Trike Trailer Prep Continued

This week's meeting featured the highly anticipated return of some more team members to the Milkdrop, as the summer EVT crew is gradually reuniting and continuing to grow!

In preparation for the weekly meeting, the full-time UROP gang set the tone for the meeting with some long nights in the shop consisting mostly of work on the trike along with a healthy dose of messing around on Roberto's motorcycle...

1:25am

3:49am

4:23am

Productivity from the week before carried into the meeting, with the crew up at 6am and off to work finishing up the frames for the trailer walls!  Although the painting was all done, we continued filling the Milkdrop shop with wonderful scents as we applied clear coats of polyurethane at 4 hour intervals.   

 We also finally adjusted the brake cables on the motors so that they're ready for some testing.  Joey added an intermediate wire to run the power wires to the brake motor through the base of the trailer so that we can seal around it with the silicone and still be able to disconnect all the other wires.

Extra connectors for the brake motor wires

After a long, heated debate, we finally decided that it would be best to just tip the trailer onto the back.  Everything was securely mounted and the weight balanced enough that we didn't have a problem tipping up the massive trailer, and we had an optimally convenient way to apply the silicone caulking in all the exposed openings.  This also gave us a great opportunity to clean out all the dirt that had been slowly building up under the trailer.  Erich showed his experience and mastery with the caulking gun as he meticulously sealed up all the edges along the aluminum frame.

 
Hanna and Joey continued plugging away on the Xbee work so that we can pull the data from the trike wirelessly on the chase car.  Although there was some trouble sorting through the drawer of old Xbees and figuring out which ones still were in working order, we got one set of Xbees transmitting the data from the batteries and almost finished getting another set to transmit the data from the cycle analyst.

Hanna and Joey mastering Xbees