Week of November 15th

Last week, we began manufacturing work on the pieces of our MCM. We created a handful of brackets out of our aluminum L-piece, a few support columns out of our aluminum tube stock, and a drilled base plate out of our plywood plate.

We learned two important things from our initial manufacturing process, the first being tool accuracy. Different tools are capable of different ranges of accuracy. When we cut our support columns from the tube stock, we used a band saw. The band saw isn't a very accurate tool and created un-squared support columns as a result. To fix this problem, we finished off the support columns with a mill. The mill is more accurate than the bandsaw and was able to shave the support columns to a proper 90 degree square. We could have used a sander instead of the mill, but it isn't a very accurate tool like the bandsaw.

The second thing we learned was tool resolution. When we worked on the brackets and support columns, we noticed that the tool sometimes removed more material than we thought it would. For example, a drill bit of diameter 1/4" sometimes made a slightly bigger hole or the width of the bandsaw blade might throw measurements off. We had to carefully account for the tool resolution to avoid problems such as inaccuracy or error propagation. For drilling, the reaming process can be used. For cutting, use of bandsaw (cut slightly longer than needed) followed by use of mill can be used.