Millard West Black Team
Braking
Steering Alignment
We have spent a great majority of this month getting our steering set to just the right alignment. This process has been slow and tedious week after week, but towards the end of the month we got it where we wanted it.
This took too long mostly due to our steering rods which we go more into length under the respective title. We also set toe out to equal lengths.
The brakes have provided the group with a great challenge. We're using bike brakes for this vehicle and we're having a difficult time aquirring brake strength whilst maintaining a frictionless ride.
Therefore, we've gone through several periods of adjustment, trying to get less friction, then more brake power, then less friction, and so on. Once we had finally gotten the brakes set, we ended up removing them in order to tighten the spokes on the wheel. In addition, we also replaced one of the brake lines with a new one since we found out the current was damaged.
Our steering rods were without doubt our greatest source of greif this month. We started out with the origional rods from last year and tediously tried to set them to the correct length to set the wheels parallel. After a day or two we decided it would be impossible without cutting them down to size. So the next day we cut and relathed the rods until they fit.
Afterwords our instructor said he wanted thicker rods on the car in fear that our current ones would snap. So we took two considerably larger rods and cut those down to length and lathed them. Setting these to the correct length was quite easy comparitively.
The 'push test' was a recurring test throughout the month of Febuary. It is more a less a simplefree-ride down the hallways of the school to gather raw information on our cars ability to turn and the wheel's stability.
To do this we had a route that we took which lead to in front of the media center. Once there we tried to make a full circle inside of the hallway turning left and turning right all without touching the walls. This ensured a sufficient turn radius and allowed us to assess our wheel stability under that kind of stress.
Steering Rods
