19 Jul Vito Zampini, Second Week At UCSB! Mechanical and Materials Engineering Lab

Hello everyone! This week was amazing, I started the week off by mocking up a 80-20 aluminum frame that will hold a camera to the testing area. after building a frame I needed to come up with a way that a camera can atach to it and slide to and from the testing area without interfering at all. That meant that the camera needed a sturdy frame and a way that gets to the testing area of the optical table. (if you don’t know what I am talking about go see my first blog!)

As shown in the picture that metal frame is the original frame where I needed to figure out how to mount a sliding camera boom that would reach the testing area. Claude was running in the background trying to dechiper this puzzle with me but once again the human brain won and I came up with an idea with my mentor.

The plan we came up with was to use thse tracks that allow 80-20 aluminum to move freely through them and orignally we only had one track to hold one piece of 80-20 but because my mentor suprised me with the idea of mounting a 2 and a half foot laser to the same little frame I was building to hold a camera, I had to reinvent my frame to accommodate for the largeness of the laser. I gave my mentor Matt a cut list and we called it a day until he had cut them.

On Tuesday I recieved the cut list from Matt and started assembling the bigger frame and added the 4 tracks that allow the laser camera stage to move back and forth, and after assembly I forgot to take a picture of the final product but tommorow I will edit this post with a final product image. Then the Graduate students in the lab were having some problem with their optical table which needs to be fully enclosed in these doors but the manufacture of the doors didnt design the model well enough to close the doors fully, so for the rest of the day we tried coming up with solutions to close the doors fully. This was a cool break down of the design behind the doors because I had to open the solidworks file to see that the manufacture was in the wrong and not the graduate students assembly.

Wednesday I got the day off to watch my country advance to the finals! But I am writing this on sunday after our tough loss against spain for 2nd place. 🙁

On Thursday I tapped holes which is the proccesing of making internal threads into a pre-drilled hole. This allows bolts to screw directly into aluminum. The reason for tapping holes is to create the legs of an aluminim table, the tapped holes allow plates to screw into the legs and then adjustable feet to screw into those plates. Safe to say that the table made my forearms sore for the next two days. After tapping holes and actually built the table which is identical to the table in the picture below with some help from my coworker Vilma. It was pretty dificult but we managed to do it!

On Friday Matt and I moved around some 300 pound optical tables and made sure a 80-20 table frame was nice and square to be able to hold a 300 pound optical table. Then I get thrown around by solidworks and managed to make a small cad model for a thermal camera that will also get mounted to the moving camera and laser stage. After that I headed out and went to Campus Point to enjoy the first hours of the weekend 🙂