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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)

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