Monday, September 22, 2008

Brake Pedal Final Assembly

More progress! In fact, at this point it feels like we're nearly done.

On Saturday we spent a long day completing and assembling each of the three pedal assemblies.

This day felt different from the previous days, however. At this point we are so far along that there was very little time spent dithering and making decisions, then reconsidering and deciding agaian, as we'd been doing most of the previous days of this project.

Instead, we found that things were falling into place. Both of us simply kept working: measuring, drilling, cutting, filing, riveting, and bolting together. It was a rewarding day!

Amos spent most of the day working on the most complex assembly, the brake. He drilled the pivot holes in the u-bracket that mounts the load cell actuator and then spent some time tinkering with the alignment to try to get the actuator perfectly square with the tongue he'd fabricated earlier and mounted on the load cell.

He also determined where he wanted the u-bracket to sit on the pedal platform, and drilled the holes for that.

Along the way he decided to put a shim under the rear end of the load cell, and then during the alignment process he also made a shim to go between the u-bracket and the pedal platform.

It also took some tweaking to get the spring situated so it didn't flex sideways and hang up on the nut on the threaded pushrod inside it as the pedal is actuated.

By late afternoon the complicated brake pedal assembly - the part of the project that had required the most design work and the largest amount of precision fabrication - was complete.

Didn't Amos do a fantastic job on this?

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