Disaster....

There are some great challenges that need to be overcome when doing a carbon fiber chassis for a Formula SAE car. First is money, with the help of Rick McMillen at IndustriTech that was not a problem. Second is time, with the help of Rocky Mountain Composites we were able to create a buck in a quarter of the time of prior years. Third is luck, fate, destiny... What ever you want to call it. For a carbon chassis to come out correctly there are so many events that need to take place flawlessly.

Our chassis fate was the simple fact that when it was placed into its final cure it was set on the oven floor... This simple problem caused the film adhesive and carbon plies around our hard points to never reach their gel temperature and never fully cure. If the chassis was placed on some stands where airflow could have reached both sides of the part then this post would probably not exist. However, that is speculation and also irrelevant at this point.

The beautiful carbon chassis that delaminated during mold separation. The chassis is standing on the rear bulkhead and you can see the bottom side and also the up sweep of the nose.

So at about 3:00pm on April 21... Plan A failed.

By 3:15 pm on April 21... Plan B was in effect.

After about 15 minutes of disbelief, just staring at the chassis in complete silence, the team decided on a new path. The time and resources are not available to try and create a new chassis. So it was decided to create a steel tube frame chassis that would incorporate as much of the original design as possible. So we got to work.

By 7:00pm that same night a preliminary chassis was designed and the structural integrity was evaluated.

By the next day the chassis was refined from an initial weight of 84 lb down to a respectable weight of 65 lb and an expected torsional stiffness is 4,400 ft lb/degree. The result looked something like this!