Week 4:
My goal for week4 was to fix the rails and to find out other ways to connect the copper strips together. In the previous idea, right copper strips were placed on the top of the left strips and they were connected together with screws. This idea worked pretty well with our current collector shoes; however, the only problem it had was the noise when the collect shoes ran over connection points, where two copper strips were connected.




(Previous idea-Figure1 )


Other solutions that I could think of was to make the teeth shapes or to line up two copper strips and weld them together.





I also did some research on different types of collector shoes, which uses graphite carbon. However, for the half scale, this would be a costly solution because we have to reinstall all the third rails and convert it into AC instead of DC.







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