By BuckeyeCurrent - 11/24/2013 8:44:37 PM
Hello everyone
My name is John. I'm part of a student project team called Buckeye Current at the Ohio State University. We build electric motorcycles and race them in tournaments around the world. Last year we finished 3rd in the 2013 Isle of Man TT Zero Race. We are also the first collegiate team to average 90 miles per hour (145 km/h) around the Isle of Man.
This year, we plan on making our own fairings. The team doesn't have enough money for carbon fibre, so we will be using glass fibre. This will be a learning experience for the whole team because none of us have every used glass fibre or carbon fibre. I hope you guys will be able to help us out. We plan on documenting the whole process for future team members, and we would be happy to post our final results to the forum at the end of the year.
Best regards,
John
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By BuckeyeCurrent - 6/20/2014 3:56:42 AM
Hey everyone, here is a quick follow up on how our project went. We had a great race and ended up placing third for the second year in a row, beating out a professional Belgian race team by only .3 seconds. Check out our website here http://current.osu.edu/ for a recap of the events leading up to the race. It wasn't easy for us to put together decent fairings with our experience, timeline, and budget. As was said in our previous post we used a fiber glass fabric. We used negative molds made from insulation foam, which required a lot of time just to prep. The seat and belly-pan fairings were built in several pieces, and were eventually connected using strips of fiberglass. Each side had a separate molds and they were connected with fiber glass in the middle after each side was completed. We vacuum bagged every time we applied fabric and ended up using a polyester resin. Here are some pictures to show a bit of the process and our final product. All in all, the fairings ended up much lighter than last year and may have been the difference that gave us that .3 second lead. |
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