Announcements and Saturday, Oct 29

This weekend is parents weekend, so I know a lot of you are going to be doing stuff with your parents.  We're not going to be giving rides from marketplace this Saturday - If you want a ride this saturday, send me an email and I'll give you a number that you can call one of us at. 

We're going to be at the Parents Weekend Pratt BBQ on Saturday from 11 til 12:30, so we're probably going to start working after the BBQ (probably 12:30 or so).  We're going to be taking the frame jig over, laying up another intake plenum half, cutting exhaust tubing, and possibly welding the exhaust too.  I'd like to continue building the carbon fiber parts for the diffuser, and we're going to be doing some machining too.  I'll be teaching mastercam again like last week.

As for the vehicle dynamics seminar, I'm going to push the one this saturday back a week because of parents weekend and the basketball game.  The first lecture will be on Tuesday, Nov 1 at 6:00, and I'll give the same lecture again on the following Saturday at 7:00ish (Nov 5).  The first lecture is extremely important - I'm going to be covering tires - and very little will make sense if you aren't familiar with tire behavior.  Let's meet at the garage for this first lecture since I'm not sure what rooms are going to be available yet.

If there are any questions/concerns, let me know.

-Mike

Throttle body, frame jig, and wheel speed sensor

Some quick progress updates:

The frame jig is finished, and all we're waiting on now is our roll hoops.  Hopefully they'll get here soon...

Fall break Updates

It's been a productive (and tiring) fall break for those of us who stayed around for fall break.  We finished machining all the hubs, the steering rack supports, started the diff caps, and a few other small parts.  We also built a new intake diffuser, and two plenum halves that are almost ready to be put together into an intake manifold.  Finally, we started and finished our new undertray/diffuser.

The frame jig is done, and now the only thing we're waiting on is for the tubes to come in so that we can send it off to be welded.  Things are looking pretty good so far.

Diffuser Fabrication

How to make an undertray/diffuser in three easy steps:

Pictures on the process after the jump.

Carbon fiber intake fabrication, Part 1

 New carbon fiber parts: two plenum halves and a diffuser

Autocross with TSCC at UNCG Park and Ride

A few of us went out to an autocross hosted by the Triad Sports Car Club and we definitely had fun - here's a link to the gallery with pictures from Sunday.

Got a little bit sideways across the finish line...

A few more pictures from the gallery after the jump:

CFD Results: Half Car

I recently ran another CFD model for as much of the car as I could realistically get Solidworks Flow Simulation to run - I've found that it has a tendency to crash on larger mesh sizes with no indication as to why it crashes.  As I mentioned before, I've started doing half car models so that I can effectively double the number of cells since the car is symmetric.

New Render Video

The car for this year is almost completely modeled in CAD.  With a fairly major redesign, CAD has been an invaluable tool in making sure everything packages properly.  Packaging is a major part of vehicle design, and CAD allows us to put everything in its final position, visualize how parts will interact, and allow us to check for clearance/interference before we actually build anything.

In addition, modeling parts I think has been a good way for newer members to get experience in Solidworks, and some of their parts have made their way into our full car model.

See the new render video here.  (For some reason the compression on the embedded video is messed up for the first portion of the video - download the video to see it in its full glory)

Intake Manifold Manufacturing

Here is a picture of the new Motorsports Team recruits learning how to make a carbon fiber parts.