Workday and 'Race the Sun'

Another Saturday has gone by... one less workday between now and the day we have to send off the car.

The mechanical team was mostly preoccupied with shaping and gluing in the foam/balsa wood to the bottom of the seat to create the necessary 27 degree incline angle, creating a mock wooden wheel which could be mounted to the 16" rear rim (we haven't actually ever used 16" rims at the front of the car, so before we design them we wanted to check for any geometric conflicts inside of the fairing), and of course finalization of the array stand.

Some pictures of the mechies performing specific tasks related to the above activities can be seen below:


Stanley sanding down a piece of balsa wood for the bottom of the seat on the belt sander.


Right to left: Matt, Jerry, Aaron, Eiden (four of them working on the wooden wheel), Chris, and Anthony (working on seat).


Steve continuing to work on the array stand that him and Isabel have been developing for the past few weeks.


Sweet shot of Axiom's bottom shell from the front.

The electrical team was also hard at work in their area of the garage. They were busy at work on the MPPTs, solar cell encapsulation, and retrofitting an old battery box to house some old cells we had sitting around the shop to test a new battery setup.


In the picture above, left to right: Stephanie, Dan, Awesome printer, Tim, George.


With a smile this big, one can only assume that Jeff is working on something... 'super'.

Towards the end of the day, we headed for Jeff's house to watch 'Race the Sun' - a movie about an underdog Hawaiian high school team facing adversity and overcoming all odds in competing in the World Solar Challenge 1990. Based on a true story, it had all the cheesy lines and awkward dialogue that you expect in an awesome inspirational story. After the movie we stuck around for a bit, talking about random solar car-related topics, one of which can be seen below:


In this picture, from left to right: Jeff, Christie, Brandon, Tim, and Mico.

After the movie, Tim, Jeff, and I headed back to the shop. Jeff and Tim were working on a new electrical component for the car, and made at least a dozen trips from their workbench to the car while troubleshooting various issues. I bailed early on, but knowing the pair of them, they probably pulled another all-nighter at the shop.





Talk to you guys later.

John Fernando
Mechanical Engineering Manager