Our Crowdfunding Groups
Thank you all for your donations! With the extra money this year we will be able to afford more resources and update our trailer for competition. This allows us to have better organized tools and bring more one time use resources such as steel tube in case we need to modify or fix the car at competition. Not having our trailer up to date or having the extra one time use resources last year hurt us because we had to move all of our tools around many times and search for any extra resources.
Louisiana Tech's SAE Baja team is going to competition in Michigan in 2024. The competition is September 12-15 and is in Holly, Michigan. We are fired up about this competition because after doing better than expected last competition, with a bigger and more experienced team we have high hopes to implement many new designs and technologies into our car.
If you do not know what SAE Baja is, let us tell you. SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Baja (named after the sand dune races in Baja, California) is a design competition where college students are tasked with fully designing and fabricating an off-road style car. The constraints given are a rulebook for safety of drivers and challenge of engineering principles, and a standard engine for all teams. The engine required for all teams is a 10hp Kohler. Other than the rules, we are allowed to use our intellect and creativity to design whatever we can prove to be the best design.
We have many plans for the time between now and September 12; we want to redesign many of the parts that either failed or didn't produce maximum efficiency during our last competition. Our first big goal is to redo nearly our whole drivetrain. We plan to accomplish this by in house designing and fabricating a new gearbox to cut weight as well as have better gear ratios from the torque specs given by our motor. We also are getting a new cvt that will work more efficiently with the new gearbox and motor rpms. Our second big goal is to redo our suspension system. This will likely not happen on our current frame but will be implemented into the next frame that we fabricate. We want new suspension to increase our travel height as well as to put less force on our control arms so that they don't bend again. Our last big goal for this year is to cut as much weight as possible in the car. For last competition it weighed in at just over 500lbs without a driver; we want to get it below 450lbs to help with speed.
Your donations will go towards helping us afford housing as well transportation to and from competition mainly. We have about 15 people plus a large trailer that will need to be transported as well as housed for nearly a week, this gets real expensive real fast and is one of the main factors of if some people can go or not. Your donations will also go towards fixing our trailer so that we can transport our shop more efficiently. At the last competition we spent much time sorting through or searching for tools we needed to make quick repairs with. This nearly made us last for certain parts of the competition, but this is avoidable with a trailer that can better fit our tools and organize them. The last thing your donations will go towards is bringing extra one time use materials to competition for any additions we may need to add to the car at competition. Having these resources at competition is valuable for repairs when a large hit may bend or break tubing during a race and we have to repair the damage as soon as possible to get back to the race. Any extra money we make from your donations will go toward the fabrication of the next frame we plan to make.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned above or anything not mentioned above please contact our secretary, Nathan Theriot, at njt005@email.latech.edu.
