Long overdue baja post.

Well for the last year I have been engrossed with my senior project, the mini baja. It was a long stressful interesting process. Overall I feel like I was able to learn a lot and prepare myself to be a better employee quicker. Let me generally run down the project from start to finish.

First Semester
We started off learning some basic kinematics and principles to designing different aspects of a car. We split up into two teams since we had 20 people in the class. We each designed a baja car during the course of the semester and by that I mean the last month of the semester since we had little direction about what we were supposed to do. At the end of the first semester each team presented their design in a critical design review of several faculty members. Once that was done ideally we would've started building over christmas break, however, we had 2 designs and could only build one baja.

Second Semester

So finally about 3 weeks into the semester we put together a design that satisied the Dean well enough to give us the funding to start building. I had designed the frame and we were able to put most of it together around spring break. Here is what it looked like about that time.


The things that were unique about our baja was the rear suspension was a transverse leaf spring made with carbon-kevlar composite leaf springs and a fiber glass skull on the front.

The rear suspension

The fiber glass skull on the front

The Competition

The event was in Portland which was convienent for us since that meant we could crash with Josh and Teresa (THANKS AGAIN IT WAS GREAT!!). The first day of the event was in downtown Portland at the expo center this is where they inspected the baja's for safety and design. We had a very dissappointing time trying to get our baja to pass all of the little requirements of the inspection. It actually took until halfway into the second day when driving events had started for us to get the okay and start driving. We finished 14th in the design though out of roughly 75 schools. We crossed the river into Washington for the driving events. They had a drag race, manuverabilty course, hill climb and a rock crawl on the first day. Since we got a late start we were only able to do the first three and couldn't compete in the rock crawl. The third day of the event was the endurance race, 4 hours running around a 1.1 mile course that was built to wear out the bajas. We finished the race unscathed even after a roll over which is something USU hasn't done since about 5 or 6 years.

The Team

Naoko with the other wives.

A final look at the car after the competition.
All in all it was a good experience, I am not sad that it is over though.