Drill-Powered Vehicle
An endurance-racing vehicle powered by a hand drill
Scope:
For Component Design (MCEN 3025), we put our learning to use in a drill-powered vehicle competition, where teams of 6 spend all semester doing everything from initial CAD designs all the way the machining and assembly of our vehicles. The class ends with an endurance competition, where teams compete to see how many laps of an 1100 foot course they can complete in 30 minutes.
Requirements:
- The vehicle HAD TO remain below 50 lbs
- the vehicle HAD TO remain shorter than 7 feet
- the vehicle HAD TO have at least 3 load bearing wheels (>20% of vehicle weight in each)
Design Considerations:
We used a weighted design matrix to find the best combination of the following categories. The order they are listed in was our ranking of importance.
- Minimizing weight
- Maximizing wheel torque
- Driver comfort
- Minimizing cost
- Widening wheelbase (to ensure we didn’t flip on turns)
- Minimizing rake angle
My Contributions:
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Lead CAD Engineer I was selected for the role of lead CAD engineer. I used weldment profiles within SOLIDWORKS to build our frame design, as well as vehicle-specific components such as a custom sprocket adapter and our drill-actuation setup. From there, I used COTS models from McMaster-Carr to create a full assembly of our entire vehicle, ensuring it met all design requirements. Finally, I created a full drawing package of every frame member, machined part, and our full assembly using GD&T to ensure correct machining. This also included a BOM that was used to ensure that the cost of the design stayed below our threshold.
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Manufacturing We are currently in our manufacturing phase! After our successful design review and subsequent revisions, we’ve moved to the machine shop to start manufacturing. My responsibilites have included sourcing (bike wheels, tubing, etc.), welding of the steel frame using MIG welding, and machining of various additional parts needed for the design.
Our Competition Results:
Coming soon…
