While some S&T students have been partying through the gonzo games, follies, coronation, (not to mention two days of no class) and other St Pat's festivities, a dedicated core of SAE Baja Team members have been working their "green" off to get their '09 mud bug ready for competition.
Each student design team sets up production time schedules that sometimes consist of a little wishful thinking, the machine-shop version of cramming for finals. St Pat's week celebrations serve as a great benchmark of a team's progress, an opportunity for teams to have a coming-out party and display their projects to the public, and the resurgent Baja team is a great example.
Team Leader Casey Boyer, Matt Callaway, and other Baja grease monkeys kept the SDELC shop facilities humming during the run up to St Pat's and managed to debut the new rock-crawler with some crowd-pleasing wheelies during the annual parade. Casey and other team members have quietly given up their spring break holiday to stay in town and work on the car because there is still quite a bit of work to do. Seat belts, fire walls, painting, fuel containment systems, and that all-important sponsor signage still have to be installed on the yet-to-be-named vehicle. Throughout the finishing work the team will continue to test and re-test to root out any design flaws in the weeks before competition. With a more than 50% drop-out rate during the chaotic 4-hour endurance race it is critical that the team test, test, and re-test all their systems prior to heading to Auburn, Alabama in mid-April.
Baja fans will be disappointed to hear that there will be no amphibious event this year so there are no plans for floatation chambers on the car. We do understand that the course will involve some pretty tough rock-crawl elements, so the Miners' new car is designed with pretty high ground clearance.
Recently in Baja Category
On weekends S&T's campus usually gets pretty quiet, but that certainly doesn't apply to the Miners' vaunted student design teams. This weekend started with SAE uber-judge Steven Fox giving a fascinating, insightful and humorous 3-hour seminar about race car vehicle dynamics, design approaches, strategy, and the evolution of rule-making at major SAE competitions. With Steve's decades in the auto manufacturing you might think he'd concentrate on an engineering design that might save the industry. Instead he focused on the design process; how a team accomplishes its goals, the best way to stay focused on the design challenge at hand, and the importance of bringing in new team members at the early stages of design so the team's entire knowledge base doesn't suddenly disappear on graduation day. He stressed the old saying that "those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it", emphasizing that design teams must know the history of design so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated at great cost in time, materials, performance and money. Another old saying that crept into his talk was KISS, and if you don't know what that means, well.................
After dinner at world-famous Alex's Pizza, the Miners hosted a shop tour and turned the table on Steve by presenting the design approach that recently earned S&T Racing world-ranked recognition. Team members showed Steve their plans for a wheel mounting system that will reduce the component count by 40% and save considerable weight at the corners. This after-pizza was an excellent rehearsal for the design presentations that are a critical part of most student design events; you might win all the races, but if you can't explain how or why you did it you probably won't win the event. If you were in industry you won't be able to get the financial backing to put your project into production, and you might not have a job any longer so it pays to do your calculations and test and verify at each benchmark. 
Steve frequently praised the S&T FSAE group for its commitment to growth and innovation, their strong emphasis on pre-race testing, and their ability to stay ahead of schedule.
FSAE wasn't the only student taking advantage of the class-free time. The Concrete Canoe Team went into full-scale production Saturday with a new and far less labor-intensive method for building the unlikely craft. Mark Ezzell, Patrick Tilk and a few others were the mix-preparation squad, keeping a soup-like concrete slurry ready for Matthew Struemph's spray gun. 
Their new system, the results of which haven't yet been tested in water, should strengthen the boat because it will eliminate seams that can lead to cracking. The actual (proprietary?) mix includes fine glass beads to help reduce weight and make the craft more buouyant, and anyone who has tried to carry a concrete boat will agree that's a great idea.
Mixing the material in finely-measured small batches had another advantage. A group of very bright engineering students from Atlanta happened to be visiting campus and when told they'd see a boat made of concrete they were quite incredulous. The boat builders took a few breaks to host the potential transfer students, explain how the Miners often work in open-ended design challenges, and show their guests the fun and appeal of a S&T education.
Lastly, S&T'S baja and solar car teams both were toiling away in the background. Casey Boyer stayed busy producing car parts on the SDELC shop lathe, while Dan Welty and several new team members toiled away on plans for Solar Miner VII. The spring semester is when the teams, who typically design the systems in the fall, get into full production.
Chief Engineer Wes Thomas reports that Baja’s second event in an ambitious racing season was successful. After early breakdowns in the season’s first SAE event, the mudders finished ALL events at the Caterpillar-hosted mud-slog. They finished on 65th place out of 94 teams that showed up, and had a strong finish (27th) in their first-ever rock crawl, which is very good considering they didn’t have their rock specialty vehicle ready and raced their general purpose quad instead.
Wes reports “this was a learning year. We fixed the stuff that broke in Tennessee, but found new weak points. Our car was also heavier than last year (and at ~500 pounds a good 150 more than the fast teams). I am still waiting to hopefully get some judges’ feedback as to why we didn’t fare well in design, sales, and cost, so there should be a significant improvement next year. It's most likely because we report our numbers accurately”.
He continues that “maneuverability would have been better, but two bad thunderstorms turned the course into sticky clay that wouldn't come off tires. It was like driving on ice, spinning the tires at 5 mph on flat terrain. You couldn't even see the tires after just a short run”.
“We're also hoping that having two running cars and a design ready to go by next semester should help with member retention. If finances and team member ability allow, we should have a complete, competition-ready car by December. The chief engineers will spend time trying to teach the new kids how to actually build stuff so the designers can do their job, and reduce the risk of burn-out by year’s end". On students, not clutches, we think he means.
They've also come to the realization that it takes a lot more money and outsourcing then initially thought to field a competitive car these days. They’re already working on designs for next year to simplify the car, cut costs, shed weight, and improve reliability, and already have a lighter, more efficient transmission picked out.
Wes lastly comments that “we tried to do too much with too little and the team suffered. Lesson learned".
We can’t think of better way of summing up experiential learning, because this is all about learning. Thanks for a truly brilliant summation, Wes.
S&T’s Baja team is back on campus after their ambitious second ’08 design competition, and they report a significant improvement over the race in Tennessee. You might remember that they withdrew from the last month’s grueling endurance race with a shattered CV joint, but we hear that they finished ALL the events at Caterpillar’s sprawling test facility near Peoria. We’ll have more info as we get it, but in the meantime here are a couple of shots from the earlier event.
The team had probably jettisoned the floatation chambers because the Peoria event substituted a rock crawl for the amphibious challenge.
S&T's baja-style racers weren't brought down by a nail (broken flywheel key) or a shoe (shattered A-arm), but on a sad Derby Day in neighboring Kentucky their horse couldn't overcome a metaphorically broken ankle and had to be put down. The bearing basket on a CV joint broke in half and even then the Miners were set to attempt emergency repairs until they realized that all the ball bearings were probably ground deep into the mud on the Tennessee Tech campus.
At that point there was little to do but pack it in, watch the remaining race, and rest up. They'll return to campus, regroup, and get back to working on their other baja-style buggy for the SAE event near Peoria IL in just two weeks. That one is primarily a rock-crawler so the winner will probably be the most rugged rather than then most nimble. Stay tuned!
OK, for all of yesterday's drama the real Baja action is the four-hour (!) endurance race. In a mass start eerily similar to quitting time on the S&T campus (except baja drivers wear helmets), round after round of cars charge into a lake. Wouldn't be so confusing except that dirt cars don't steer very well in water (or is that just a K-State driver getting chewed out for lousy driving?).
Our Miners developed a strategy to avoid this mess; they simply waited until the first wave (ouch!) either collided and withdrew, or simply sunk as one did, and then waded (sorry!) into the fray. Kept their car nice and clean, too!
........for want of a shoe, a horse was lost, then the soldier, regiment, battle, king and kingdom were all lost, or so goes the old saw from centuries past.
That was nearly the case for S&T's Baja this weekend. After the requisite judge-mandated modifications, they managed to re-enter tech inspection, gain approval, and head for the skid pad arena, but the engine wouldn't re-start.
No amount of hauling on the starter rope succeeded, so they pushed the beast to Briggs' support center where they found the flywheel key had sheared. Easy repair, except nobody had one, so they resorted to every engineer's stand-by equation; extreme force, to tighten the flywheel. Worked like a charm and after a rainstorm delay they handled skid pad and acceleration with aplomb.
The next task, maneuverability, was not so easy as their right A-arm tore off at the bottom of a steep drop.
Such was the end, albeit temporary, of qualifying for the Miners that day.
Time to borrow a TIG welder and let Wes Thomas do his aluminum magic. After what was probably a sleep-free night for the five-man crew both A-arms were repaired and strengthened and un-named car was ready for the all-important 4-hour endurance race. Did we mention there was a slight water hazard on the course?
If you think that Missouri S&T's (yeah, we know that it is still UMR for a few more weeks) engineering students spend all their time in the lab designing and building projects, you couldn't be more wrong! Some of us just love to get dirty. We just ran across a treasure trove of photos from the recent SAE-Baja competition that show the Miners doing their best to get filthy and having a LOT of fun!
Like the fastest waterbug on the river, the campus' off-roaders are pulling far ahead of the pack on the race's challenging amphibious leg. They were clawing (paddling?) their way into the top 10 of the all-important endurance race, designed to test the limits of each vehicle, when a shifter mount broke slowing the baja boat.
Did we mention that the Miners won the Mud Bog event over nearly 100 other mudders? How appropriate that a school founded to efficiently burrow into the earth took top honors in just the group's second year of existence. Not bad, not bad at all for a sophomore team, eh?
We just discovered a bunch of these moving pictures of UMR's amphibious dune buggy/baja vehicle. No telling what you're going to find on the Internets these days...
If you heard about this blog on KJPW in Waynesville, you're probably looking for that photo of the amphibious dune buggy. (Hint: Click on the word photo.)
