i was lucky enough to be the only freshman on my SAE mini baja team at NJIT, we have 2 teams, and its lots of fun, ive been learning alot about welding and manufacturing, and all the engineering that is put into building a tubeframe, its really great stuff. the only bad thing is that my team is soooo lazy, our frame isnt finished when it very well could be, i keep getting on their case to do stuff or give me somthing to do, but its lots of fun otherwise, i got to design the dash face in Pro Engineer, and we are going to mill it from 1/8" aluminum, and im in charge of making a retractable steering column to make it easier to get out of the car in 5 seconds....

but anyways, ,its lots of fun, and here is a pic of our chassis so far

Very cool!

I was thinking of joining formula baja, but the team at UCI kinda sucks. Instead it looks like a few of my friends and I are going to start a Formula SAE team.

yeah, unfortunately my school doesnt have a FSAE team, we did it once a few years ago..and they said they spent around 40 grand for the car, so the cost is just huge, and to be competitive, you need to spend a minimum of 60 grand....

so...baja i am stuck with, but i am going to make the most of it

Oh yeah, I'd do baja in a heart beat. I think UCI has 2 baja teams that have trouble passig pre race inspection. We had a team an fsae couple years ago so we have all the big equipment (engine, dyno, stand alone, some wheels and tires, gearbox). It aint cheap, but a lot of students benefit from it.

You know, I've been wanting to know something about Formula SAE - Every year there are new cars and new designs. And many of them are AWESOME. Where do they go? Do they sit in the back of some campus warehouse collecting dust? What about the designs? Do they just end up in a box of old college notes in some Engineer's attic?

I wish/hope that some of these designs were/are available. I'd love to build one (but not design one).

-Ben M.

no joke. They are all cut up into pieces and thrown away. By rule, you arent allowed to submit the same car twice.

QUOTE (MattR @ Apr 6 2005, 04:07 PM)

no joke. They are all cut up into pieces and thrown away. By rule, you arent allowed to submit the same car twice.

I wish that they would put the plans up for sale. I'd gladly pay $500 for a set of plans of a winning design. I'm sure a lot of other people would be interested in buying plans too. I want to build a little race car but I don't have the tools ($100,000 worth of software), time, or skill (I'm not an ME in my wildest dreams) to design something as well as the top teams do. I do however, have the ablilty to fabricate things given the specs and drawings. I bet there would be a big market for this. You can buy plans for hundreds of different homebuilt aircraft - why not little race cars too?

-Ben M.

http://students.washington.edu/auto/Design...ortImages/2005/

Thats a pretty cool link.

The competition isnt actually about being a race car, its about the design process. Half of the competition is the originality of the car and technique used for design. The goal is to build a budget race car to be mass produced.

QUOTE (airsix @ Apr 6 2005, 03:34 PM)

You know, I've been wanting to know something about Formula SAE - Every year there are new cars and new designs. And many of them are AWESOME. Where do they go? Do they sit in the back of some campus warehouse collecting dust? What about the designs? Do they just end up in a box of old college notes in some Engineer's attic? I wish/hope that some of these designs were/are available. I'd love to build one (but not design one). -Ben M.

I know a few guys that have worked on the FSAE teams (at Virginia Tech and Cornell).

Actually, some are sold to private people to autoX. I guess that they are pretty sucessful out on the small courses, but once you get to larger ones the falter (so said the engineer for Cornell, who is now the chief engineer for Callaway Cars, so I think he's probably correct). It depends on the school.

We had some kids here locally who were on a Formula SAE team for WSU. They used our local autocross events as their testing venu. Each event they were here running, data logging, taking notes & pictures, etc. By the third event they had the car sorted out very well. Up to that point they had not pushed hard for good times - they just worked on getting things set-up. Their times were mid-pack to top-5. Then on the last run of the day their main driver decided to push it for all it had. He took TTOD on a 60 second course, with next fastest time being a ZO6 that was a full 16 seconds slower!

-Ben M.

yeah the FSAE cars are pretty sick, and id love to build one....as far as i know with baja, you can use a chassis/frame for two years maximum, but many times individual parts are reused