Progress for Oct 10 - 15

This is a really fun process. I get to take my time and do it right. This week I laid down the first weld on the Power Cube (version IV). I also started making progress on ordering my engine (post forthcoming).

I'm building the Frame of the Power Cube first. The frame is made of 1/4" thick angle iron. Its dimension are 27" long by 29" wide by 24" high. I will be making the cube taller so I don't have to shorten the shaft of the engine. The OSE folk turned me on to that modification. I'm waiting on them to get a new height. Until I know how tall to make the cube, I can only build the top and bottom squares of angle iron.

Welding Arrangement

The angle iron was already cut to length, so I could start immediately. My professor helped me set up the welder. I did a few practice welds to get the settings right, and get back into it-- I haven't welded in about 5 years. Getting the material into a proper square took some work, but I managed.

I laid down a few Tack welds to hold it all in place and remeasured for squareness. One of the sides had fallen out of alignment so I ground off the weld and fixed it. Now it was time to lay down some real welds.

Welded!

Tacked!

If you look at the picture labeled 'Tacked!', you'll notice a pretty big gap between the two edges. I'm not going to weld this joint until I add the piece of angle that gives the cube it's height. With a piece of angle blocking the gap it should be an easy weld.

It took quite a while to get set up and started, but I was finally rolling. The piece was tacked and square, and I was ready to weld! But it was time to clean up. I had a machining course to attend. So I have a half finished welding job to finish up next week.

Tracking Hours

Gary mentioned how it would be worth having a record of how many hours it took to complete my project. This was enough to spur me on to add it to my spreadsheet. Most of the time I spend won't actually be on the spreadsheet. I'm not going to record, research time, documentation time, or correspondence time. I also won't include time that I pay someone else to spend (many of my steel cuts are done by my supplier for example). What will be included is fabrication time. I'm a relatively untrained fabricator. This means I'm less efficient than many who would undertake this project. Still, for someone who has done some carpentry, a little welding and a lot of experimentation this may be a reasonable estimate.

In the end I think it will be of major value to the OSE project to have records like those that I'm collecting. To have lots of data points on the costs (material, time, energy) of a Power Cube would really strengthen the case for OSE based businesses. I'm happy to collect data for my little project and hope to see data for other projects. Another person tracking their costs would help me understand when my costs are reasonable and when I'm slow or my materials are expensive. This may help me (or others) save major money/time.

Anyone can ask for access to my records in case they want to look more closely, or in case they want to use them as a template for tracking their own costs.

Tracking the Materials and Cost of a Power Cube

Just a Power Cube requires a lot of components. I'm worried that the design of the Cube will change, so I'm buying parts piecemeal. I'm also curious how much a Power Cube costs. I made a spreadsheet to track what I've ordered and how much it costs. From this I'll be able to compute total cost. You can see my spreadsheet here (and below). I copied liberally from the spreadsheets that OSE provides for the Cube. I will update it as work proceeds.

Helpful Resources

This is just a list of URLs to help me find things quickly.

Tom's Dallas Log
My Log
BOM

Progress for Sept 19 - 23

My first posts will be a little backward because there's a lot to say and I want to try and be organized about saying it. So I'll start with the most concrete stuff. This week I started building a Power Cube which will be the power source for many machines to come.

On Monday I ordered 20 feet of Angle Iron from Access Metals (the Total cost for this was 68.90$). This would be the frame of the Power Cube. Sandy drove to the shop and picked it up. To fit in the Neon, it was cut into 2 six foot pieces and 1 seven foot piece.

On Thursday I left work early for my machining course at CCBC. I had about 1.5 hours to work before class started. I managed to cut all the long pieces of steel in that time.

The first cut on my tractor!

At the end of the work, I realized that the instructions had left out some additional cuts. I would need more steel. I conferred with Tom and he confirmed a change to the instructions. I would need a total of 408 inches of angle iron. That's another 168".

We'll get that before next Thursday.