So you may have noticed I haven't posted any updates since October. That's not because I'm inactive, but it's just that the circumstances have been such that I haven't been able to go in and work on my project. First, it's been getting darker earlier, which makes it hard to go in and work during the day. I get out of school at 3:35pm, and the sun goes down around 5:00pm. This means that by the time I get to FabLab after school to work on my project, I only have about half an hour of sunlight left to work in. Also, I'm currently working on figuring out how to bend pipes, and I don't have all of the tools I need yet. The plan for bending them is to pour hot sand into the PVC piping to make it more pliable, then strap it to a jig to bend it. For that I need something to heat the sand in large quantities, and all I have right now is a small camping stove; so not quite enough. College applications has also taken up a large chunk of my time the last couple of ...
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This week I finished a longer piece of track, and conducted some dynamic load tests to see how the cart and the track would hold up while moving. I'm happy to report that everything worked perfectly! The cart rolled really well, and the track was sturdy. The PVC piping ended up having a slight dip in the middle due to how it was stored, but it's not a huge deal. This was a huge milestone in this process! It's taken a year and a half to get to this point, but it was definitely worth it to see my idea come to fruition. I'm planning on making some curved tracks next, in order to test how the cart holds up under a higher G-Force.
I did some weight testing with bags of concrete of 60 lbs each. I placed four of them on the rollercoaster car frame to get a static load up to 240 lbs (109 kg). I also got started on a longer piece of track so that I can test the dynamic load. Next week I'll get to finishing the piece of track, and stress testing that as well. I'm also looking into how to do curved pieces of track, but I'm going to hold off on that until everything else is ready.
I did it, I finally did it! I finally finished a piece of test track and put my cart on it. It was the most gratifying part of this whole project so far to fit the cart on and slide it around. I even sat on it, and wiggled a little bit. I'm happy to report that it held my weight and did not break. The supports and the rollercoaster frame felt really solid. We're really starting to go places with this project! The next step is to do some stress testing; finding the near-breaking point of both the track and the cart (I don't want to sabotage all my hard work completely).
Sorry for not posting last week, I completely forgot! So to make up for that, I'll make a post today about what I did last week. Last week was exciting! I finally got everything in the right place. It's not all screwed down just yet, but still! I didn't really get to get a sense of how it rolled, so I guess I'll find out some time this week when I go in again. Apart from working on my 'coaster, I also helped another student learn some of the basics about Blender.
Things are going a lot slower than I would like, but I still think I'm on track to finish a section of track and definitely the rollercoaster car. I'm coming in to work on my project about once a week, and in the meantime, I'm working on creating a scale CAD model in the Fusion 360 software. This week I spent most of my time in the FabLab attaching the wheel hubs to the main frame, and getting everything to pivot correctly.
Update time! School just started up again, and my teacher is super busy during this first week of school, so I'm not going to be able to work on my project until next week. However, I'm working on a Fusion 360 Model of the rollercoaster parts and cart at home, which should (eventually) allow me to do digital stress tests on the rollercoaster's structure. Things are picking up again soon, so look forward to weekly updates!