Week 4 In Class Progress

On Monday, as planned, Marcel carpooled with a friend to go to a Costco Warehouse in the Philadelphia area to scout for some honeycomb cardboard. Sadly, he was told that all the bigger cardboard pieces are crushed every Monday after inventory is taken.

Big Surprise from Katie!

As last week's as well as this weeks expedition for cardboard proved futile for us, we were still left left with a need of strong honeycomb cardboard. Guess what?! Katie had a sheet of honeycomb cardboard in class! We were the happiest group of all today.

We immediately began working on the frame which composed of two layers of honeycomb cardboard joined together in the middle by circular cut rings of cardboard which were 15 cm thick each.

                               

As you can see, we modified the frame design from our original design and tried to make it as small as possible because our rider, Marcel, has a small torso. Additionally, we designed it this way to minimize the weight to increase our weight to speed ratio. As the designing went on, we realized that making the bike forks attach to this small frame would be an issue because the bike wheels might end out touching each other due to small length of the frame. Yet another question that came up was how Marcel was going to balance while riding, with no place to put his legs. 

Class quickly drew to a close and we had to stop there and schedule a time to meet during the week to fix our current dilemmas.