Week 9: Assembling the Raptor Reloaded

raptor hand

Raptor Reloaded (and a broken pin piece) from our first attempt at assembly

 

Week 9 was a very open to anything style class, where each of our groups was supposed to be working on moving forward with our semester project. Since all the pieces for the Raptor hand were finally printed out and we had the hand making kit in the lab, me and Sam worked on putting together our very first Raptor hand.   This turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I had expected. First off, getting the pieces (especially the fingers) to fit together was not super easy. Some of the joints had to be filed down a bit to fit into each other and it ended up taking almost the whole class period for us to finally get the hand together. Then we had to add on elastic and fishing wire to allow the hand to open and close. These took a while to get through the holes (using a safety pin ended up helping a lot) and then getting the tension correct so the had would open and close when the user bent their wrist up and down also took some effort. All in all the final assembly of the hand took a few hours, but seeing the hand complete was well worth it!

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