S03

In August we started out the class making designs for the car and scaling it to try and find out how much medal we needed. When we finished drawing the designs, we measure the cars that we built the year before and scaled the drawing to estimate how much metal we would need for both of the cars. It was going to take awhile for the metal to come and we wanted to work as fast and efficient as possible, so we started trying to figure out what the body to look like and the steering that we wanted in the car. We wanted to change from last year so we decided that we wanted power steering in the car even though it would be more expensive.

September- This month was mostly another month of trying to get ready for the rest of the year. We started reaching out to sponsors for money, so we could get the best parts possible. We had a lot of new parts that we wanted for this year and it was going to take a lot of money especially since we were making two cars. Of course the people that have been in the class for two years got more money than the first year people but we all had enough. We were still looking into the other details of our car. We had never used power steering before so we had figure out how it works. We also wanted to put shocks in the front end of the car so we had to figure out how to build all of this. We kept looking into what types of batteries we were going to get. We didn’t know whether to go with the yellow optima batteries or the red ones. We also were looking for a way to get more amps in our battery and we knew that Raymond Central used a tub of water and put their batteries in it and charged that batteries. After they let them charge for awhile they put a heating coil in the tub and let the water get to a little over 110 degrees. Another thing we were trying to look at is what we wanted to make the body out of. We were going through the options of maybe fiber glass or polycarbonate. One other option we had was carbon fiber but that was pretty expensive. We ordered a bunch of the polycarbonate right away because we knew we were going to make some of the body out of that. We decided we were going to make the canopy and the rear end top of the car out of fiberglass. Another thing we were looking at was the back end. We didn’t like how we did it on the car from the year before so we had to come up with a new design. We decided to put two springs in the back end and another thing we did was make the motor so that we could adjust it so we would have a problem with the chain rubbing on anything. October- This month we got metal in and slowly started building the frame. We wanted to do thing accurately this year and we had a big ring made for the nose of our car. We knew we wanted to make that ring a little bigger so we had more room in our car. The first year group got ahead of us pretty fast but they didn’t really have an idea what they were doing, so they had to make a lot of adjustments, especially with the back end. We decided to make the front end of the car using to A arms and that we were going to connect the shocks from the middle of the middle of the pivoting A arms to the top bar of the car. We slowly kept moving forward with the frame and most of the things we made were adjustable so that we could make adjustments where they were needed. November- We slowly still kept moving forward with the frame. We were still figuring out how we wanted everything and what efficient adjustments we could make that would help out in the long run with the car. We definitely weren’t trying to get the car done as fast as possible. We wanted to make things as safe and durable as possible. The kid we had weld did a good job on everything. Nothing has broken so far so he couldn’t have done too bad. Things were slowly moving forward. We ordered the shocks for our front end. They were pretty big and we figured that they’d work. During this month we kept trying to figure out how we could make the perfect back end and so we made it so that the bottom of it would pivot for the shocks. There were two shocks on two arms that angled down and connected to the bars that pivoted. We had plenty of room for everything we needed so we weren’t too worried about anything. We bought a sprocket guard so we wouldn’t have a problem with the chain falling off like last year. The nice thing about making the motor adjustable was that if there was too much slack in the chain we could just adjust the motor.



December- We still kept spending time finishing up our frame and putting the finishing touches on the back end, adjusting things that needed to be adjusted. Everything on the frame seemed to come together pretty well. We didn’t run into too many problems getting the frame built. The only big problem we had was the big shocks that we ordered. We put them from the A arms to the inside of our car like a V. The problem was that you could just step on the front end of the car and it would bottom out. There was a lot of space between the car and the ground so it shouldn’t have done that. We think the problem was that either the shocks were bad (because they were used) or that they angle they were at put too much leverage on the shocks so they could compress too easily. So instead of using the big shocks we ordered smaller bike shocks and made little braces to put the shocks from the A arms to the top car of the body.

January- This month we were pretty much done with building the frame so we could start working with the body of our car. We started off with the fiberglass so we’d have plenty of time for it. It wouldn’t take as long to put polycarbonate on the car so we did fiberglass first. We got foam and glued it together. We started with the nose cone and after we were done and were able to just put the foam, which was still unshaved at the time, on the front of our car, we started working with the canopy of our body. This took quite awhile but we got that done and shaved.

February- We were trying to look for a way to put fiberglass on the foam without the fiberglass sticking to the foam so we found that wax paper or foil works pretty well. We were doing fiberglass first so the first year people could kind of go off our errors with the fiberglass. Since we used wax paper, we had a lot of bubbles in the car. The first year students put the fiberglass directly on the foam and on our car we found that the fiberglass resin melts the foam away. The first year students used wood glue over the foam so it wouldn’t melt it away. We spent a lot of time layering the fiberglass on our canopy and waiting for it to dry. During this month we also started to put polycarbonate around the bottom part of the body since we had to wait for the body to dry anyways. It really didn’t take too much time to get the polycarbonate on. We did the on one of our days off so that we would have time to do the whole thing. That day we just kept working on the body. We finished getting polycarbonate on the bottom of the car and when the canopies were dry, we started sanding everything. We started to put Velcro on the bars of our car so we could get the canopy on. When we tried to put the canopy on we ran into a problem because the canopy wouldn’t fit right. We figured we knew some people who could try and fix it but we had to start coming up with a plan b if it didn’t work. We started making a canopy out of polycarbonate. It took us about 3 tries until we got the canopy that we wanted. We sort of stopped working on the fiberglass one because we liked the way the polycarbonate looked anyways. We thought the car looked like a big torpedo. This was a busy month, so the next part we started was the back end. We figured that fiberglass would work best because we’d easily be able to just take the back end off if there was a problem somewhere unlike last year. The back end turned out better than the canopy. It was also a lot easier because we put foil on the foam instead of wax paper.



March- We had a lot of work to do and our first race was on April 9th. We started to figure out how were going to fill the gaps in our car so the whole in the polycarbonate where the steering arms go, we used like and tire inner tube rubber. It was sort of a pain to work with because we had to rivet it to our car and it tore pretty easily so we to little, square pieces of polycarbonate in riveted the rubber with that so it didn’t tear when we rivet it. Another thing we started doing was bondoing the car. We kept sanding and getting everything ready so that we could pain it. Where we used fiberglass, it took a lot of bondo to fill in the gaps and some wholes. We took a day out of Easter break to make sure everything had bondo where it needed to be and making sure everything would be ready to get painted. We started helping the first year students with there car because they were running behind. We helped them sand their car sown and made sure it was all bondoed well. A student new a guy that would paint the cars for pretty cheap so he went and got the paint and had the cars painted the morning after we worked on them. Ours was painted sort of a silverish blue and the other car was painted a dark green.



April- The few days we had before the race, we spent finishing up the requirements that had to be met on our car. We made sure all of the bars were where they needed to be. We put foam on the bars that had to have foam on them. We added weight where we needed weight. Everything came together pretty well before the race. The day we had our race went okay for us. Some thing could’ve gone better. We weren’t able to fully charge our batteries because the first year students had to unplug them and try to put them in their car because they couldn’t get their car to go. On top of that one of the second year kids thought he knew what he was doing and blew up their control box so it didn’t go well for them at all. We got third that race. The car that got first was a good car. The second car that we got beat buy we shouldn’t have lost to so we knew we needed to make some big adjustments so that we could beat the cars that were going to be better in the next race. We taken the next few days to test our batteries and make small adjustments to our car. To test our batteries we took a tub of water and put a notebook coil in the water. We hooked up the batteries to a switch and then to the notebook coil. We let that sit for about 30 minutes and then tested the batteries to see how many amps they put out. We’re still trying to help the other team make adjustments on their car while we work on ours and we’re trying to get everything done before the next race on Saturday.