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It was well into the night, but three team members on Savage were still hard at work! They were highly focused as they undertook the task of interfacing the head restraint with the firewall to separate the engine bay from the driver.
on After two quarters of design and fabrication, Raider was finally brought to life last week. Over the weekend, the team had a chance to take the car out to a school parking lot to test out the car’s acceleration, braking, and handling characteristics. It was a solid day of testing and provided the team with some good insight into how they can tune Raider for even better performance. Check out the video of how the day went and stay tuned for more from Raider and the rest of the Anteater Racing fleet!
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February was a productive month for our Raider team; although we’re running a bit behind schedule, we’re shooting to have a steerable car on wheels by the Winter design review (Mar. 11) and a car ready for testing soon after that.
Suspension components are the biggest holdup due to all of the machining involved; we’ve definitely learned our lesson in regards to that. Once we’ve got those tires on the ground, our powertrain team is primed to deliver power since the engine and gearbox have been mounted. The human interface team is in the process of installing various components and hammering out any kinks they come across, and our chassis & body team has been lending their hands where needed. Lastly, we turned in a cost report last night—under a minute before the deadline—and are proud with our year-over-year improvements in cost documentation.
We’ve still got a ways to go, but we’re beginning to feel the warmth of the sunrise!
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As we approach the midpoint of the winter quarter, it’s a perfect time to take a retrospective look at accomplishments made since our last public update.
Chassis team lead Kurtis Wragg and team captain Danny Kim spearheaded the fabrication of our chassis at the end of fall quarter, and were successful in guiding the team towards delivery of a fully tack-welded chassis in just three days! Our fabricators accomplished what usually takes a few weeks in just a fraction of the time.
The human interface team has nearly completed all designs and are poised to begin mounting of their components once we receive our laser-cut tabs from our generous sponsor, Taylor-Dunn.
As for the powertrain department, we’ve received our Briggs & Stratton engine and are working out the kinks of packaging all components, bracing against all vibrations, adding precautionary shielding—things of that nature.
Machining of various suspension components is under way, as is fabrication of the associated tubing for our frontal arms. The design of the rear suspension components is taking longer than expected since we’ve switched to a semi-trailing arm rear design, as opposed to the double-wishbone design of last year.
With our competition starting on May 19, we recognize the importance of getting our vehicle fully-functional, and anticipate being ready for vehicle testing by early April. Until then, most of our team will be living in the shops, relying on fast food and energy drinks for sustenance.
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Well, would you look at that! Raider is slowly but surely coming together. Most of the team has been swamped with hammering out their designs for the past few weeks and so it wasn’t until just today that we took a step back to see how things were coming together. While there’s obviously a lot that hasn’t been included the assembly above (sorry, but our rear tires don’t float), it’s still nice to see the fruits of our labor growing bigger as the weeks pass by. We frequently get caught up in our modeling, calculations and analyses and forget how cool the big picture looks from afar.
