The Final Push

Team Pending spent a lot of time in the lab over the past week and we got a ton accomplished. This weekend we finished assembling the machine and have begun testing. A couple of design tips for your next big project. If you want to make a toothed wooden box like ours for a chassis, make sure the dimensions of the teeth are the same as the width of the board. We choose a .25" thick piece of plywood as material, which requires .25"x.25"x.25" teeth. Laser Cutting the teeth is really the best method, as hand cutting those can be inaccurate (making the box difficult, if not impossible, to assemble) and time consuming. We found the best setting for the laser cutter (on a 50 watt bulb) to be 50% power and 1.4% speed. If you are looking to get really intense and secure, look into the dovetail cut, as it will be far more sturdy, but very difficult to make (you can't do it on a laser cutter). Here's a few pictures of our assembly in-process: