Formula SAE

[PrimeTimeV6]

That means I would have WAY too much fun on that thing. Spin out at 80 would be a blast.

[8695Beaters]

That was at like 35. I think 80 would be scary in that car. Once I load up all teh pics and vids on my Facebook I'll put up a link. I have about 100 pics from Cali.

[8695Beaters]

If you are near the Newark DE area, we will be showing the car for the Discovery Days 2008 for the next 2 Saturdays. Well we should be showing the car, provided we can transport it there. The event is held to entice more students to come to UD. We represent Mechanical Engineering and the car is just something cool to showoff. It is held in the Bob Carpenter Center if you are interested.

Also links to my pictures of the Cali event. I had so many it took two albums. The videos take a really long time to load, so I may not get them up for a while.

David Zipf's Photos - FSAE West Competition 1 | Facebook
David Zipf's Photos - FSAE West Competition 2. | Facebook

[8695Beaters]

THE 2009 SEASON IS HERE!!!

We had our first driving day today. Our plan was to bring both of our cars out today and drive them both. But as per usual, things never work out as planned. Our older car (27) needed new tires (we had been running used rain tires because our slicks were done). We already had the new tires, but they weren't mounted. And this car uses 10 inch wheels. Which means conventional tire mounting machines don't work. So we spent 90 minutes removing the wheels from the old tires. We even tried using a Sawzall to cut off the tires (doesn't work). We ended up having a tire shop mount the new tires. Thankfully, this is the last set of tires we will ever need to mount on this car. We are not going back to 10" wheels, simply because Hoosier is the only supplier for tires that small. And we will be selling this car sometime over the winter.

As for the car that went to Cali in June (39), it wouldn't start. It's either ignition or the fuel injector. We'll find out soon enough. That car runs 13" wheels. Goodyear and Hoosier both make slicks for that size wheel (the Goodyears are awesome).

Anyway, in order to make 39 run, we had to cannibalize a few parts off of 27. This included the cam sensor and starter relay. Fortunately, the car runs without a cam sensor (apparantly it never worked). As for the starter, all we had to do was touch 2 wires together. Bam, outboard starter. The trick was no stalling the car. Car 27 ran great today, and we all had a ton of fun, despite the heat, humidity, and the lack of people there (not a single freshman showed up).

Work is beginning on the next car. We are working on the frame, with a goal of shaving even more weight and increasing reliabilty. We are looking at switching from the Yamaha YFZ to the Suzuki XFR engine. Ths Suzuki is sold with fuel injection. Our thought is if we buy a fuel injected motor it will already have all the bugs worked out of the system. This is all bench racing at this point, so we'll see how it pans out. And sorry, I forgot to bring my camera, so I don't have any pics of today's driving day.

[jfchalmers]

Hello,

I was refereed to you guys through a Delaware engineering forum. I graduated from UMD last may and currently work at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. I am looking into starting a vehicle dynamics modeling group and am searching for eng students who are interested in the motorsports industry. We would be working closely with race teams determining the best setup for race day based on dynamic simulations. Skills in CAD (solidworks, ProE) and dynamics modeling (virtual lab motion, carsim, trucksim, adams) and programming (Matlab, simulink) are all huge pluses . You can find these programs online, I think you will find impressed by carsim. Let me know if you or anyone you know would be interested and we'll go from there.

Jamie Chalmers

[8695Beaters]

Yeah man I got your email. Since you sent it to the entire team, you should get some good response.

[8695Beaters]

I'm officially working on the brakes. My head is spinning with caliper dimensions, rotor sizes, pads, master cylinders... There's a lot more work that goes into brakes then most people think. But by the time I am done, I will be a brake guru. Hooray!

[8695Beaters]

Oi, it's been a while since I talked about what's been going on with UDFSAE.

We've already had 2 driving days. In 2 attempts we still have not been able to get both of our cars running at the same time. With any luck, that will change this weekend, as we have another driving day tomorrow. Here's the recap of the first two driving days (sorry I don't have any pics, I keep forgetting my camera):

9/14- The new car (39) refuses to run. We are not sure why, so we leave it at the shop. The old car (27) has no starter solenoid or relay, so we have to start the car manually. That means someone has to touch the two starter wires together and jump it Redneck style. Before any of this can happen, we must removve our two (heavily) used sets of rain tires and mount the new Hoosier slicks so we can go driving. Unfortunately, we are not the best planners in the world. Our advisor has the tools to mount and remove tires, but not for a 10" wheel. Which leaves us to do this by hand. At 8 am on a Sunday. After 1 hour, we have removed four of our old tires, but nobody remembers how to put on the new tires (how do you get the edge of teh tire over the lip? It's not as easy as it sounds). We break down and take our tires and wheels to a tire shop so they can figure it out.

Meanwhile, we have mounted our slightly-less-used rain tires to the car, in hopes of getting some driving time in for the day. After 3 rounds of drivers, the dry-rotted rain tires are going bald (the tread was well worn to begin with). Fortunately, our fresh slicks come in and we mount them up. I leave halfway through (Hagely Classic Car show, can't miss it), but after the tires, it is a pretty uneventful day.

10/5- We have finally figured out what was plaguing car 39. The crank angle sensor's wiring had come undone. This may have been the problem we had in California. This is also why we are buying a complete Suzuki XFR this year instead of a Yamaha YFZ motor. The YFZ is carbeurated, which leaves us to figure out the fuel injection, tuning, and wiring. The XFR is fuel injected, so we can just mount everything intact (except for intake and exhaust, which we will fabricate).

Long story short, both cars are running. Well they should be running. Nobody charged the batteries for either car. We have enough time to charge 39's battery, but 27 starts off totally dead. Which is exactly why we bring jumper cables. Once at the parking lot, I set up the course. With the course done, we start up 39 to warm it up and get some hot laps in it. Unfortunately, we pull the throttle cable from the gas pedal. This creates and hour long job of trying to get a cable that is barely long enough into a hole that is only 1 mm big. We break down and buy a new cable when the old one frays (it's actually not a throttle cable, but a bicycle brake cable, which is cheaper). Now it is much easier to get the cable into the pedal. But the nub that fits into the throttle body is too big. And it must be hand sanded to fit into its slot.

With 39 temporarily out of commission, we try to get 27 running. As mentioned, the battery is dead. o we pull out our ancient jumper cables and hook it up to a truck. The cables immediately begin smoking. We attribute this to the grease that is all over the cables until the plastic coating begins melting off the cables!!! We yank the cables off the battery terminals (the cables are quite warm) and decide that, grease or not, the cables are done. They were shot before we even hooked them up. We find another set of jumper cables, charge the car, and start pulling off hot laps. At 1 pm, we also get 39 running. Within 5 minutes a coach is running over to us. They are playing a soccer game next to teh lot and would like it to be quiet. We try to find another lot for the day, but decide to give up and call it a day.

[8695Beaters]

Just got back from today's drive. Here's what went down:

First of all, I goofed. The new car is car 30, not 39. Just a correction.

We met at the SAE shop at 8 am. While we had a set time for the lot, as well as 2 trucks to move both cars, we had no key to get inside the shop to get the cars. we had to wiat 40 minutes for someone to bring a key to us (he was driving back from West Chester). We got the cars loaded and the batteries charged, and headed to our lot. Both cars were actually running pretty well. We had a great course laid out, very fast, with lots of tight corners too. Tons of fun to drive. Unfortunately, car 30 was using it's hard compound Hoosiers. And the air temperature was about 50F with the wind. Which meant it had no grip. Combine that with a throttle and clutch with no play, and you have a car that will do donuts at a thought. For me it was undriveable. I prefer a car that has some understeer to it (learning to drive in FWD will do that to you. The Nissan pushes real bad too). A few other drivers were also having problems with it. I was the only one to kill the battery though. On car 27, the course was just right. On the front straight you could hit 3rd gear. With a stiffer chassis, it would be killer. 30 would be an even better car if there was some throttle modulation available. As it is, we only tuned it for WOT, so it is very hard to drive on a tight course, especially a cold one. The hand clutch doesn't help. We also did a side by side drag comparo. The video is below, along with some pictures.

It wouldn't be a UD Driving day without some mechanical failure. Today we started with a flat tire on 27. Easily dealt with by Fix-A-Flat. Car 30, on the other hand, had a few major issues pop up. First, after I killed the battery, we had no jumper cables. So we found some heavy gauge wire and had to do it by hand. Guess who got to do that? Then we popped a fuse. Then, while we were warming up the tires to do our drag run, we burned through the insulation over our wiring, and broke the header. We turned the insulation and did the run very quickly. Now we have a lot of repairs to perform. This is on top of the modifications we need to do for VIR, which the car is legal for. Maybe somewhere along the line, we'll even get the tune ironed out better.













Practice


Drag Run Video

[splink48]

Lookin good man!