4. Small Mistakes, One at a Time

I was absent for a week, so my partner had to cut the pieces of wood out. We made a mistake when drawing the lines on the wood earlier though. The different pieces touched each other. So when my partner went to cut, the wood was squiggly, and even with sanding we couldn't get it really straight and we could not get the sizes exact anymore. But when I got back, we did not have much time, so we took what we had and started working on building it. 

Since we had used think wood and since our toy was pretty tall, we did not know if hot glue would keep it all together, but we tried it. And it seemed to work a little too well. It was then that we realized we made a mistake by gluing a piece of wood at the wrong angle. But by this time the glue had dried, so we had to use a saw, an exacto knife, and a ruler to pull apart the two pieces of wood.

When we fixed this problem after about 30 min, we realized another problem. We had glued a piece of wood to the front of the toy, in front of the cam and followers. This was a problem because we needed to see the cam and followers in order to determine if there was a problem with our toy. We eventually got this off too, with a saw, an exacto knife, and a ruler.

But this was not our last mistake, I accidently glued on the flat piece of wood to a rod and the shark to the same rod, meaning we could not put one side through a hole diving the top half and the bottom half. So we had to remove the glue from one side, insert it through the hole and then re-glue it, for the shark, the fish, and the dolphin.

The last problem we faced was with our cam and followers and was a two part problem. One part of the problem was that the followers kept sliding off the cams, so they would not work. After attaching three more pieces of wood to the bottom of the followers, it seemed to stay. But then we saw that since the rods holding the shark, fish, and dolphin were long, they seemed to more around and not stay in place going up and down. So we cut out three pieces of wood, made holes through them, unglued the shark, fish, and dolphin, glued the pieces of wood to the back of the toy, inserted the rods through the holes, and re-glued the shark, fish, and dolphin. Thankfully this was our last problem, and by the time we did this, our toy was working amazingly. My partner and I were very proud of what we had built.