Well, the best laid plans don't always work out. George sent along these photos of the recent modifications, and its clear that we've gone wrong somewhere. The spirit of this "open source" design process is to show the process, warts and all, so here it is. Somewhere, we made a mistake, because the moving parts don't line up any more. The reasoning was that we'd leave the rear frame geometry alone, and we'd only simplify parts without changing the geometry. Either that idea turned out not to work, or something got changed along the way. Some of the slides from earlier segments are shown here.
Part of showing this is to show how hard it is to keep track of the morphing frame without CAD. In fact, though, we did do a little CAD analysis...see Alan's drawings below. But as we all know, Murphy's law is always in force.
This first picture shows the ovalized tube in the position we thought it would end up.
I think we were going to stay with the curved arm on the bottom as shown in the drawing above.
It looks like the new arm below the ovalized tube is now much shorter than it used to be. In the drawings above, I think we were going to wait on straightening the bent tube because it would affect the geometry.
If we're lucky, the whole problem lies in the straight arm being too short. Do we still have the old arm?
Ouch. Morphing wonders turn into morphing mash-ups pretty easily.
Here you can see the new weld that probably took out the bend in the harm, and perhaps made it shorter.
George, I promise we will give you clear CAD drawings in the future before your beautiful welds go to waste. Hopefully, this can all be fixed fairly easily.
