Manufacturing parts of the MCM

This week, we continued machining different parts for our Most Critical Module.
We planned to manufacture the cube inside the inner scoring arm, so that the arm can be attached to the thread and extend down as the motor turns the thread.

What we learned is to always expected some modifications to our original design. It took us four separate tries to successfully finish making this part. When the initial cut has been made from steel square stock, we found out another material that could be used as our inner scoring arm. Instead of using the Aluminum square stock with 1/8" thick walls, we decided to switch to a 1/16" wall because it will significantly reduce the weight of our arm. Thus to compromise to this change in design, we had to change the dimensions of the cube too.

We then made a few errors in filing down the cube to size, and also not aligning the drill bits of the mill correctly. On the thrid try, the hole was drilled 0.25" away from where it was supposed to be, and thus we had to re do the whole part.

In the end, We had to work extra hours in the shop just to make up for it. But we do realize that this kind of things happen during machining, so we did not dwell on it too much.