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.