I showed Tim videos of the wall of nails, spiral of nails and zig-zags that we could be building to see what he thinks. We decided not to do the arc that slows down the balls because it would be too big and chunky. It would be more of an obstruction. The zig-zags however, would be the best option as well as the wall of nails. We gotta keep the sizes in mind so that we don't make them too big, or else we would have a hard time twisting the rails this way and that. We want to keep the rails as straight as possible so that it could travel a little quicker between points. Curves would give a longer path.
Marked out with circles where we would need to slow down the ping pong balls. The places where we need to slow them down are all before the ball meets the switches.
I sketched out the options we have for slowing down the balls and made modifications to suit out needs.
Above we've got wall of nails (the rectangle and trapezoid with diamond arrangement of dots). I'm thinking is we made it into a trapezoid shape we could limit the flow coming off the wall of nails, therefore slowing it down further.
Spiral of nails - To make it slower the pole would be bigger. Bigger pole -> longer path -> slower ball.
For zig-zags, in the previous page I've got triangles making a simple zig-zag. To make more interruptions of momentum it would be better to add thin strips of wood at a very slight angle instead. This also lengthens the path the ping pong balls have to travel through.
Above is also a rough sketch how how the switches would be integrated into the path. There's also a side view with switches dropping down the balls on to wall of nails (trapezoid) and wall of nails (the two straight lines). The second side view drawing is a path interrupted by spiral of nails that joins up to the rest of the path. These are options, but I think we could come up with something better than that.
Zig-zags are a definite thing, so tomorrow Tim and I will be going up to the 3D labs to get working on those and maybe on the wall of nails too since it would be easy to do that.
Here I've drawn the size for the wood on our zig-zags and the spacing between nails. So we could lay this over the wood and cut/nail.
Ben and Edrian are doing really well on their progress on the engines.
They drilled some holes today on the sweet tins and assembled the top part of the engine as well.
This bit is the top part.
This is the diaphragm of the stirling engine. So this is the bit where the air pressure moves it up and down. This is where the cranks is connected to.
We talked about how thinking back on it we should have begun with this engine in the first place, since this one has the highest chance of success. We only canned this one in the first place because the materials weren't as common as the previous designs. However, we agreed that if we did do this first we would never have thought to laser cut the parts and would've spend many frustrating sessions trying to get the precision right up in the 3D labs. So it's kind of a good thing that we failed several times before moving on to this design.
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