This was my group's finished project for Design for Manufacturing (MEC E 464, Winter 2024). The objective was to design a payload device to carry up to 10 18" long schedule 40 steel pipes (~25 lbs) with an RC car, and manufacture the parts using, at minimum, a CNC mill, injection molder, sheet metal forming, and 3D printing.
Below are my main contributions to the project:
1. CNC-Milled clamps to hold the payload.
This was machined in three setups, with CAM generated in Fusion 360 for each:
1. Getting the stock to size and drilling/interpolating holes (left pic).
2. Machining half of the clamping profile, since we did not have a long enough end-mill to do the entire profile (top part in right pic).
3. Machining the other half (bottom part in right pic).
2. Injection Mold for TPU clamping inserts
I designed the mold for a part my teammate designed to sit between the clamp (see above) and the payload pipes. The following are the preliminary drawings (click to enlarge).
After a design review with our professor, the mold was slightly changed to the following to reduce stress concentrations since it was 3D printed on a Formlabs SLA printer in High Temp Resin, a very brittle material. Below is also a picture of the part it produced and the part fitting in the clamp.
