any more sprockets (and we're not going to invest in larger sprockets either to gear down anything--Ed says we'll be ok)
-Buy seven 1" wide wedgetop treads for IFI wheels (fyi, website doesn't work on macs...sheesh)

Last comments:
-WE NEED TO MAKE COPIES OF BLUEPRINTS SO THAT EVEN WHEN SOMEONE AND HER NOTEBOOK IS GONE, WE STILL KNOW HOW TO BUILD OUR ROBOT :) I'll make sure this gets done tomorrow.
-Our Friday meeting is going to be shorter than usual...exact time tbd.

That's all for now. Hope you all don't have too much homework!

ps-Ed was here tonight, if I didn't make that clear. thanks, Ed.