For my fifth week on my internship River and I began our Machine shop class. In this class we learned how to cut metal using a saw and how to tap and drill holes and to shave metal off a piece of aluminum. Using the Drill press and the lathe we began our project to create a spinning top and a phone holder. Our first day of the class was all about safety. Safety when using these machines is very, very important. When a motor is spinning a metal tool at 1000 rpm you do not want anything catching or getting caught in it. Our instructor told us a story about a girl working on the lathe by herself on a weekend and it did not end well – end of the story she did not live because she did not put her hair in a pony tail. While using these machines, you have to wear long pants, a tee shirt and no bracelets or anything that had the slightest chance of getting caught. After our second day we learned what levers and buttons controlled the drill press and the lathe and how to use each individual part. On our third day we began our spinning top project, we had to use the lathe to shave down a metal cube of aluminum to fit the parts onto the top. The next day we finished our top and began the phone holder. Using the Drill press we began shaving down the sides of two rectangles of aluminum to make the stabilizers and had to tap holes into the pieces. Then using a thread piece we allowed for a screw to go into the pieces of aluminum.
During our fifth week at LASP, River and I still worked on the 3-d printer and got a cube to perfectly print which was a huge success. But we still had problems with the filament and configuration with the nozzle. On Friday we changed the primary printhead nozzle from .4 mm to .8 mm to see if the pooling issue of the filament inside of the printhead would be fixed, which it did not. And now we have a huge problem because the new nozzle broke inside of the screw holder inside of the printhead which we are going to have to figure out a way to remove it. Other than the 3-D printer I have been cleaning flight parts for SPRITE which is going be launched next year in Australia.
Over the weekend my family came up to visit me which was very fun. We had a huge family gathering and I got to see my older brother who I haven’t seen in 7 months because of college which was very nice, and I wont be able to see him again until December which I am bummed about but I was happy I got to see him.
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