I'm joining the lease of an apartment

[Aeson]

But it only has two bathrooms

(4 bedrooms, 3 other people)

Does it have any squat toilets, or are you going to develop excruciating hemorrhoids like everyone else not in Europe?

[Hauldren Collider]

Touring your conclave of indentured servants?

It's a really wacky sport.



There's actually a person in that thing driving it (always a really really small girl). We push it up a hill, it goes downhill at around 40 MPH, then we push it up another hill. 5 man relay race for the uphills, 2 on the first, 3 on the second. First one around the course wins.

They have to close the roads for us to do it so that means we have to do it early in the morning.

more buggies so you can see how small they are:



The one covered in garbage bags is our new one. We haven't painted it yet, hence the bags. The shopping bags are parachutes so the drivers don't go full speed and kill themselves before they get the hang of driving.

[Sava]

this explains a lot, actually




but don't misunderstand, I still this

[MRT144]

Goddamnit HC, just when I think you couldnt be any more martin prince.

[molly bloom]

That's actually why I'm a huge fuckhead, a lot of reasons....

Corrected for verisimilitude.

[Hauldren Collider]

Goddamnit HC, just when I think you couldnt be any more martin prince.

If we're being fair, that's basically everyone at this school.

But actually buggy is ridiculously cool. Plus a lot of teams' head mechanics get really good jobs at places like Boeing and car companies doing automotive or aerospace engineering because of all the composites and advanced materials we work with. It may not appear that way but those things use really sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Like, defense/aerospace level sophistication. And we build them ourselves.

[Lorizael]

Plus it's good training for convincing cute college girls to do things they'll regret later.

[MRT144]

If we're being fair, that's basically everyone at this school.

But actually buggy is ridiculously cool. Plus a lot of teams' head mechanics get really good jobs at places like Boeing and car companies doing automotive or aerospace engineering because of all the composites and advanced materials we work with. It may not appear that way but those things use really sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Like, defense/aerospace level sophistication. And we build them ourselves.

How exactly do you tool the bodies?

[Hauldren Collider]

Plus it's good training for convincing cute college girls to do things they'll regret later.

Buggy is safer than driving on the highway. No serious injuries in over 30 years, before we even had safety rules

[Hauldren Collider]

How exactly do you tool the bodies?

Different teams do it different ways, my team uses disposable male molds. It works a bit like paper mache. You take a big foam core in the shape you want the buggy to be, and lay up carbon fiber wetted with epoxy around it. Vacuum bag it to compress it and draw out excess epoxy and let the epoxy solidify. Then you lay up a core material, then some more layers of carbon. There's more to it than that but that's the general idea. After that's done we cut what will be the hatches out and we smash the foam up and pull it out. We make the foam mold with a cnc router on campus.

For the metal parts we either machine them ourselves with our bandsaw or mill or we send it out a technical drawing to get machined at a cnc mill at a machine shop in the area.

[MRT144]

Different teams do it different ways, my team uses disposable male molds. It works a bit like paper mache. You take a big foam core in the shape you want the buggy to be, and lay up carbon fiber wetted with epoxy around it. Vacuum bag it to compress it and draw out excess epoxy and let the epoxy solidify. Then you lay up a core material, then some more layers of carbon. There's more to it than that but that's the general idea. After that's done we cut what will be the hatches out and we smash the foam up and pull it out. We make the foam mold with a cnc router on campus.

For the metal parts we either machine them ourselves with our bandsaw or mill or we send it out a technical drawing to get machined at a cnc mill at a machine shop in the area.

Sweet! They look real spiffy. The process kind of reminds me of snowboards where you have layers of wood/carbon fiber pressed together. Flexible but strong. What usually separates the top from the bottom in buggy racing?

[Hauldren Collider]

There's also wheels. We do a lot of research into rubber and polyurethane formulations to try to find compounds that have good properties. We do some computer simulations to optimize aerodynamics as well. The strength-to-weight of the buggies is ridiculous. Our newest ones weigh between something like 17 and 23 pounds with all the steering and harnesses and gear, and they're still easily strong enough to keep the driver safe even if she plows into a tree at 40 miles an hour.

[Hauldren Collider]

Sweet! They look real spiffy. The process kind of reminds me of snowboards where you have layers of wood/carbon fiber pressed together. Flexible but strong. What usually separates the top from the bottom in buggy racing?

Thanks! I'm really proud of them. We work really hard on them, and the results are breathtaking. Sometimes I'm amazed we can build these things.

It's exactly like a carbon snowboard: sandwich composite. We don't use wood as a core material because it's really heavy (absorbs a lot of the epoxy), but wood's one of the strongest core materials around. Bonds really well to the carbon.

What do you mean top and bottom? Do you mean best and worst teams? Among the teams that really try to compete to win, as opposed to just have fun, lately the pushers are what make the difference. This year the sports coaches have been pressuring their athletes to not compete in buggy for some reason. After that, wheel compounds. Wheels are everything. Good wheels mean the buggy rolls out a lot further up the second hill, which is really steep, making the job much easier for that pusher.

If you meant the core material, different teams use different things. We use nomex honeycomb. Some other teams use thermoform plastic honeycomb. There's also kevlar and aluminum, and a few other choices, but I don't know if anyone uses them. Teams tend to keep that stuff secret. I know a couple have used balsa in the past, but usually because they want a buggy that will last basically forever. That stuff is sturdy.

[MRT144]

Yeah, I meant best and worst teams. When someone stumbles upon a good design idea does the idea disperse fairly quickly to other teams? Or do you keep it close to the vest until after the races are completed?

[Hauldren Collider]

Yeah, I meant best and worst teams. When someone stumbles upon a good design idea does the idea disperse fairly quickly to other teams? Or do you keep it close to the vest until after the races are completed?

Depends. Some teams are really secretive--SDC is so secretive they spend big bucks on special reflective/polarized windshields so you can't see their steering. One day I wore sunglasses and stood up-sun as it was coming up the hill so I could see what the big deal was. From what I could tell it was just a basic fork steering like everyone with a forward-tricycle wheel configuration uses.

On the other hand, APEX has no secrets and publishes a blog where they document their whole build process.

It's not always clear what designs are good or bad. There's a lot of variables. It's often subjective and speculative. For the longest time my team used aluminum frame-and-shells instead of carbon monobodies because we figured out a way to make the pushbar retract using them. So we had the most aerodynamic buggies on the course by a wide margin, and they had some of the best downhill times in the sport, but our uphills weren't as good because they were heavier. But no one else adopted the design. Also, the system was complex and sometimes didn't work.