Week 1

At this point the frame of the car has been custom built by the team before I arrived for the project. In the following weeks we will continue to add crucial systems for the cars. The task assigned for me during the week was to create bushings out of a high strength plastic to use as a placeholder on the car to attach other parts such as the a arm suspension system. These plastic bushings are used to make sure the pieces fit and everything works and won’t be the actual material the bushings will made of. Eventually we will remake the bushings with a type of metal which will be used in the actual competition. The reason we use the plastic to prototype the design is because it is a lot easier to manipulate and shape, but has a huge flaw: it expands greatly in the presence of water causing the pieces not to function properly. We used lathes to fabricate these bushings and it is a slow time consuming process because we need to get the pieces into an exact size. This is the 5^th year the polytechnic team is participating in the competition and the team continues to grow every year. On Friday ASU Polytechnic had an open house for extracurricular activities and we had a great turnout for the Mini Baja SAE team. We were able to showcase previous cars to the public and they loved what we are doing.