Hey Guys not only am I a MINI enthusiast but I am also a member of the UCONN SAE team and it would seem that I am now the publicists for our team (self proclaimed, but it seems to be a job a have fallen into) so I thought I would share what we are doing here. Expect to see updates every 2 weeks or so on average. With that said let's get started.

For those who don't know what FSAE is. It is a design challenge set forth by SAE where college students design and build a formula style race car. The pretense being that you have been contracted by a major company to design and build a car that can bought and run by a weekend racer. As a consequence of that we are not only judged on how the car performs but also on build cost and various design elements such as simplicity, unique features and robustness.

On the UCONN SAE team. Our success has been mixed, we made it to competiton back in 2002 and did well, after that though the team was disbanded for a while. Since then the team was restarted in 2007 with the intent of competing in the 2008 competion however the car was not completed on time and thus we didnt make it to competition. This year we are continuing with the same frame and much of the original design, so things have been a bit easier (or hearder in a few cases). However a lack of funding has hampered us and as a result progress has been slower than expected.

With that out of the way I can bring on the cool stuff.

First off I have been keeping my local MINI enthusiasts up to date here: http://nemini.org/index.php/topic,11938.0.html so take a look there if you want to see how we have progressed since the beginning of the month.

Secondly since this is my first time posting about this here I will give a special update to help bring everyone up to speed. Our team still has a lot to do before the car is competion ready, I'll list a couple things just to give an idea of how big of a project this is:
-Finish wiring ECU (big project)
-Finish custom oil pan (nearly done)
-Finish fuel deliver system (nearly done)
-Get engine running
-Rig control gear (clutch, throttle, shifter)
-Build A-arms (... dont know what to say here)
-Complete rockers (nearly done)
-Mount dampers (nearly done)
-Finish differential mount and housing (needs a bit of re-engineering)
-Finish pedal set (50% done)
-Rig cooling system (non existent but easy to do)

And this is really a partial list. The scope of what needs to be done makes it a daunting project when you throw in the workload of being mechanical engineering students.

With that said here are some pictures and part by part descriptions:



That is the car as of this past Wednesday. As can be seen there is still a lot of work to get done before the May competition. Seat time is important to makeing the car perform well at competion, but at the rate things are moving seat time will not be extensive I think. It will most likely consist of experiane team member have gotten through Karting and AutoX on their own time.

Let me highlight a few things.



In tis picture your points of interest are the intake manifold, the fuel pump, shift linkage and the empty space by the fuel pump.

-The intake manifold and the runners are of course custom parts and are designed to work with the fuel injectection system that we converted he Honda CBR engine over to. If you look closely you can see the ports for the fuel inject on the intake runners. The FI and the ignistion system are both going to be managed by a Microsquirt ECU which has turned out to be one of the bigger projects.

-The fuel pump is simply an off the shelf part, no need for anything custom here

-The shift linkage is a WIP. Wednesday we spent some time fabricating the mount for the shift cable so that it has something to press against when we are shifting. Aside from that all that is needed is an adapter to connect the cable to the linkage on the gearbox side and that portion will be complete. I have absolutely no idea on how we intend to do the shifter in the drivers compartment, but I can tell you that it will be simple merely due to the fact that we are on a sho string budget and simple usually equals cheap.

-Behind the fuel pump you will note a large empty space. That is where our custom fuel tank will go. you can actually see some of the mounting points for the tank, which is just about done, in this picture.




This is our main electical box. It houses the ECU, is going to house most of the relays and fuses, and is one of the bigger projects in the sense that it combines many subsystems together and thus only gets completed as fast as the subsystems do.




For those of you who have done SAE in the past you probably know what these are usually used on, for those who havent these are actually dampers commonly found on downhill mountain bikes. While not perfect for the application (fitment issues in our case, along with the fact that it is hard to find the propper spring rates) they do the job well enough. Our intention is to run a pull rod suspension systems with the dampers mounted down low. The choice to run pull rods was primarily dictated by the fact that when the frame was designed there wasnt quite enough room left for the dampers in the intended mounting spot which left us with two options to get them mounted. We could either cut the frame to make them fit or we could do pull rods. We chose the latter.




This is our pedal assembly. Many SAE cars run only two pedals with the clutch being operated by hand, however we chose to go with the "classic" three pedal setup and this is what we came up with. You will note that the pedals are huge, and the reason behind that is unknown as we dont know who built them actually, although based on that fact alone it was probably done last year. We run two master cylinders as stipulated by the rules and we control the brake bias through a simple balace bar mounted on the brake pedal. The throttle and clucth linkages still need to be brough to the pedal location and the way they are attached to the pedals also need to be figured out. I have a feeling this is going to be one of the subsystems that gives us many headaches in the future.


Anyway that is it for now. I may update this particular post in a few days with more pictures and description, otherwise I will stick to a 1-2 week update schedule. Feel free to ask any question, I will do my best to answer. We have a photobucket account which can be found here: http://s271.photobucket.com/albums/jj134/uconnfsae/. Just make note of the fact that any suspension component you see there that looks like A-arms are just mock-ups.

 

WOw cool deal seen some sae students at VIR. Wish I would have done that in college.

 

Having tried and tested many different types of shock/damper setups, I love the pull-rod suspension. We did push-rod, coil-over, pull-rod. We even had a senior design project design a mono-shock pull-rod system, but it hurt the stability at high speed.

I wouldn't mind seeing what you've got for brakes and uprights. Our school was involved with Hitco (Renault F1 team brake supplier for those who don't know) and they donated carbon rotor and pad material to us. That was the only cool part of our car that year.