Archive for September, 2007

Meeting with Ken - September 14

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

Today Dr. Sheldon and I met with Ken Parks to talk about the design of the hamster wheel.  He gave us some good ideas about how to join the 12 pieces together (previously a rather sticky point in our design) and offered to draw us up a CAD design.  We are going to half-lap the edges so that they overlap and we can bolt them together that way.  He suggested that we use a closed channel for the diagonal bracing pieces.   We talked about possibly using plywood or sheet metal to line the inside of the wheel, and Ken suggested a perforated metal that would allow the person to see out.  It was good to get some advice about some of the problem parts of our design, and now I feel like I know where we can go from here.

Here’s the design that Ken made for us:

hamster-cage-cadsmall.jpg