Week Nine - It's Over

Hey guys!  I just finished my last week with Baja!  I hit 150 hours exactly, just in time for a whirlwind next few weeks that would make working at ASU very difficult.  It was a pretty slow week, so I've got some interesting things that happened during the week, but mostly some lame at humorous descriptions.  That being said, let's dive in...

TUESDAY

For the first half hour or so, I took advantage of the machines at ASU to make some parts for my deliverable that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to make.  I'm going to put up a separate blog for that project.

The rest of the day was kind of slow, since we once again had several things to do, that were all beyond the ability of high school students.  We did spend a lot of time working on the front brakes, which meant removing the calipers yet again so the lines could be changed out.  After I took off one of the wheels and calipers, I watched the rest of the process, in between retrieving various wrenches, zipties, and bolts.  When I left, the couple of team members left were about to start bleeding the brakes again, which can take over an hour.  Slow work, and honestly one of the only relatively boring things I've done there.

THURSDAY

Thursday was perhaps even slower than Tuesday.  When I got there, only one guy was there from the team.  A couple other interns were there too, but no one had anything to do. I even checked the "to-do" list on the Google drive for the club, but there was nothing on it that I had either the ability or the resources to do myself.  It was about 15 minutes of sitting there waiting, then Professor Contes walked in to check on the team.  When we saw us, I told him about the to-do list, and he agreed that we couldn't do anything from it at the time.  After noticing that no one else was in, he invited us to audit one of his classes for the next hour.  I was the first one to accept, and the only one to do so without hesitating :)

The class is normally about the chassis of the car.  However, the students had moved onto their final projects, so instead, Prof. Contes gave a presentation about the General Motors Proving Grounds that used to be locate just across the street from the Polytechnic campus until a few years ago, and where Prof. used to work.  It was great timing, because as enthusiastic as I would have been to audit a chassis class, it would have all gone over my head, especially this late into the curriculum.  Everything worked out perfectly that he discussed something that could be understood by someone like me.  He gave a detailed account of all the facilities, buildings, functions, and research programs housed at the site, and even why it had been located there (hot, dry, and mountainous: good for pushing new cars to their limits).

After the class, I watched Jesh (electronics lead) work on the E-CVT for a little while, until he and the other leads left for the weekly lead meeting.  That left only four team members and a couple interns with nothing else to do for an hour before the general meeting.  We ended up playing frisbee golf outside to pass the time (Coleman brought it in a few weeks ago, no one knew why).

At 6pm, we all went to the meeting, which was an hour-long reprise of stressing the importance of finishing the car on time, as well as some discussion of travel details for the first competition, which is in less than three weeks.  The rest would take me too long to explain the surrounding details that make it understandable to anyone who hadn't been intimately acquainted with the team for the last two months.  Anyway, thus ended my least productive day at Baja.

SATURDAY

Saturday was my last day.  It was the most productive day this week, but not as efficient as it needed to be.  With the competition in just two and a half weeks, there was (and still is) so much that needs to get done on the car.  We started the morning with a checklist on the whiteboard of all the things that needed to be finished before the car could drive that day:

I know it's hard to read, but it was hard enough in person, so it's best picture I could get.  The only important thing in the photo is in the top right corner.  It says, "1pm: Car Moving."  When I left at 3;30 pm, the car was still not moving.  We got sort of behind schedule, but we did get a lot of the list items completed.  I personally finished two of them, entirely by myself, which I'm proud of :)

1) I secured the gas tank box onto the car.  On the Baja cars, the gas tank itself is protected by a metal box, which is required to latch, and prevent the tank from moving around during driving.  Here's a picture of the top half of the box.  The rest is under the splash guard (the big metal sheets around the box).

Securing the box meant drilling holes into the bottom of the box to match the holes in the bracket that had already been welded to the car.  It didn't work out as simply as that, however.  The gas tank was old, so the holes that were already in it matched the bracket on a different car, which were close to the new car's, but not close enough. Three of the four holes matched up partially, but no two matched up perfectly.  So, when I drilled through them, I ended up with three holes that looked like a cell in the end stages of cytokinesis (hey, guys, I remembered something from biology!).  Anyway, fortunately, the widened holes were small enough for the heads of the bolts to still secure the box, but I wasn't sure if it would work until all of the bolts were in place and tightened up.  It's hard to see the messed up holes with the bolts already in place, but the most pronounced ones are the two on the right.  Look above each bolt and a little to the right.  The tank is partially in the picture as the black plastic thing on the right, with the fuel lines coming out of it.

That concluded the first (and easier) project that I single-handedly crossed off the list.

2) I made gussets for the rear shock arms.  (I purposely worded that in as complex of terms as possible, just to show off the fact that I've learned a lot these last nine weeks).  So now let me explain what I just said in layman's terms:

This is a rear shock arm, a triangular-ish tower that welds onto the chassis, and through which the shock bolts into place.

Notice how the bracket on the top of the tower leaves a large gap above the shock, at least an inch and a half.  The front towers have brackets that extend right up to the top of the shock, leaving just enough room for the shock to move during a drive.  My job was to make gussets, or small pieces of sheet metal that filled in those gaps (not the two triangular gaps; those are supposed to be there).

Doesn't sound like much work, right?  WRONG!! These two pieces of steel took me probably two hours to make.

I started out with a large sheet of rusty steel from which had been cut out several different parts for the car.  I was allowed to make the gussets out of a medium-sized strip on the edge, so as not to ruin the stencil-like shapes of the other parts.  I decided to cut out a 1.5" X 1.5" square for each gusset, giving me plenty of room to cut it down and make the curve for the top.  That alone took maybe a half hour.  I had to use a Dremel, which is time-consuming enough of a tool for thin metal.  I never measured the thickness of the steel in question, but I'm certain it was at least 5 times as thick as the metal I cut before for the paneling.  Once I had my two squares, I sandblasted them to take off the rust, to make it possible to weld them onto the towers when it came time.  Then, the real challenge began.

I had to start shaving them down and making them the correct size.  I first placed the squares over the shock towers and drew lines on the left and right edges where they met the tower bracket, so my gussets would be the right width.  I used the Dremel to achieve that.  Next, I had to make them the right height, and cut the curve that would help them fit into the tower like puzzle pieces.  I tried using the Dremel for that too - for about a minute.  I knew it would never work, the metal was just too thick, and I wanted a nice, smooth curve.  I decided to try my luck on the table grinder, which I used a few weeks ago to make the caliper spacers.  The grinder looks like this, by the way:

  
I used the orange wheel on the right.  I had to turn the machine up to almost maximum speed (which is 10000 RPM) to get it to take off any of the steel.  When it did cut, it looked like one of those little firework fountains on New Year's Eve: a constant stream of bright sparks that came flying out, and right at my hands and arms.  Interestingly, it's pretty painful to have hot steel dust spraying at you, but it doesn't leave any sort of scarring.  But I'll divert away from the morbid stuff.

I kept having to re-position the gussets in the pliers I was using to hold them on the grinder, because the force of the grinder kept pushing them around.  I won't lie, it was really hard to grip the pliers hard enough to keep the gussets still.  And I couldn't just pick it up and put it back in the pliers, because the whole point of using the pliers in the first place was to avoid touching the metal.  Grinding off steel heats up the metal immensely, so every time I wanted to test fit the pieces on the car, I had to walk all the way down the hall to the bathroom to run cold water over them, so I could even touch them.

After over an hour of grinding the curves and Dremeling the straight edges when they were the wrong size, I had finally produced two gussets that were small enough to fit on the tower, but large enough to be welded on without gaps:

They didn't get welded on before I left, so I can't show you all what they looked like, but I hope this gives you a good enough idea.

I did a ridiculous amount of Dremeling, and that can eventually wear down the cutting wheel.  I started with a mostly-used wheel, which I proceeded to completely use up, as well as a new one, and a little bit of a third one.  Here I placed the second completely used wheel next to a fresh, unused one.  Just though that was kind of funny, and it's a perfect way to illustrate just how much cutting I did in one day.

I was sad to see that the car wasn't driving by the time I left on Saturday, but I'm very glad I got to see it once before I stopped going in.  I wish the team all the best for competition, and I look forward to hearing how well the car does at the end of the month.  Since I finished my internship in 9 weeks, rather than the 10 that most people will do, I'm going to put up at least one more weekly blog, to stay fair to everyone else.  I'm going to walk through the process of making my deliverable, a fully-functioning music stand!!

Until next time.  Cheers!