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Unofficially FSAE has taken 3rd in the design finals, right behind Virginia Tech! Amazing!
At 5:00 a.m. in Madison, WI, temperatures are cold and it isn't just windy, the air is positively HOWLING outside! It's going to be VERY rough today................
Regular classes start next week, but design team leaders at UMR are already learning the tricks of the trade when it comes to team management.
The SDELC is hosting three days of financial and management workshops for newly elected leaders and business managers. Most design teams operate as complex engineering firms with an entrepreneurial focus, and have to deal with investors (donors), sales (marketing and public relations), logistics (team travel) and manufacturing operations -- so new team leaders need to get up to speed on team operations early in the design cycle.
Dr. Paul Hirtz, SDELC assistant director and solar car team alum, has brought in speakers from the UMR communications department and alumni association to teach key principles of fundraising and public relations. Business operations training includes how to understand the university’s accounting systems, how to spend each team’s money, how to track purchases, and how to do project planning.
Shop policies, safety training, vehicle operations and, most important, the allocation of workshop space are covered during the three-day workshop designed to get the teams off to a smooth start during the annual design and production cycle.
Too fast for Missouri’s highways? How about a free ride on a NASCAR track? That is what UMR’s Human Powered Speed Challenge Team is going to do! Gateway International Raceway (GIR), located just five minutes east of downtown St. Louis, will sponsor UMR’s bullet-shaped recumbent bicycle for extensive high-speed testing next month. Chief Engineer Jerrod Bouchard visited the track last week to show GIR managers “FlyBy”, UMR’s national champion Human Powered Vehicle, explain the group’s new design, and outline the case for hosting future racing engineers at the Madison, Illinois facility.
Continue reading "Rolla’s bullet bike on a NASCAR Track? All right!" »
There's really no excuse to use a James Taylor lyric in a headline on this blog, so we did it anyway. (Actually, "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground" might have worked for the AAVG team.) Anyway, we're going to be out of the office for several days (acutally, not all of us -- just me). So "we" thought "we'd" leave you with some things to chew on until "we" get back.
If you enjoyed last week's video of the exploding chicken, you should check out Tom Shipley's video archive, which is home to stories about Engineers Without Borders, the Formula Car Team and the Solar Car Team.
Speaking of archives, we've already got a pretty good stash of posts to peruse:
AAVG
Baja
Concrete Canoe
Formula SAE
Human-Powered Vehicle
Robotics
Steel Bridge
And if you're still bored, you might want to go over to our other blog, Visions, and read about complex UMR research stuff. (If you go there, you can also read about eating squirrel for lunch.)
OK. Now we're officially gone to Carolina in my mind.