Over winter break, we sent the foam we got from General Plastics to be machined into plugs at Advanced Pattern Works in St. Louis. A plug is basically a life-size “template” of a part (in this case, our solar car), which is used in composites manufacturing. APW is machining the foam to the exact shape of our solar car using their advanced equipment, such as 5-axis CNC machines.
Around the end of the month, we’ll go back to pick up our completed plugs. Then, we’ll use them to create a fiberglass mold and do carbon-fiber layups, the next steps in creating the shell of our new solar car. Needless to say, we can’t wait to get started on actually building the new car!
Also, everyone is back from winter break and we’re having our first team meeting tonight at 9:00pm. We’ll be going over the work we need to get done this quarter, share any important team updates, and I’m sure we’ll do something fun too.
Nice update! The guys from APW are great, we loved collaborating with them last time.
Someone from the team should schedule a ‘viewing’ field trip when they are doing the machining to see what happens. It’s a cool process, especially at that scale.
[...] that time we sent some foam to Advanced Pattern Works? Well, we got it back yesterday. It came on a big flatbed semi: All hands were on deck as we [...]