Mechanical

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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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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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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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 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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CUER- A Fresh(er’s) Perspective

Posted on December 23, 2012 by pjm206

Finally, it’s Christmas! After managing to endure the whirlwind of my first 8 weeks at university this is a welcome chance to have some time out, revise and of course, reflect upon the fantastic opportunities that this intense term at Cambridge has provided me with. Yet looking back I can honestly say that, amongst the inevitable torrent of highs and lows, the best part for me was without doubt signing up to CUER.

Having naively joined the team on a whim within my first 2 weeks of studying, I was very uncertain of what to expect. I had comparatively minimal engineering experience, was pretty sure I would be the only girl present and felt as though I would probably be rendered useless to the team. It’s fair to say I could not be more wrong! Although initially daunting, sitting in my first mechanical team meeting surrounded by such a mixture of incredibly bright, passionate people soon brought me to the realization that I’d made a great decision.

To this day, the team spirit is a main contender as to why I have enjoyed my time with CUER so much. The genuine buzz and excitement surrounding the new ‘game-changing’ design was …
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The birth of a concept- my CUER story

Posted on December 18, 2012 by pjm206

During last term I tried to give people an insight into the workings of my team, the Mechanical Team. I purposely kept these posts impersonal to emphasise that this project is bigger than any one individual. It is the way that we work together, drawing on each person’s expertise that means that we can develop a system that is also greater than its individual parts.

Today, however, I am writing a more personal piece. This is my CUER story, starting back in October 2011 when the last term had just returned from Australia. I was sat in Queens’ bar with a group of friends. This group included Henry Cathcart, Oliver Armitage and Emil Hewage, three grad students who had just returned from Australia.

It was not talk of the outback that caught my attention, instead the discussions about CUER’s concept for the 2013 race. They were proposing building a solar powered motor bike and explained to me how the reduction in drag could mean that the design could beat the larger cars. At the time I was wholly unaware of the amount of time and research that had been done to quantify this statement. I just took it at face …
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Mechanical Team: Michaelmas Week 8

Posted on December 2, 2012 by pjm206

We launched our Kickstarter last week. This money is needed to pay for the clear canopy that is so crucial for our design. Please show your support for all the hard work that the team is putting in:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/704143762/cuer-the-uks-number-one-solar-car-team

Now for the weekly update…

So that is it, the short sharp Cambridge term is finished. Most of the team has dispersed back around the country (and world) and the technical side of the Mechanical Team returns to remote working and weekly Skype meetings to keep the momentum going.

The manufacturing team, however, has not gone home. A short term means a long holiday, allowing the manufacturing team to set off together to Bristol. They will spend next week at the National Composites Centre laying up our carbon fibre monocoque chassis. This is a huge milestone in our project and I very much look forward to seeing the end result next week.

‘So what have we been doing this week?’ I hear you ask.

I left you last week with the patterns of the car arriving at Ricardo in the Cambridge Science Park, straight from Jaguar Land Rover’s Rapid Prototyping department. There story from there on in involves a lot of …
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Mechanical Team Launch Week Blog (Michaelmas Week 7)

Posted on November 26, 2012 by pjm206

It is finally here, launch day. The day that you finally get to see what we have been working on for the last 5 months! Getting to this point has been a huge effort from everyone on the team and a huge effort is still required to get the final car to Australia. I will write a blog post in due course explaining how we came up with the concept, explaining my CUER story from start to where we are now, but for today I will just fill you in on the work done this week (with a few photos from the last few weeks that I have been keeping under wraps.

To start with I would like to welcome three new sponsors to CUER who are supporting the mechanical team, Matchtech Engineering Services, Mackays of Cambridge and Moore and Wright.

Matchtech Engineering Services are an engineering consultancy, specialising in structural analysis and design. I first met the managers of their team during my Year in Industry before coming to Cambridge. They are IMechE registered mentors and their skills developing new talent in the work space are fantastic. They taught me a huge amount of engineering during …
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