The MarkChibi Part 1

Back a few posts, and awhile ago I mentioned I came across a guy named Charles and some of his work including. Now having actually meet the guy and going though the process of building my own Chibi a death-mobile it's my turn to write an short novel (nanowrimo) with photos of what has happened over the past few months.

It started with taking apart Charles' CAD and figuring out what kind of resources I would have. Currently most of my work comes out of our local hackerspace-Makerplace. Similar to the well known techshop, it provides a full wood, laser, craft and metal shop to anyone that pays the month membership and passes basic certifications on the equipment. With a range of equipment including CNC mill, bridgeports, and lathe just about anything is possible. However Makerspace has a lot of cons but those can be another very long blog post.

Do I need a bigger mill?

And well basically with all my projects it starts with an sketch in Solidworks, my preferred choice of CAD program. Which I have kinda learned how to do over the years of clicking buttons till things happen the way I wanted them to.

CAD! A complete mess of a model atm

Basically what the model looks like today when I opened it up (created date of the assem says May13). Mostly a hacked together mess at this point after many iterations and test fits and upgrades and whatever else I did to the poor thing. But the general construction is there, and how everything is put together. Basically when I started I had a list of points I need

• Must fit in my trunk without lots of disassembly 
• Must go fast.. 30mph? lol.... 
• To do the later 2 speed gearboxes
• Decent control and handling
• Budget..... or lack of therefore more on this later. 
• And to look awesome

With materials I had in hand I went with a regular 6061 extruded box design, held together with gussets and a bunch of 1/4-20 bolts. It's basically how I built several FRC robots in my past. It's cheap, quick and is pretty strong for how light it is. The frame is pretty simple, I went pretty bare bones with everything in the build, squares and simple shapes.

This will be it for this post more to come soon. I am currently in the process of upgrading MarkChibi for the San Diego Maker Faire Dec .7