26 March 2010: Look North feature
Fame at last! On Friday morning Peter Lugg from BBC Look North came into school to film our Greenpower project. He spent a couple of hours in school.
Initially this was in the workshop where he filmed an informal discussion between the students and our partners. He also did several interviews with both adults and students. The second hour was outside where he filmed CR Blade running up and down the school car park. This included strapping his camera to the car with Gaffa tape. A bit nerve racking as the camera was worth around £4000! A massive thanks to Dr. Chris Bale (ImechE), Dave Ellis (Marell), and Gordon and Richard (Claro Precision Engineering Ltd.) who came along to help out on the morning. The footage has not been shown yet so I cannot comment on how good it is but hopefully it will raise interest in our cars and perhaps inspire others to get involved in Greenpower.
The wheel disks have been machined for the inner tube valves to go in and are now ready for gluing.
This was a relatively easy job although pretty time consuming. At the moment our workshops are crammed with students trying to finish projects and it is very difficult to find machine time or even space! This should calm down over the next month or so and we should be able to make a concerted effort to get things underway!
Anything Greenpower is kjsgreencar@googlemail.com.
15 March
2010: Crag Rat Fury
I am delighted to announce that we have received a grant from the Royal Society that will enable to build a new car from the ground up. This is brilliant news and is everything we could have hoped for and I cannot thank the Royal Society enough! As part of the bid we have to work with external partners. I am really pleased that Dr. Chris Bale has agreed to be our engineering partner, as well as Claro Precision Engineering Ltd, Stage One and Marell. We have also recently visited Leeds University as part of this project to have a look at the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Formula Student project and a massive thanks to the students, David and Jonathan for allowing this to happen.
We have ordered most of the material we need for the new car and in last Thursday’s club we cut some of Cellite Board ready to manufacture the wheels.
We purchased the rims, tyres and tubes, along with a new gearbox from Cycle Heaven in York www.cycle-heaven.co.uk and a big thanks to Rich for sorting this out for us.
I will try and do regular updates so please keep coming back!
22 March 2010: Crag Rat Fury
Work started on CR Fury this week. This was mainly cutting out the wheel disks from the Cellite board. As usual nothing is as easy as it looks and it took several attempts and a lot of wasted board before we got this right. Initially although we had been really careful with the measurements, the disks were too small and just fell through the rims. Easy we thought move the jig a little further away from the blade, but this just made the inners look like 50p pieces. If you are trying this yourself make sure the centre of the wheel is exactly in line with the front of the bandsaw blade. Eventually we got the measurement perfect and the disks are now waiting for a valve groove and gluing into the rims.
