Being a product development engineer, this strikes me as a HUGE project. Even if you're not looking for professional results. I sense that you understand this is not something you'll be able to toss off in a weekend, but the key issue as I see it is this - how much time and effort will you need to invest to ensure that your large investment results in something worth the investment?
What will be the operating envelope for this vehicle? If it's going to be out in traffic - a cage among the cars and not just a lone cyclist near the shoulder, it needs some crash protection. Bicycle tube won't cut it. It is possible to make a real car extremely light and still safe, but your options are limited. Go to an SCCA road race at a local track, wander around the pits and look at the smaller sports racing cars. Also locost construction techniques(Google it). Then realize that including operating doors complicates things dramatically in terms of chassis strength. Another reason to move away from bicycle-think and more toward a very light but real car, is that you're going to have a hard time finding or adapting components for a car built with bike tech. Not only that, but a bike-ish car amounts to coloring far enough outside the lines that most rules of thumb you'll be tempted to rely on will be useless. You're on your own. Do you want to design and build your steering system and all suspension parts from scratch? Car stuff will be far too heavy for a bike-ish car. If Zzipper makes your windshield (presumably from plastic), how will you implement wipers that don't turn it into a scratched up haze? Without wipers you'll never get a plate for it. Speaking of which, how will you implement a hyper-lightweight parking brake that passes inspection? These are only a few questions of dozens you'll have to work out to make this successful. I'd suggest making this a mental/sketching/calculating/spreadsheet project for quite a while before you buy any parts, cut metal or shape plastic. Pay attention to the interplay of different aspects and the compromises. You'll be surprised how much it changes and improves. Trust me, it's a lot easier, quicker and cheaper changing things in the design stage than going through multiple prototypes. And you'll get a better final result. Whatever direction you go, best of luck! Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140926/9d249513/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
