Lets Get Crackin

I say, I do enjoy the holiday season. I get to relax a little, see my buddies from my home town, and family time is always a good thing.

So as I said before, I have already started some design work. I have been mostly working on the chassis for that is one of the first things that needs attention. The frame of our FSAE car up at Clarkson is my speciality, for I have been doing research and a lot of reading on the subject, as well as plenty of school work. Since my major deals 99.89% of the time with aircraft, lightweight, strong, and complex airframes are not a foreign subject. While aircraft deal mostly with aluminum, there are some other differences between racing and flying, but few none the least. There are a few basics you need to remember for any frame and one is how the material is loaded. What I have tried to do here to the right is create a frame that uses the materials in tension and compression more often than bending. It is never possible to load every member in pure tension or compression, bending happens, you just need to know where and what to do about it.

So this is the front half of the frame I have so far. The suspension mounting points have not been actually calculated from a suspension analysis yet, so the front box may look a little wacky. Other than that, I am rather happy with this portion of the frame. I did a small sizing analysis involving a wall and a floor up at my dorm to see how much space I would need for the driver, pedals, helmet heights, and things like that. I used the FSAE 95th percentile male template as my basis and went from there. Basically the car is designed around me.

By using some of the rules from the FSAE booklet, I decided on many of the wall thicknesses for the roll hoops and around the driver area. Otherwise just my past experiences and knowledge from designing a FSAE frame lead me in that department. Now I have only seen a few bare F1000 chassis, but it looks like the main roll hoop does encompass the entire driver's profile, but not the entire car profile. The profile can be seen here in this picture, from Ralph Firman Racing. http://www.rfrcars.com/ This makes since for reducing the overall frontal area of the car, but makes me wonder about safety. Now they could have some other side members in place that take care of that issue, but once again, I have not seen very many bare F1000 frames.

Well I bet I could talk for another 10 pages about this frame. Maybe I'll put in a little more in the next post. Otherwise that's it. Adiós muchachos.

Cars and Going Fast

And hello. One thing I do want to talk about is where I get some of my inspiration and how. There are a few places, but the one I am most excited about would be a man by the name of Dick Fritz. Dick if you are reading this at any point, then my hat is off to you sir. Dick Fritz is a rather cool guy, he started out after college in the early '60s working with Chinetti Motors in New York, the first company to import Ferraris into the US. They were not a well known car manufacturer at this time and even his father thought they were crappy cars. Dick then went on to work with many of Ferrari's racing divisions and was part of their Formula 1 in '69. Besides Ferrari's he is credited for getting the McLaren F1 street legalized for use in the United States. He also tangoed with the Russian mob when they tried to sell him 2 cars, then scammed him and ran off. Not only did he get his money back, but he got the cars in the end as well. He is also considered a legend by Car and Driver magazine. Let me tell you, the man is quite interesting.

Now you maybe wondering why I'm talking about this Dick guy so much. Well it turns out he is a Clarkson University graduate and has come back to help out with our FSAE team. In the 3 or 4 hours that we conversed with him and showed him around our facilities, I learned a great deal. He left us a resume so we may look it over. There was one page with some brief history, then about 8 or 9 magazines that he was all mentioned in, along with some Ferrari manuals. Cool stuff.

My other location for a lot of my inspiration is the Internet. Doesn't sound to exciting, but I have learned a lot. Looking at other race cars, Formula SAE cars and Formula 1000 cars, has yielded me a great deal of ideas. Check this one out, its from Stohr Cars and is not an amazing photo, but does show quite a bit. http://www.stohrcars.com/f1000.php I do like their differential housing and suspension mounting 'box' that they use and will look into something like that for my car. I have many more pictures like this that have good information in them that I review from time to time to inspire my self and gather ideas.

Well that's about all I have for now. Have a good one.

Hello Once Again

Alright, so I just arrived home after finals and its nice to be able to relax for the next few weeks. Anyway, back to fast cars...


If you have not read the Formula 1000 rules, I would suggest taking a quick look. http://www.formula1000.com/
Interestingly enough they are only 6 pages long and are rather straight forward. There is a reference to this measurement figure on the right, that is part of another set of rules in the SCCA rule book. Some of the most important features are the size along with the engine restriction and weight. Other than that there is not a lot limiting a manufacturer or company to do what they want, which is really interesting.

Since I am not a large company, I am not really going to look at making a thousand of these cars or attempting to mass produce them. Castings and most forgings are something I am not going to pay attention to. Simple forgings like rings may be a good idea though. Also, the more machining I can do, the better, so I will try to stay away from designing parts that need to be milled on a 5 axis CNC. I don't want to spend a million dollars on a weekend racer, but I don't want to cut any corners. Materials like carbon fiber are great, but do I really need half of the car to be built from this stuff? I say no, but making a few things like the seat and a few smaller components may be well worth it. The rules do say that carbon can not be used as a body panel, or any other part 'licked' by the airstream.

Well, that's about it for now. I will start posting about what I have done so far soon and actually kick this blog into high gear. Have a good one.

And So It Begins

Well, here I am, I now have a Blog. Blog Blog Blog, blogoshpere, interblog, blargonet, blog.

My name is Pierce, but you can call me Two Toes, and I am a senior at Clarkson University. It is a tiny engineering school up in New York, but it kicks ass. My major is Aeronautical Engineering and I am lovin' it.

So as the title may tell, I am part of our FSAE team up here. This is true. Its a great program along with all of the other SAE and student project teams. I would highly recommend joining if your school offers these programs. Check out this FSAE link, it has a lot more information: http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries/

Last year I was the team leader for our FSAE team and unfortunately we did not make it to competition. We were low on man power, were still learning a lot about cars, and had a lot of broken promises. As well as the team leader, I was in charge of designing the new frame for our car. It was my first time doing something at this scale and the outcome was less than favorable.
This year is a new year and the frame looks a lot better. As for being the team leader, another student stepped up and I didn't have an issue with it. He is a hard working individual that should have been the leader from the start. Unfortunately, I don't think he is that good of a leader.
We are moving forward though, and a decent car is getting built, so I do see us going to competition this year.

Well at this point you may be wondering what the hell am I going to start Blogging about any way. Good question. Over the summer I started to think about after college and decided I would like to keep my hobby of building a race car. After some research I found Formula 1000. http://www.formula1000.com/ Its the next step up from a FSAE car and it got my attention quickly.
I started to design a car from the ground up in my spare time shortly after that. I then ran into Jersey Tom's F1000 http://fsae1000.blogspot.com/. It inspired me and gave me some ideas, one of them being this blog here. So Jersey Tom, here's to you, thanks for inspiring me and I hope we can talk design some time.

Other than that, I made this blog to basically share ideas, post what I have been working on, and hopefully inspire some other engineers or race car enthusiasts to do the same. I have some basics down and shortly I will start uploading them here and discussing what I'm doing.

See you then.