Development of the Kart

Matthew Milo

It is a Saturday afternoon the sun is shining as the members of the SAE Baja team at Olivet get to work on the car that they will be competing with in their workshop inside Reed Hall of Science.

“It hasn’t been an easy task obviously but working together definitely helped us overcome a lot of obstacles”, said Samuel Goin one of the senior design members on the project. The development of the kart is the most crucial part of the process and for obvious reasons. If you can’t develop a good kart then you will struggle to compete in the competition thus finishing poorly.

Olivet’s SAE Baja Team was given a $10,500 budget which is relatively small compared to other competitors such as MIT, The University of Michigan, and others.

“This is like a David vs Goliath situation, in this case, we are David,” said James LeGrand. The senior design group was tasked with building a stock kart from scratch that could compete in the 3-hour endurance race and singular events testing each part of the car. The competition will take place at Tennessee Tech at the Hyder-Burks Agricultural Pavilion. The group had many objectives that they sought to accomplish by building the new car. Some of these challenges included low part and material cost, lightweight, durablity, reaching high speeds and acceleration, and finally maintaining safety.

The group aimed to meet as often as possible to work on the kart but had to coordinate with their school work schedules.

“We decided to meet on Saturday afternoons where we would be in the shop for a few hours all working on the kart and some of us would be there during the week day after classes for a bit,” said Goin.

The team was tasked with creating a brand new kart that would operate better than the kart pictured above. One of the main components of the kart they wanted to change was the chassis. The chassis is the base frame for a motor vehicle and it is created from a type of steel. The ONU Baja Racing team welded the different parts of steel together to form the chassis and made it durable enough to withstand a possible rollover to ensure the driver wouldn’t be crushed with 400-500 pounds of force.

The team decided the Kart should have four wheel drive to give them more power when going through difficult terrain. The only issue? No Baja team in the history at Olivet has done a four-wheel drive system so the team had no experience to draw from. This had to be done completely from scratch.

Another issue the team addressed was an issue with the axels that connect the wheel to the chassis. They realized that past designs of the chassis introduced an issue called “bump steer.”

Bump steer refers to the motion when force is added to the car and the wheels stick out away from each other leading to steering issues and difficulty controlling the kart. This could happen when a car is dropped from a tall height.

The new chassis design called the “nose chassis” fixed that issue because it was less crowded in the front of the kart. This allowed more axis stability.

When looking at the new kart, the shocks that are located above the wheel. These shocks help the kart handle and stabilize after big bumps and falls up to six feet. The previous design had shocks that were covered by a metal pole that helped the shocks make a full stroke. They originally went with the shocks that are a metallic cylinder.

“Previous Baja teams have used those designs before and they were the cheaper option at the time but we noticed a lot of negatives with this choice,” said senior design member Wyatt Wagner.

Wagner explained the switc to coil-overs which are shocks with the coils visible to users.

“This was a popular choice by Michigan, MIT, and other big teams,” he said. “It is also a popular choice for big car manufacturing companies such as Honda, Polaris and etc. Another pro is they just look cooler and give us a more professional look giving us a production style vehicle but they are more expensive and don’t have as much options to change the springs which help the stability.”

The new kart is more efficient as it reaches a higher speed that averages up to 25 miles per hour and provides new features that can score them extra points. One of these new features added for the first time in the history of ONU Baja racing was adding a 7 inch display above the wheel that gives the driver information such as wheel speed, engine speed, whether four-wheel drive is engaged, fuel information, and battery information.

As the month of April comes to an end it is closer to the competition start date, the senior design team still has some work to be done on the kart. Despite the challenges, the senior design team for Baja Racing ONU remains positive and is excited to show off the project to everyone at the competition.