We’d like to thank The Young Engineers for their support in the form of grommets! The Young Engineers manufactures grommets, fasteners, and latches for composite materials, specializing in the aerospace industry. We are using their grommets for almost every mounting point and cable pass-through on our car.

These grommets from The Young Engineers are one of the key things that make it possible for us to build a composite-framed car. They line our bolt holes on both ends and throughout the inner, to handle the compressive force that bolts apply to the carbon fiber panel and protect the fibers and Nomex from crushing.

Here is a look at the completed layup from last weekend–the results of what you saw in this blog post.

As promised, here is a picture of the new rollcage, featuring Terry. The major changes are the angled front bar, more robust mounting plates, and additional bars in the sides and rear.

We’d like to thank C&B Welders for helping us with welding the cage. They did a great job and we really appreciate their support! C&B is a local business that does on-site and in-shop welding work for residential, commercial, and industrial customers (so practically everyone). 

We’d also like to thank Cartesian for bending and profiling our steel tubes. They were very easy to work with and gave us extremely precise results! We appreciate that Cartesian is very committed to us and other student design groups.

Earlier this week, we bolted the suspension cage and rollcage to the ribs, in order to align the ribs properly in the car. Then, on Saturday we glued the ribs down onto the shell and did a carbon fiber layup over them to add strength. We made a chamfer at the point between the shell and the ribs (which normally would’ve been a hard 90-degree angle) using squares of balsa wood which we sanded down.

See the whole process in our Facebook photo album. Here’s a teaser…

The team does not officially condone placing paintbrushes in your mouth.

The layup has finished curing and we unwrapped it to take a look today, it turned out well. Look for photos of the finished layup soon!

Last Saturday, in the middle of our work session, a bird suddenly flew and/or fell into the Autobay while the garage door was open! It looked sick or injured and Alex Chambers took care of it, giving it meager accommodations in an empty plastic storage box, before animal control was able to come and handle it.

Another thing we did during the work session was remove the supplementary safety bar, affectionately known as the Anti-Decapitation Device, from the top shell of our car. The Anti-Decapitation Device was added to our car at the race site by request of the race organizers who expressed concern with our previous rollcage design. Our new rollcage has been redesigned to address those concerns, so the Anti-Decapitation Device is no longer necessary–in fact, the new rollcage won’t fit in the car with it in there. The new rollcage is here, and will make it’s appearance on the blog shortly.

The electrical team worked on telemetry design and coding, and also finished up creating some circuit boards in PCB Artist. Here they are discussing how to implement telemetry features:

Last but not least, we wet sanded the bottom shell in preparation for rib installation.