Seat update....needs lots of adjustment

The seat is again proving to be a more challenging project than anticipated.

It has many rules governing it's position and size and so getting the belts to go through into the driver compartment is a tricky process. Also because we don't want to destroy the seat and cut holes where we don't need them it's hard to start to make cuts and holes when you really need the seat fully mounted in the chassis with a driver sitting in it to know exactly where these all go.

With the chassis unable to be soley used to mock this up at this late stage it is a bit of a guessing game, the solid works design used a model of a driver but there really is nothing liek the real thing so you can't trust this 100%.

Also makig life a little harder is the fact that the harness mounts are 30mm out of position due to a manufacturing error, it is too late to re-make these so we are using what we got but the seconday problems are just becoming a little be-motivating and slowing progress down.

I have decided that we are jst going to have t cut holes as best we can and keep cutting and shaping them till the seat sits right, we still have the mould so if need be we can add some patching to the composite lay-up later down the track once we know the belts will go where we want and comply with the rules.

Here is a few pics of the progress over the weekend...slow but now we have a pretty good game plan written down with a list of priorities to get done by our car launch this Friday, we just need it to be sitting in the car with belts through it so it looks the business, we can finalise the hard mounting points later.

Oh did I mention we all have exams over the next 3 weeks and the car goe on a truck to melbourne on the last day of exams ? This is the most fun you will have in you're engineering degree.



Above I use a drill bit that has the milling type teeth on it's shank so that I can easily cut complex curves. I start with lots of holes around the perimeter on the inside of where I want the final cut. I then mill between the holes joining them all up using the sideways cutting ability of the drill bit. Then I get a nice sharp half-round file and try to neaten up the edge. It works fairly well and is the most effective method I have found to do this type of work, I have been involved in the seat making in '08, '09 and this year so I'll building a knowledge of what NOT to do by making mistakes.....some would call it learning. Still got a lot to learn and still making mistakes but thats life, we do what we can.



Above test fitting the belt holes in the seat to see what will work and where we need adjustment. The lap belt holes (on the sides) should be ok I have marked where they need to be enlarged for the haress clips to fit through. The submarine (crotch) strap does fit through the opening but the belts will slightly rub on the seat at the moment which is no good, either have to cut the holes more to taper a slot towards the mount to enable a good angle of wrap around the drivers thighs or add a steel tube bar that just touches the underside of the seat, the belts would wrap around this so that they have a nice smooth radius transition up towards the driver, just have to ensure a good wrap around the drivers legs again though.

Body work and Cockpt liner update....we're almost there

It's hard to believe we have the car launch at the end of the week, Friday 12th Nov BUT we are quietly confident that with some huge efforts by the 'dirty dozen' within our team, everything should be sorted out without too many headaches.

In the good news we are really making good progress with composites.

We'll start with the nose section of the cockpit liner, that was laid up today and test fitted in the chassis. It needs more work but is looking the goods (although it's a mongrel of a lay up using all kinds of scraps we had left in the workshop.....fingers crossed the final part is half decent)

Above you can see the assortment of fabrics used, some carbon, some fibreglass and some other cloth which I have forgotten the name just now.

Below you see what the mould looked like after we wrestled the part off it. We had to break the surface coating in places because it just would not budge, also have to run a split down the top of it to help spread it and peel it off. I will have to go back and splice this small section at the top front end of the liner later, we had half planed to do that because we anticipated it to be really hard to remove from the mould.

Below you will see or make shift heater / oven. The part came off slightly under-done so we had to try and cook it some more. We are pushing tight deadlines now so we didn't really have time to wait for it to fully sure. We took it off the mould while it was slightly still flexible, helped a little in removing it but we tried to stiffen it up a bit soon as we had test fitted it. We just draped it back over the mould and heated it with the heat gun under a plastic drop seat on one of our race car rolling stands.

Below The liner and the body are test fitted on the chassis.

Test fit view, if you are familiar with the FSAE competition you may know about the chassis sizing templates that must be passed through the interior of the car, the white / cream shape you can see above in the nose of the car is one of them being test fitted with the interior cockpit liner in place. So far we think we pass.....we'll see.

Below The body work on the male mould as Tim Stockton makes some cut aways of excess laminate. We hope to send it off to the painter tomorrow so it was a mad rush to try and get as much of the small fitting work done today.

Above Tim Stockton all gumbied up in PPE, looking like an extra from an early James Bond film or some kind of nuclear technician, Tim attacks the body work with a grinder to get the right shapes where needed.

Above MC (Michael Connaughton) our technical director for the last 2 years, takes a happy snap for his personal collection. Can you blame him, things are starting to look pretty tops.

Here's what he was looking at, haha just something to lighten the mood.

Above Our black beauty, too bad this will almost all be painted over.

Below seat section of the liner has some marking on it made for holes to be cut for belts and gear shifter etc. Drill and an angle grinder do an OK job of cutting the shapes, final work is done with sand paper and then a rubber lip will be glued on to create a nice edge.

Below Tim Stockton can carry the male mould from the body work single handed. Apparently it is not that heavy. Looks great and he has done a stirling job over many months to create the male plug and then female moulds to finally produce the bodywork part. We think it's amazing he still smiles about being in the workshop after mid-night everytime he comes in to work on the car build......then again we're not really the average engineering students are we, you definately need a little something extra to stick at it.

Great surface finish has really made releasing the part much easier than in past years attempts at composite work. CMT helping the next generation of engineers to grow and develop their skills.....who'd have ever thought.

Still to come.......a list too big to bore you all to death with but the cockpit liner and ergonomics side of things (which is my baby.....Errol's)  is as follows.

Finalise the holes in the seat for the gear shifter, harness straps, sort out mounting points for the liner, finish the lay-up of the liner, possibly paint and coat the liner again, get the mirrors on the car, get the dash lay-up finished and sort out mounting it and try get the mechatronic guys to wire up the dash.

Bunch of welding for all the mounts, still need head restraint finalised (design is done just need some small fabrication work done in-house)

The list goes on.....but we'll make it.

Keep your eyes open and stay 'In Tune' with team progress.

Race seat progress

Today, Tim Stockton and Errol Hassett started to lay the fibreglass and carbon onto the seat mould with help from Candice Woodhams.

Went well mostly and we are very impressed with how it is looking, we waxed the mould last night and applied PVA release agent this morning so it should come off with less effort on our part.


Above: Tim Stockton appliess layers of carbon to the mould



A days work: This is what we produced for the day, not quite finished with some sandwich material to be added and then more glass but looking the goods.

Roughly 1 layer glass, then 1 layer carbon and around 2 layers of glass on top of that at the moment. Probably put one more layer of glass on maybe 2 around the sandwich material areas. Should be ready to pull of the mould to test fit next weekend...........with a few days to spare before the car launch November 12th.

UPDATE

And here it is.......

Race Seat: The finished part (almost) in the chassis. Looks fairly good, not perfect but a marked improvement on previous years work.

Mould damage: Getting the part off the mould proved to be quite the effort and fair bit of damage was done but it should still be able to be used next year.

Hope: We hope that this years good work in design and manufacture will not go to waste next year. This mould can be repaiered and re-used to ensure the quality of CMT racecars remains to be of a high standard.

Happy as Errol ?: Errol Hassett looks happy as Larry in the new race seat. The first test fit in the chassis has been a proving of the concept (for now). The design idea and manufacture methods seem to be a success.

Making of the 2010 race seat / cockpit liner

• Day one – Thursday 6th Oct

Picked up the foam profile cuts from Foam Sales in Myaree this afternoon, will also have to get some more tomorrow. Time to glue the printed out templates to the MDF guide sections we cut last night.

Getting a bit Sticky: Nathan Staats spreads PVA glue on 6mm MDF board to stick printed template guides for the seat mould.

I need a chop: All the MDF section glued and ready to be jigsaw cut out.

• Day two – Friday 7th Oct

With all the MDF cut we can now assemble the seat mould pieces. Using a 4mm grouting tool we spread the PVA glue as evenly as possible on each of the 14 sections for the seat (in two halves), also used a sauce bottle to help spread the glue.

We weighted the moulds to help them have a nice strong bond and left them to dry over night.

• Day Three - Sat 8th Oct

With the mould all glued we could start the seat shaping, basically sanding back the polystyrene to the mdf guides and then in a fee spots.

Used a sheet sander, with 60 grit sandpaper, to take most of the polystyrene off, quite quickly. After approximately 3 hours of shaping the seat was done.

Took a little extra time to cut and shape the pieces for the arm pockets and head rest recess. The section of the cock-pit liner in the nose of the race car was shaped the day before which also only took approximately 2 and a half hours.

Above: race seat and nose section together to make the full cock-pit liner mould.

Above: The headrest recess added and one of the arm pockets being plastered on.



White out: Errol Hassett getting overed head to toe with polystyrene dust during the shaping of the seat. The black shirt and trousers looking a combination of grey and white with all the dust. (It got even worse than this after more shaping)

• Day Four - Weds 13th Oct

With the shaping all complete we now put the plastering cement on. It’s easy to use because you just add water. We don’t really pay any attention to the correct ratios just adding water till the desired consistency is achieved.

The plaster just makes a nice surface to sand, filling small holes etc. We then coat this again to get an even smoother surface to fibreglass onto, hopefully it releases from the mould pretty easy.

• Day Five - Thurs 14th Oct

With the seat section of the cockpit liner plastered it was time to plaster the nose section. First we had to finish the prep work. Added some polystyrene to the top, just to give a lip for laying the fibreglass onto (the finished part has a cut out there so just trying to plan ahead and make life easier) also added some MDF board cut into two strips to created small shoe heel pockets added bonus is the slight increase in rigidity of that section of the liner.

We also added a piece of round poly rod to the back of the seat. We cut it in half and taped it in position by eye; the idea is partly stolen from a go-kart seat. They have a small recess to stop your spine touching the rear of the seat, instead the weight is supposedly spread along the muscles either side of the spine, it also will increase the rigidity of this section to some degree so that’s a bonus.

A little extra plaster was added t create a nice fillet edge around the spine recess and else where just to make sure the curves flowed nicely into each other, this makes it more visually pleasing and should help when trying to release the part off the mould.

• Day Six - Sat 16th Oct

With Errol Hassett looking like he was dressed for battle, we commenced sanding the plaster to a smooth finish. Using the sheet sander and 160 and 180 grit sandpaper, it’s pretty quick to achieve a nice finish.

Caution must be used sanding at this stage, it’s easy to put a gouge in the plaster with the edge of the paper, anything like that will just create problems with the final lay-up of the fibreglass so avoiding that is best, if there are any we try to take them out by hand or apply more plaster and repeat the process.

First thing that went wrong was the rolling table collapsed as Errol was taking the mould outside to sand. It was partly broken already but we were doing what we could with what we had. A disappointing start, luckily the damage to the mould was not so bad, just needed more plaster, will do that at a later date.

• Day Seven - Fri 22nd Oct

Time to do the small repairs to the rear section, which fell when the table collapsed, and sand the nose section.

• Day Eight - Sun 24th Oct

Now with all the sanding done, we apply a coat of talc and epoxy resin in a kind of slurry paste, almost like a gel coat but the cheap version. This is done to fill any small holes etc and to give a nice smooth surface for the release agent wax to be applied. After that we can start to lay the glass, finally. The final product will be shown later, we have the car launch November 12th so it must be ready before then.

UPDATE



Tim Stockton waxing the mould Friday night before we planned to lay the glass.



Adding the realease agent coating





The PVA release agent film is a blue colour which makes is easy to see where you are up to. This film will dry to a thin plastic like layer that we then lay onto. It will stick to the part and then we wash it off as it is water soluable.