Litchfield High School

Monthly Reports

January 2008
The members of our 2008 Power Drive Team are seniors Trevor Kohls, Andrew Kittoe, Brett Kramer, Kendel Kusek, Nathan Pickering, Tyson Sekutera, Logan Snow, Austin Nielson, and Abby Chamberlin. The juniors include Eric Panowicz, Blake Siegel, Andrew Reynolds, and Melissa Bucher. We have two sophomores helping us and they are Jason Lichtenberger and David Brandt.

The month of January has been a pretty busy time for us. We started by each drawing our own sketch of what the car might look like. Everyone drew their own version and then we all got together and decided what design we liked best. Eric Panowicz, Melissa Bucher, and Abby Chamberlin worked on a size to scale drawing of the car. Now we are working on making a copper wire model of the car to help us when we start to build the real car.

Before we did all the wiring we spent time learning about basic electricity. We wired together our electrical system components, and did a bench test to make sure the system worked. We found out that the controller was defected so we ordered a new one. After we installed it everything worked out great.

We discussed about what type of tubing we would like to use for the frame and the material used to build the body. We decided to make the frame out of aluminum tubing and we chose aluminum trim coil for the body. We are also making new adjustments to our old car so that we can compete at the advanced class.

January - Car S89
During the month of January the Litchfield Advanced Car Team made plans to change the standard car we had last year, car S89.  The major changes we have decided to do is to have the car fully enclosed, make some changes to the braking system, and to change the steering system.  So far we have made the changes to the stearing system from first having a bell crank system to a rack and pinion system.  Since we made this change we now need a steering wheel instead of the handlebar,and now we need to fabricate a throttle pedal.  The pedal was fabricated and is now mounted to the car.

We need to set up a cable system to the pedal and should be acomlished soon.  We are working on enclosing the car but little has been done yet.

February - Car S89
This month we have primarily been working on the body.  The nose of our car has been rebuilt with fiberglass and body filler.  We are almost done with the new throttle assembly; all that is left is to get our wire connected from the potentiometer to the throttle pedal.  Our steering system changes have been completed and we are currently working on a canopy to fully enclose the car.

February - Car S91
This month we have primarily been working on the frame.  We have been using 1 inch aluminum tubing.  We had to have our tubing bent to the curved shape of our roll bar.  The frame is basically finished at this point.  We also had to fix our front axle.  First we welded it 10 inches from the bottom of the car when we should have welded it 8 inches.  We redesigned our front axle and lowered it two inches to achieve adequate ground clearance.  We have all of our materials lined up to begin assembly of the body and also have a plywood floor made.  The rear wheel mount was constructed from 1/4 “x 3” aluminum plates and welded into place.

March - Car S91
March was a busy month for us. We started by assembling the parts inside of our car. Melissa and Eric assembled the headrest for the driver. We also made sure the chain and reer wheel were aligned correctly. Our team also reconstructed the front axle. In class we learned about wheel alignmetn, which helped us to understand what we had to do to get our car to steer properly. Abby, Eric, and Melissa made the floor board for the car. They also cut out plastic wheel covers. Unfortunaly we discovered a problem with our motor so we had to go back and fix the wiring. After we fixed that we started to cut out the aluminum body panals and screwed them on to the car. Overall we got a lot of work gone in the month of March. We still have some body work to do before our first competition on Saturday, April 5th.

April - Car S91
As time grew shorter before our first race in Hastings on April 5th we rushed to finish our nose out of one half of a ball.  We also hurried to complete the steering system.  Even though we passed inspection in Hastings our steering system did not hold.  The decision was made to purchase a rack and pinion system.  The team also did not like the appearance of the nose on the car.

Since we had two weeks till the next race in North Platte we decided to rebuild the nose.  The team first constructed a wire frame and covered it with fiber glass.  Next we used body filler to give the nose a smoother appearance.
When the rack and pinion system finally arrived it was installed on the car.  Since the rack and pinion was a completely different system it changed the angle of the steering rod.  The angle was changed so much that the steering wheel was only centimeters from our canopy.  We put a knob on the steering wheel to make steering easier since we did not have enough room to put our hands on top of the steering wheel.

When we arrived in North Platte and started the first heat, the car did not perform to its expected speed.  Since the car was greatly under the expected speed we knew something was wrong.  Upon inspection in the pits we concluded that the problem wasn’t a physical problem but an electrical or controller problem.  As the driver continued to race the team pondered what the problem could be. The team came to the conclusion that the controller wasn’t programmed right.  So now we are working on swapping the motor and controller out of the advanced car and installing them into this car before the Kearney and State races.