Cambridge

Mechanical Team Update

Posted on May 19, 2013 by pjm206

It has been a while since the last mechanical team update. There have been two reasons for this. The first is that the 4^th years on the team have sat our Final Exams at Cambridge, the second being in the little spare time we have had, we have been busy building the car.

As the exams are now over and our 4^th year projects are coming to a close (my first draft was just handed to my supervisor today) we thought it was time for an update.

So what has been going on:

Roll bar manufacture:

Marshall Aerospace kindly agreed to bend the tube for our roll bars at a meeting on a cold and blustery morning back in the beginning of March. Material was ordered and by the end of April we got the call to say the roll bars were complete. I took an afternoon off revision to cycle out to Cambridge Airport to collect them.

Alex Robinson- our Systems Designer and general hero with a lathe then finished the assembly of the front roll bar, which had had to be manufactured in two parts due to machining constraints. He also manufactured some inserts for the …
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Posted in 2013 Car, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Headline, Interview with an Engineer, Mechanical, News, Students, Testing | Leave a comment

Mechanical Team Blog Post- Lent Week 8

Posted on March 23, 2013 by pjm206

So that is it, another term at Cambridge is over all too soon! Huge amounts of progress have been made! Sorry this post is a little late. As always with the end of term, there are many distractions tying up loose ends, handing in coursework and planning revision for my final exams (which start within a month!). It is strange to say that I will never attend another Cambridge undergraduate lecture, never have to do an examples paper again and never do lab work again. Fortunately it is not quite an end of an era yet. I still have my 4^th year project to complete next term (the crash analysis of the car), and CUER still has plenty of challenges to throw my way!

Nostalgia over – onto an update of our progress:

Members of the mechanical and electrical team meet to discuss progress.…
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Mechanical Team Blog- Lent Term Week 7

Posted on March 7, 2013 by pjm206

Build Progress:

Steve and Thomas welcome you to our new build workshop.

This week, a stiffener (which also acts as the steering rack mounting block) was fitted to the chassis.

…
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Mechanical Team Blog: Lent Term Week 6

Posted on March 1, 2013 by pjm206

Part Machining:

The machining of a wheel to house our motor began with its turning on a lathe. While internal details still require milling into it, the block of aluminium I showed you last week now looks like a wheel!

It went from looking like this:

Via this:

To this:

The quality of the machining is amazing. I must say a huge thank you to the technicians at the Engineering Department’s machine shop for doing such a fantastic job.

…
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Posted in 2013 Car, Aero, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Mechanical, News, Testing | Leave a comment

E-Luminate Festival

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Keno

When was the last time you thought about light? As our designs are progressing quickly from wacky ideas to a full race vehicle, light is something that we’ve all been thinking about increasingly: “How can we track the sun better to get a bit more light?”; “How will light affect the temperatures inside the car?”; “How will the car perform under harsher Australian light?”. However, it occurred to us last week that not many people actually stop to think about the stuff that is everywhere and all around us: light.

Last week was the first ever E-Luminate Festival. This was a five-day light festival in Cambridge, celebrating the collaboration between light and clean technology. Dotted around Cambridge were greenhouses, churches, streets, shop windows and even parts of the Grand Arcade Shopping Centre, all bathed in beautiful light displays and light based artwork for five days to celebrate the festival.

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Mechanical Team Blog- Lent Week 5

Posted on February 22, 2013 by pjm206

Build progress:

Bulkhead consolidation, which has been ongoing for the past 3 weeks, is almost complete. One more session on this is needed in a couple of weeks time to complete this, however the critical parts of the car’s structure are now at full strength.

The rear suspension mounting plate has also been added to the car. This part carries the highest load of any part of the chassis and as a result weighs a couple of kilos. The good news is the chassis is still under our weight target even now it has been fitted to the car.…
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Inspire & Innovate – CUER & Ardingly

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Keno

Building any type of vehicle is not a simple task; it requires knowledge about mechanics, dynamics, electrics, power and safety. This year, we’re celebrating 6 years of designing, building and racing solar cars. The experience and expertise we’ve picked up along the way have really placed us in a position where we can start from a blank sheet of paper and push the boundaries with our latest design, codenamed Daphne. With a chassis weighing just 20kg, we’re all excited to get Daphne rolling in the coming weeks.

…
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Posted in 2013 Car, Aero, Affinity, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Composites, Electrical, Outreach, Students | Leave a comment

Mechanical Team Blog: Lent Term Weeks 3 and 4

Posted on February 12, 2013 by pjm206

It has been a very busy two weeks for the mechanical team. As a result I did not have time to write a blog last week, so here goes with a two week catch up on what we have been up to:

Build progress

Over last weekend, 22 different team members worked shifts to progress the final stage of lay up on the chassis. This work is required to consolidate the bulkheads (which so far have been glued into place) with the outer skin. Wet layup of carbon sheets around the joints will allow the loads to transfer between parts effectively without causing failure. Work on this will continue for the next two or three weeks.

CUER continued our outreach activities over the weekend by showing students from Ardingly College around our facilities. Ardingly are looking to build their own solar car in the next few years, a fantastic project to get the next generation of engineers excited about the issues that matter. As part of their tour they came to see some of our wet layup and got to see our new car take shape!

…
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Mechanical Team: Lent Term Week 2

Posted on January 30, 2013 by pjm206

Week two is done. We are 1/4 of the way though term already!

Thankfully the temperatures have been rising (ever so slightly) and the snow has been melting which made manufacturing this weekend a little more bearable for the ever increasing number of volunteers.

As with any project, things never go perfectly. In the ideal world, you do all the problem solving at the design stage and then carry out this plan at manufacturing. As any person with real business experience knows, some rework is inevitable on a prototype build and you have to have your problem solving cap on at all times!

Lent12 (13)

You can clearly see a gap between the chassis and door in the photo above. Unfortunately, both door and chassis had warped slightly in the autoclave, so getting to two surfaces to mate perfectly required some careful consideration. This was the problem that we had to solve this weekend.…
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Mechanical Team: Lent Term Week 1

Posted on January 20, 2013 by pjm206

The snow welcomed us back to Cambridge this week and also marked the return of my weekly blog!

We are in the year of WSC 2013… Time to get excited.

Allot has happened over the holidays. As you will have seen from the blog we made the chassis at the National Composites Centre. Can I extend a huge thank you to all of the members of staff there who made our students feel so welcome and helped us complete our task.

Over the holidays we also had our Kickstarter running, successfully raising over £10 000 for the car’s canopy in 40 days. This is being ordered in the next couple of weeks! If you missed our getting your name on the car with the Kickstarter, fear not, you can still donate to Name-On-Car at www.cuer.co.uk/name-on-car. As usual £10 will get you name printed on the side of the car!

So what is in store for the mechanical blog this term? Well we are targeting a rolling car by the end of the term, a mere 8 weeks away. A huge amount is still required to be done before then, but since when has that put us off?

So what …
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