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Week 5 (July 3-7)

The wayside power rails for half of the half-scale track have been installed successfully.   Initially, we planned to carve the inner lining of the PVC pipe to make room for the small rectangular copper piece that is used to hold two sections of rail together at each joint.  However, we decided this is too time-consuming and there is an easier way to solve the problem.  Instead of carving the PVC pipe, we simply placed copper piece behind the PVC pipe, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:  Copper rail connector piece placed behind PVC pipe. (Photo by Andrew Lu)

The front of the joint is shown in Figure 2:  The modified collector shoes have been tested to be able to easily glide across the joint.  There is no more overlapping of copper rails and the screws are flush with the surface of the copper rail.

Figure 2:  Two sections of copper rail joined together. (Photo by Andrew Lu)

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Week 9 (July 31 - August 4)

One of the collector shoe guides have been built and installed to an end of the track.  The installed collector shoe guide is shown in Figure 1.  The collector shoes slide between the wheels and into the wayside power rails.  Wires connecting to the battery have also been installed to the rails.  Wires from the previous Wayside Power Team are reused.  The ends of the wires are repaired where needed and zip ties are used to keep the wires organized on the track.  A multimeter is placed at the other end of the rails to ensure that the transfer of electricity through the wayside power rails is successful.  We have also finished the final report this week. Figure 1:  Installed collector shoe guide. (Photo by Kevin Leong) Figure 2:  Fixing and organizing wires. (Photo by Kevin Leong)

Week 8 (July 24-28)

The design for the collector shoe guides had been changed slightly.  The outer lip, or wall, on the guide is not needed.  We realized that the collector shoes do not hang lower than the guide.  In addition,  the curves on the guide that push the collector shoes into position are difficult to create.  Instead, extra wheels that the bogie team no longer needed were used in place of the curves.  We also spent this week writing the majority of the final report.

Week 7 (July 17-21)

By the end of this week, all of the wayside power rails have been installed for the half-scale track.  Guides for the collector shoes need to be installed at the ends of the wayside power rails.  The purpose of a guide to gently feed a freely dangling pair of collector shoes back into a pair of wayside power rails.  This occurs during a track change, in which a pair of collector shoes derails from the wayside power rails on one side of the track.  Another pair of collector shoes needs to be guided back into the wayside power rails on the other track.  We brainstormed ideas for how the collector shoe guides should be made.  Tan was able for draw out a model of the guide using SolidWorks, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1:  Model of a collector shoe guide. (Drawn by Tan Ho)