CU Eco Marathon Car

The car is done!! Well, I'm done with the car, let's say. I still have to write the final report on the project, but all the late nights are history. The car looks fantastic. As soon as we get it running I'll post it's fuel efficiency. For now, here are pictures;

Senior Project in the News

My Senior Project was featured on Denver's Channel 7 ABC news last week. Here's the clip -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXOIdO1OqRM

2,000 Visits!

My blog just spilled over 2,000 visits since I started it a little over a year ago. Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll have some more news on my TRIATHLON endeavors soon, instead of all this school crap.

Supermileage Car

In years past I've been involved with human powered vehicle projects, and each year we talked about how cool it would be to have a professional looking monocoque carbon fiber fairing/chassis. Our fairings always turned out disastrous, though somehow we were still able to use them. This year, for the supermileage car I'm working on for my Senior Project, we actually pulled it off. Yesterday we popped our professional looking monocoque carbon fiber fairing/chassis out of their molds. It took about 600 man-hours of work over 5 weeks, split between 3 people, to get this. We're still not done with it, but this is a huge milestone. We still have to trim the edges and windows, make and install the windows, carbon fiber seat, carbon fiber firewall, and then the fairing will be done. After that we'll have to put all the components together and get it to run.


Finished parts; 17.8lbs total

Structural foam was used between layers of carbon fiber to provide stiffness and strength to hold the weight of the driver.

The huge autoclave the molds were cured in.

A New Level

Since my Senior Project has taken over my life, I figured I might as well post about it instead of writing about my non-existent training schedule.

I'm in charge of the carbon fiber monocoque chassis/fairing for a supermileage car competing in the Shell Eco-Marathon this April. It's gone from Computer Aided Design to molds in 3 weeks, all done 100% by hand. It's taken about 350 man-hours to get this far. With only 3 people to share the load, it's been a busy time. Next step is to prep the molds for the carbon fiber layup and structural foam, then it gets baked in a huge autoclave for a few hours, and voila, a carbon fiber car body!

Computer rendering

Final CAD

Flow analysis

Male plugs

Female molds in the oven

Just like riding a bike...

My cycling training as been abysmally non-existent in the past 6 months. I could easily count the number of times I've ridden my bike since August on my fingers and toes...probably just my fingers. The weather has been nice enough in the past few weeks to melt all the snow off the road, and today the high was 39F; perfect for a ride. I took it easy and felt pretty comfortable. During the ride I tried sprinting and managed to squeeze out 1,314 watts, exactly 17 watts/kg. My powermeter is new so I have no previous data to compare this too, but I'm expecting the numbers to jump up dramatically once I get my butt in gear this spring.

I have a couple swim, bike, and run time trials coming up in the next few weeks...the truth will soon be revealed about how much training I SHOULD have been doing in the past few month.

Handmade Wheels

I finished the wheels I was machining for part of a school project I'm working on. The wheels turned out really nice. I had to make them custom because what I needed for the project was essentially a wheelchair wheel with disc brake rotors. It has a 15mm axle sticking out of one side, and beefy bearings to take up the uneven load caused by clamping onto the axle at just one side of the hub. Pictured here is one of the wheels without the disc brake rotor installed.



Back of the hub


Front of the hub