Milling

We are just about finished milling our second car. We had some problems early on with the CNC stop working due to a short in the emergency stop button. But now that it is fixed we are making progress again. We just found out a really easy way to program the CNC so we can get a whole car done in about an 1.5 hrs!

Almost Ready to Mill

All sponsorship requests have been sent out. We will begin to mill the car this coming week since the car will be completed over the next couple days. Another major change were making to the car is to have the front airfoil be 3d printed out of ABS plastic. We have a couple reasons for this...
1: Far great precision and accuracy compared to milling it our of balsa wood.
2: Increased weight at the front to move the center of mass farter away from the CO2 cartridge.
3: Increased stability and structual durability since the our new design has a few areas that would risk breaking without the ABS airfoil.

Finalizing the Design...

We are doing do final design changes to the car which we will start milling starting next week. There have been great aerodynamic improvements from our state car to our national car design... We have reduced the total drag of the car from 208.54 pascals to 99.78 pascals and the lift we have increase from -3.854 p to +24.354. Both these numbers are very good showing that drag has been dramatically decrease and the lift has changed from downforce (hence the negative number) to actual lift (because of the positive number).

We are also currently working on finalizing our sponsorship letters to be sent out this week.

Whats Next?

After getting first place at the TSA state competition we felt we owed ourselves a short break from F1. A week later we felt we were ready to start preparing for the National TSA competition taking place in Baltimore in late June.

To start, we decided that we should analyse what we can improve on and to make a to-do list based on potential improvements. Some things that are on that to-do list are...

-National car design

-Sponsorship emails/follow-ups

-Website?

-Custom Wheels

-Design/build mini wind tunnel (to be used for analysis and national display)

-3D print of car

-Mill cars of varying weights of balsa wood

-Pictures of progress

-Nationals display

-Redo binder/portfolio

-Have Nylunds paint cars

-Video for display

-Presentation with PowerPoint or Key Note

-Nationals race shirts

-Decals for cars