Unofficial Results

Unofficial Results:

The race is over and we had a blast!!!! Thanks to everyone who volunteered for the event, and to all the people who came out to watch us race. A series of long detail posts will follow in the next few weeks detailing what happened but here is the quick rundown:

We raced with times around 1 minute and 43 seconds plus or minus a few seconds. We were very consistent and raced well. However there were a good number of cars that were just plain faster than us. We are totally stoked that we made it into the top 18 (the finals). We came in last in our finals race but that’s okay ’cause tons of fun was had by all.

The car performed nicely and, as I predicted, we were able to come off the line really fast, faster than most. In 3 out of the 4 races we were in front of all the other carts by a couple of car lengths in the first 100 feet. The problem is that 3/4 of the way down the race the faster ones would catch up to us. Still I’m quite pleased. Keep looking in the next few weeks for pictures, video and detailed results.

-Bearded Lightning

Race Day

Here it is.

It’s race day. Last night we finished up the painting and went on an evening test run down the actual track. We were able to make three successful test runs at full - or nearly full- speed. We are going to do a couple more runs this morning and then it’s go time. Naturally I won’t be in front of a computer the whole day so there probably won’t be an update here until tonight of tomorrow. I will be making updates to my twitter feed (if you’re into that sort of thing) via text message throughout the day so you can follow along at http://twitter.com/natronics

Go Beards!

T-Shirts

Here is a preview of the shirts available for sale at the race.

Front:

Back:

Working Hard, 3 Days to go.

Well the last week went by really really fast. It turns out there is a lot going on in Portland in August, I have had to deal with two birthday parties, a historic Timbers game (which, sadly, we lost) and and camping trip to an island on the Columbia. But every waking moment besides those things and work I have been in the garage gluing cardboard together. It turns out it’s coming along pretty well. In the last few days we have made a lot of progress (but not a lot of sleep). Check out the pictures in the gallery to see how far we have come.

You can also see that we have figured out a way to deal with the windshield. Mike found two pieces of Plexiglas on the side of the road and we have cut and melted it to shape. It’s a little fragile so we’ll see in practice runs (tentatively scheduled for Friday night) if it will hold up.

One more piece of news we will have official Bearded Lightning T-shirts available at the race!! Come early to claim your own.

Working on the Shell

In the finest tradition of “just start and see what you come up with” I started trying to make some kind of superstructure around the frame to attach cardboard to. This is the idea anyway.

I started off just trying to wire cardboard to the frame directly but this is less than ideal. There is a lot of wiggle room and we don’t want things moving around while going down the hill. By the way there are two reasons you want as little vibration and jiggling on a gravity powered car. The obvious one is something might fall off. The less obvious one can be derived from conservation of energy. There is a certain amount of potential energy at the top of the hill, and the idea in a race is to convert as much as that as possible into kinetic energy; i.e., moving down the hill. So any thing that moves or vibrates or gets hot is energy from the hill not being converted into speed.

So I moved on to a wooden frame that is fairly solid that the cardboard can attach to. I am almost finished with that part so tomorrow it’s moving right along into forming the cardboard body.

Flugtag

Saturday afternoon Thomas and I took a stroll down to the waterfront to see the 2008 RedBull Flugtag here in Portland.  I was thinking that it would be a good idea to get some inspiration. I really wanted to see how everyone put together their contraptions. Well it turns out that about 60,000 other people thought that would be a good idea too. It was so crowded that I couldn’t really get that close to anything. But I did snag a couple of photos and watched some of them fall off the big cliff. While there are some similarities between the flugtag and the derby – namely that our design isn’t supposed to crash – I’m glad to see that our car seems better built than any of the flugtag crazy things. That is with the exception of the absolutely gorgeous lego plane which was a thing of beauty. Check out the lego plane and of all my pictures from the event on my flickr page.

Back from the Shop

So for the past few weeks we’ve all been pretty busy and Lee has had the frame in his hands with access to things like sandblasters and welders.  But tonight I got a little suprise: the frame is all done!  That’s right, all the welding is finished.  We have hook locations on the front and back and we have the push bar in place.  Edges have been smoothed and the whole thing got a good going-over with a sandblaster and, most importantly, a coat of paint.

It’s funny what a lick ‘o paint will do to an otherwise normal looking thing. Check out the picture goodness:

Now the hard part has begun. All the little pieces that we took apart months ago and paint them and get it all back together. Then we have to make some kind of aeroshell…somehow. Two weeks to go. Yikes.

Ride 2

Ride 1

Wheels mean Wheeee!

Monday night Lee brought the almost finished frame over to play around with. We jogged out memories and figured out how to get the steering back together. When we had the front wheels on it was just too big of a temptation to try and ride in it. We have a third wheel, but it has no axle at the moment so we just looked around the garage for wheel off of something to throw on. Luckily there are a lot of bikes laying around my Garage so we found a wheel and low and behold version 0.3 of Bearded Lightning:

We were pretty stoked to try it out so we each took turns pushing each other down the street to the cheers of our admiring fans random woman in the street.

It’s not that fast but there is so much more to do! Nothing about the car as it is right now is optimized. There are bearings to be greased, bolts to be tightened and axles to be found. Still it felt pretty good to actually drive the thing after 6 months of just thinking about it.