Week 3/31-4/4

This week has been entirely focused on finally getting that roll cage onto the shopping cart. I started off the week by drafting up an idea for the cage and then getting it modeled up in fusion. The design is similar to the design I had before but tweaked a bit to be more feasible to build. After getting a model we made a mock up of the roll cage with some PVC pipe and took it up to Mr. Jackson to get his feedback on the design and see if it is actually a good enough design.

And the design will work because it doesn't have to do much except go over the drivers head so this baby carriage design will be fine. Mr. Jackson then asked for a drawing of the roll cage because the shopping cart kind of tapered in so Benjamin Wirz took care of that and made a drawing of it on fusion because I forget how to. We also ran a stress simulation which showed that the roll cage could handle the weight of the whole cart. After that we had to grind off the paint at the mounting points for the roll cage because the paint does not do kindly with welding so we spent a day grinding it off.

There is a support bar that runs under the seat which is also at the perfect spot to weld the roll cage onto and then the supports are just going to run off the back onto the handlebar.

It doesn't have to be pretty the metal just has to be gone. But yes after getting the paint off we encountered a problem with the brake where the cable came loose. But we found a solution pretty quickly by just adding another zip tie and after doing that the brakes actually worked way better. They were surprisingly good at stopping the cart when we tried pushing it however the brake pedal kind of snapped in half.

I had to drill out a hole in the pedal a little bigger to fit the brake cable but in doing so the pedal got really weak and literally just snapped in half. So the plan moving forward is to send the shopping cart up to Mr. Jackson so they can get that welded and then in the meantime I will be designing a brake pedal for the shopping cart.