2.008 Virtualized!

In the past few weeks, Team Honeycrisp has had to adapt to the new challenges of manufacturing our yoyo in a fully virtualized manner. We had our first zoom lab last week where we discussed the new curriculum and were introduced to MoldFlow.

Afterwards, we met as a team to discuss the next steps moving forward with our yoyo. Based on the 3D printed models we had of the bite and stand, we decided to stick to thermoforming the bite because we thought we could improve the aesthetic design and we really wanted a thermoformed part incorporated in the yoyo. Based on this decision, we needed to update our original CADs. We updated the stem and leaf and the inner body, made the bite look more aesthetically pleasing, incorporated the worm into the assembly, and fixed the apple skins to cover the inner bodies. During this process, we realized we may run into some issues assembling the yoyo, so that is something we plan on discussing during lab this week to make the necessary changes to our design. Here is an image of our updated yoyo CAD assembly!

This week we also went through the MoldFlow tutorial to learn how to use the software. Then we ran an analysis on each of our injection molded parts to get an initial understanding of the shrinkage values as well as any issues which may arise and what process parameters to use. From the results, we learned the shrinkage percent for critical dimension features of the injection molded parts which will be useful in updating the dimensions of the CAD. We also gained an idea of the proper molding window to use and weight of the parts as well as potential issues such as air traps and weld lines which we will take into consideration this week when further revising our design. Here is a link to a doc summarizing our results from MoldFlow: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lDVw9LEHOm89TFirk_Hq-kdzqSLs3CAjaz5Xi2cxVSg/edit?usp=sharing