Master of the Mechanical Stuff

[savagecreature]

Excuse the title. I don't mean to imply I'm a master of anything. It's a quote from Wild, Wild, West and I used it to be funny.

As some of you already know, I spend a lot of time building a lot of various things, including other robots for competition. I thought I'd share the occasional mechanical success story.  This stuff always makes me think of other cool things I could do on my droids.  

We needed some idler pulleys for one of our robots so we could flip which side of the drive train the belt was on.  They also needed to fit the bearings we had on hand and be a specific diameter to keep the proper belt tension. None of these criteria were met by any of the commercially available pulleys we could find, so I designed and 3D printed these:




they printed in halves, then bolted together with #8 32 bolts, trapping the bearings inside.   We've got 'em on the bot and so far they seem to be working pretty well. 

I'll let you know how they hold up.

[kresty]

And they work?

[savagecreature]

And they work?

that's what I meant by " they seem to be working pretty well. "

[kresty]

I may eventually learn to read.

[savagecreature]

Since I don't have any droid stuff to show, and since I have to fill this thread I started with something;  Here's another assembly for the competition bot that I designed and built.


This is the CG render from the CAD model.
 


The parts after they came off the CnC.  For some silly reason these were a lot of fun to cut. They're all quarter inch acetal. I finally found the sweet spot and can cut it reliably, accurately and fairly quickly. Makes me wanna make more stuff.



And finally, the finished assembly. It's always so cool to see this stuff come to life like this. It's a little dirtier, and our local supplier didn't have the bolts I designed it with so I had to substitute, but it's a darn good match for the CG version. Gotta love technology.



About 12 hours from beginning to end, idea, design, fabrication and assembly, including time for taking photos and actually installing it on the robot.

[kresty]

Looks cool! Now I want you to cut me stuff (if I just had stuff needing cut.)