Weldments

I had a chance to drop by the shop yesterday, and things are progressing nicely! The chassis weldment is complete except for a little grinding and cleanup, and the front caster weldment is almost finished. It is very exciting to finally see the autonomous lawn mower jumping off the screen and into reality.

The tubes for the front caster wheels. All that remains is a little welding!

I spent a lot of time making detail drawings of each part, weldment, and assembly. You can never be too clear or explicit when making something complex. Unfortunately I think the pile of drawings scared off a lot of more than qualified welders and mom and pop fabrication shops.

I’m very thankful I found someone willing to take on the challenge. But even with very detailed drawings, things can still go wrong. For example, below is one of my drawings for the tube shown in the picture above.

Untitled — The miter angle is 55°. Or is it?

That 55° is geometrically correct. But when you’re using a miter saw to make an angle cut on the tube, what angle should you set the saw to? The correct answer is 35°. In this case, my drawing was actually a little misleading, while technically correct. Lesson learned: if you’re dimensioning a miter cut, it’s best to show the angle the should be set to avoid any ambiguity.

Another lesson learned is to always plan for 50% or more material than the design calls for. The tightwad in me ordered exactly what I thought the shop would need with an extra 0.5in on the ends. In hindsight, that’s a recipe for extra trips to the metal yard to get material for the inevitable mistakes caused by my own sloppy drawings.

One other good engineering practice: always collect your old drawings. We went through a few producibility changes over the past few weeks, and when I dropped by the shop yesterday, I noticed a few old drawings floating around. Round those suckers up! At a minimum, mark them void. The last thing I want to do is pay for parts that I can’t even use because I changed the design.

A side view of the main chassis weldment.

If you spend a fair amount of time in a CAD program working on the same thing for more than a few weeks, you start losing a sense of the scale of things. On the computer screen, this weldment looked pretty substantial, but in real life, it’s actually pretty small. That battery bay is going to be very tight. I really hope I dimensioned it correctly.