Anteater Baja Racing

WHAT

As a Chassis and Ergonomics Engineer at UCI's Anteater Baja Racing Team for the 2023-24 school year, I collaborated with eight other members on my subteam to design and construct a 4130 Chromoly chassis for the 2024 Baja SAE competition. To improve upon the performance of the 2022-23 competition vehicle, we prioritized significant weight reduction in the chassis, proper node triangulation to optimize load distribution during various impact scenarios, and precise manufacturing to optimize component mounting for other subteams.

HOW

I worked closely with one other teammate to design and fabricate wooden manufacturing jigs to ensure all major chassis dimensional tolerances within 1/8" of the SolidWorks CAD, as showcased below. Panels were designed on SolidWorks to be individually laser cut for greatest geometric accuracy and with ample accessibility to each node for welds. With greater consideration of ease of maintenance and practicality of manufacturability achieved by this slotted board design, the jigs that we designed allowed us to cut manufacturing time in nearly half as compared to the previous year, allowing us to allocate more time to integration with the other subsystems.

Bottom Plane

Rear Roll Hoop

RESULTS

There was a miscommunication with our purchase order form in terms of the type of wood that we wanted. We ended up needing to use exterior grade rather than interior grade plywood, meaning that it was not able to be fully laser cut, which was our ideal method of precisely manufacturing these jigs. As a solution, we laser cut a shallow engraving onto each panel and then cut the rest out by hand using panel, jig, and band saws. This imprecision led to some dimensional tolerancing errors not within our desired margin, as outlined in red in the table below. However, by readjusting the members outside of the jigs, we were able to resolve these issues and attain our desired tolerances.