Who are you?

I don't know much about you guys, even though I've gotten help from so many of you.


Here's a little about me, aside from the part-time knifemaker that you may be familiar with.

I'm a student of Materials Engineering, although that really isn't my priority. I went through college wanting to be a musician, then chiropractor, then physicist, machinist and welder, knifemaker, materials engineer, and now to knives and vehicles. I currently spend a lot of time with my FSAE team building race cars on campus; we design and build a new one each year. It's the best thing that's ever happened to my college career.


(That's me in the car)

When I was younger my dream was to design fast cars, but that went away in high school when I wanted to be a musician (played drums for ~15 years). I actually didn't really want to be a musician, and a few years ago I stopped playing when I got obsessed with knives and cars

 

Awesome, Don! How fast is that baby?

 

Would love to see more pics and hear more about this.

 

To darn cool! Thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks for sharing!
How quick is it?
Do you race other schools? or any design competitions?

My story is about 100x less interesting than yours.
I can sum it up in 1 word. Retail.

 

Haha, this wasn't supposed to be about me, but you guys got me talking about the car.

It's affiliated with SAE and we go to competition every Summer. Schools around the world come there, and you see cars from $20k budgets to close to a million - it just depends on your history and your sponsors. There are design and business presentations so you have to justify your design and cost for the what-if scenario of getting these mass produced. In summary, it's engineering in a nutshell. You have a specific goal, you design, build, test, then drive fast

The cars are open wheel, open cockpit with a limit of 600cc and 4 stroke. You'll see either single cylinders or 4, sometimes 2. With single, you basically lop off 100lbs easy and have a car that whips through corners like nobodies business, but the 4 can accelerate faster. There was a team at our last comp that did 0-60 in 2.7 seconds - 4 cylinder, carbon fiber monocoque, no aero package. It was light.

Here are a couple laps of the fastest combustion team in the world (single cylinder, full-aero):



Our team is nowhere near as quick. To get that fast, you need to be in it for many years with a solid design that's been refined over time. Plus, a good driver...

There are some electric cars too, but in the US not as prominent as you'll see in Europe. Over the electric cars can be tied with the fastest combustion teams. It's ridiculous. TUDelft had a 4 wheel drive electric that did 0-60 in 2.15 seconds.

 

That looks like copious amounts of fun!