Sorry we haven’t been posted updates in a while, but lately we’ve been working on heat-treating and installing our rollcage and suspension components. We should have a rolling chassis very soon!

Front suspension

Rear suspension and rollcage

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!