Week 6

With time winding down before our first competition everyone is working round the clock to make sure things are finished. This week the car was tested on the ASU dirt track and after just a few minutes the gearbox broke. We took the car back to the shop and after an evaluation there was serious damage to the gearbox and it would take 3 days to replace. While the car was out of order it was the perfect time to attach the pickup points onto the new chassis. These pickup points are the tabs where everything is attached to the main frame and by using this method it would save the team valuable time. The test chassis is the same design as the new one, but the new one will be lighter than the test chassis. The purpose of the test vehicle is to break the vehicle and notices what breaks and rebuild it stronger. While testing we found the rear tow links which help the rear tire retrain traction was taking a lot of impact and needed to be made stronger. This week I also got to use the plasma blaster which uses a really hot heat beam to melt metal which allows us to reuse broken pieces and weld it onto another piece.

This week the new chassis really came together and hopefully in the following week the new chassis will be completely done and ready to go.