This is Part 8 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

Your team is chomping at the bit. In an organized fashion, of course. You have good, well thought out designs. You have selected an engine. You have secured funding. Now you just have to build the car. This is the true test of everyone’s devotion, organization, leadership, and abilities. Any numbskull can install a fart pipe and a cold air intake (as proven, unfortunately, time and again). You are going to order a massive quantity of parts (you’ll get to know the UPS guy, and the secretaries that receive these heavy things will begin to stare you down when you come in and ask if you have any packages), make an even bigger quantity of parts, and turn them into a running, driving, finely-tuned racing machine.

Before buying anything, shop around, and certainly don’t be afraid to make things yourselves. For instance, the Zexel Torsen FSAE special comes in an iron carrier. That’s great, if you want to have all that weight hung off the rear of your car. But, you can make an aluminum carrier that does the same thing, and tips the scales at a fraction of the weight. All it takes is a CNC mill, a good machinist, a big lump of aluminum and time (even more time if you start the mill on the wrong step and send it cutting away into the wrong area by accident). Things like this help the car perform and help you on the design report.

Be careful with composites. For that matter, be careful with what materials you select for what tasks, not just in how strong they are, but in what their mode of failure is. For instance, a carrier for the differential is best made out of metal, as a composite one is just as unlikely to fail, but if it does (say, a rock hits it at speed) it will crack and you’ll be in deep trouble, whereas the aluminum one would dent or fail in a small area. We had our diff come apart in the autocross in Detroit, it was seized, functioning as a spool, with a good 20 degrees or so of play, and pieces had dented the carrier from the inside out. We wrapped it up in duct tape and went on to finish the enduro without leaking a drop. When we pulled the tape, the fluid drained everywhere. A composite piece, which had been considered, would have likely put us out of the running.

A good engineer thinks ahead. Not just the immediate concerns of cost, durability, and design, but long-term in the areas of maintenance and failure modes. A good team can never bank on “well, that won’t happen,” because “that” WILL happen, and at the worst possible time. Murphy likes to make appearances at competition.

Everybody has to play their part here and play it well. Some will be most productive designing individual parts, others machining them, others installing them. Let everyone find their niche as well as possible, that’s where they are most happy and productive.

One thing that was always a hot potato on our team was mandatory shop hours- so many hours per week working on the car, signed off by someone else on the team, that sort of thing. This was temporarily instituted, discussed up and down, and abandoned. It’s a pain to keep track of, especially if people aren’t used to writing down their hours and legitimately forget to sign in or out. This system also requires a means of “punishing” those members that do not put in the given number of hours in the proper amount of time. When we instituted mandatory hours, it was because we were going to the FSAE West competition in California and we needed to thin the herd of how many people could go, the requirement, if I remember correctly, was 15 hours every two weeks. However, it seems kind of stiff to not allow somebody to go if they only put in 10 hours in one 2-week period, especially if they regularly put in closer to 30. Another issue arose that some individuals’ hours were just plain more productive than other individuals’, meaning it really wasn’t completely equitable.

Just because there is ALWAYS another problem throwing a wrench in the works, there will be times that there just isn’t enough to do in two weeks to keep, say, 10 people busy for 15 hours each over two weeks. The car was in a state of relative completeness, the shop was cleaned, there was just plain nothing to do. Sure, they could have FOUND things to do, such as start designing the next car, but this would only be of benefit to those with a certain expertise. Once again, the hours system failed in the most important aspect, fairness, and that’s why we scrapped it. There are other ways to do a similar system, and better internal organization can help find things for people to do, but at some point, if the engine squad has built a solid motor and performed the maintenance to date, they can’t spend all of their hours cleaning the shop over and over again.

The key to easing the build phase is simple- doing the design phase, and doing it well. If everything is well thought-out, the build should be as easy as printing out drawings, machining and ordering parts, and then assembling them. True, it’s never quite that simple, and there will always be an element of cut and fit when you have people learning as they go along. The goal is to minimize cut and fit and maximize things going together as they should, this will make sure you have a solid car, and score well on the engineering parts of the competition. Cut and fit is a good technique for hotrodding, much less so for engineering.