Manufacturing

See the breakdown of the machining in this project.

Final Assembly:

Final assembly was done in the FSAE machine shop at the Richmond Field Station. Parts were added sequentially to the assembly and tested with the motor to ensure that each system worked as expected. Full assembly testing was then performed with the electronics on the baseplate to ensure that vibration was not an issue with our circuit boards.

Water Jet Parts: 

There are several water jet parts on the fatigue tester, most notably the base plate and specimen holder. The water jet was an essential tool for our team because of its quick and precise manufacturing of sheet metal components. We have tons of experience water jet cutting in the Etcheverry Student Machine Shop. 

Mill and Lathe Parts:

There were a few necessary mill and lathe operations that were performed at the Etcheverry Student Machine Shop. Our team has a lot of experience using conventional mills and lathes, which helped us make parts such as: the specimen clevises, spring perches, and linear rail carriers. 2 Axis CNC mill operations were performed to make the bearing bores in our bearing carriers as well as the press fit bore for the con-rod bearings.

Welded parts:

We designed our fatigue tester using many welded joints, mostly on the spring carriage assembly. Our team has access to a TIG welder and have a lot of experience welding steel. Due to the thick gauge, weld prep was extremely important, designing chamfers into every welded joint to allow sufficient weld depth. We would optimally like to anneal these joints so as to reduce the possibility for fatigue failure due to residual stresses of welding, however we lack the equipment to do this. Instead, we simply must design a significant factor of safety into these joints.
We found over the course of manufacturing that with this weld preparation, and using the maximum power of our TIG welder of 150 Amps, we had enough heat to generate sufficiently penetrated weld lines. We found that after switching to 1/8 diameter tungsten torches and pure argon shielding gas, we were able to proceed with minimal wear to the machine itself and minimal oxidation of the work pieces