oh by the way I have lead a team who made a FSAE car with a Royal Enfield 350cc engine... that was when we were trying to find out if we are up for FSAE level competition!! The car was mostly under FSAE rules except for fuel tank, seat belt, and detachable steering. The manufacturing cost came to just over $1000... it is a fact!!

http://www.torque-india.com

The car's name is TI-07

Silverback,

The design intent for UB was for a 50hp engine and cvt package. We are currently, with our best guess, about 35hp and with a clutch that isnt tuned the best and the team managed to swing a 18th finish. With 10-15hp more, better clutch tuning and less weight we will definitely be in the top 10 just running some numbers much like Big Bird did.

Big Bird,

Hope your project is going well. Maybe the next car cycle the team will get some accolades like that for running a lawn mower engine.

Indian teams,

Have you ever considered using a Briggs and Stratton industrial engine and a cvt. I cant imagaine that you cant get a Briggs v-twin in India for not too much money and while it isnt the most effiecient cvt you can buy a Comet 790 clutch that most Mini Baja teams use for 250 bucks new.

But isnt the Royal Enfield 500 a 35hp engine??
with a weight greater than that of 600cc engine... whats the point?

I havent tried to get the cost on a Royal Enfield 500.. but my guess is around a $1000 for used, and double that for a new one... maybe even less... cost advantage is there I guess... but I am not sure about whether it will be easier to maintain

Havent heard of a Braggs n Stratton engine... maybe its available, havent gone looking for an industrial Engine...

Mini Baja in India provides the competitors with a 275cc Lombardini single cylinder, and CVT produced by Mahindra & Mahindra (Quiet a large automobile company in India in case you dont know) for free I think... and its compulsary to use them or something like that....

quote:

Originally posted by Silverback:

Mini Baja in India provides the competitors with a 275cc Lombardini single cylinder, and CVT produced by Mahindra & Mahindra

Is there a rule in FSAE that says you cannot run two engines in one car? (275cc + 275cc = 550cc) Maybe join two single cylinder engines at the crank ends? Having one engine driving each rear wheel with some insane ECU software to act as a differential between the two would certainly be interesting, although not necessarily something to be undertaken by an inexperienced team.

As they say, ingenuity is a mother.....

You can run multiple engines as long as all the air goes thru the single restrictor (see 3.5.1.1). Might be a bit awkward for multiple engines.

Back in the 70's Can Am era, a car was built with 4 engines--one for each wheel. Didn't work very well....

If you build it, please come to FSAE West.

I am not going to tell you the BHP value on the lombardini engine... but if our Uni's Mini Baja team is to be believed its a shocking number... you will be better off with an Enfield 500... (or even enfield 350 for that matter)

quote:

Originally posted by vreihen:
Is there a rule in FSAE that says you cannot run two engines in one car? (275cc + 275cc = 550cc) Maybe join two single cylinder engines at the crank ends? Having one engine driving each rear wheel with some insane ECU software to act as a differential between the two would certainly be interesting ...

I think i read somwhere in Racecar Engineering Magazine about a hillclimber car that uses 2 engines and join them mechanically w/out any softwares or electronics.

You cant use 2 engines? that is an interesting concept though.

I believe that would be the Force SR8 that ran two 4 cylnder engines side by side like a straight 8. Had 800hp/ton.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6111370037003719934

I know my cars!!! Booyyaa Bitches!!! I dont know the firing order it has almost an Audi 5 cylinder back howl to it. Intersting.

I think it was an open wheel race car ... with bike engines, and it's much smaller than the one in the video.

Something more like this?

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0cqp6Qd0GienL/610x.jpg

quote:

Originally posted by Silverback:
But isnt the Royal Enfield 500 a 35hp engine??
with a weight greater than that of 600cc engine... whats the point?

The point as Geoff made so clearly is that you'd lose maybe 70 or 100 points over the event, but you might easily gain those 100 back and more if you do a simple car that is easier to manufacture with the resources available locally to ensure you have good reliability and adequate testing before the event.

Plus if you do the sort of objective analysis Geoff's discussed you might get more design points. Further to that, you might score more presentation points if you have a locally sourced engine that allows your "weekend racer" to repair and maintain it cheaply.

So; -70 in outright car potential, +150 for actually finishing endurance because you did loads of engine testing in advance, + 5 points in design for improving the objectivity of your performance analysis and + 5 points in presentation for having a car that is more relevant to the local market = +90 points.

This is an educational exercise where lap time isn't the only metric...

Ben

Yes Ben, I get that point...

But even with limited testing on a component the team believe that it will work... Nobody builds a car thinking it wont finish endurance! Even maybe there are chances of that happening.

Indian team's problem with Yamahas and Hondas are we are unfamiliar with the engine, and there arent enough good engineers/mechanics who know that engine, so its difficult to learn... there is only so much you can learn from engine manuals... Royal Enfield 500, by the way is as much of an alien bike over here...

And well of course, the fact remains.... Majority Indian teams are new, the oldest team is 5yrs old, that can give you a picture...

Silverback,

I would say that the majority of teams build cars with the intention of finishing endurance. The fact is that even in a mature competition like this, most teams don't. Regularly we see 60-70% of teams failing to finish all events, and there are distinct trends in which teams regularly finish and which teams regularly fail. As for there being "chances" that failure might happen, your job as an engineer is to eliminate those chances. To paraphrase some of Carroll Smith's words of wisdom there is no bad luck, only bad management.

You need to start thinking about why some teams continually succeed, and why some teams continually fail. The former teams do so because they have systems and processes in place to minimize the risk of failure. The latter mostly occurs when desire outweighs abilities.

Academic arguments about which engine / tyres / supension / chassis / differential might make your car the fastest are purely that - academic arguments. They are arguments about potential, and their practicality then needs to be weighed against your ability to deliver the final product. All the best wishes and good intentions in the world mean nothing if you make a poor design decision that commits your team to something it cannot see through to the end.

Now please don't think I'm being hard on your team, nor on your fellow countrymen. I am in awe of anyone that can complete a FSAE project, even more so for anyone that is doing it with the supply difficulties you seem to have in India. I am only offering this advice so that we start to see Indian teams finishing events, rather than trying to bite off too much and failing to complete.

You have said that you have already built a car with a 350 engine. Why don't you enter that? Or at least use that engine to refine a vehicle and notch up your first event completion? Then you can build on the knowledge you gain as the first(?) Indian team to complete all events. You would blow everyone away on cost, you'd do fine in the Fuel Economy event, from Ben's point of view you can see that the judges are wanting to see objective analysis in the design event, and pretty well the only major disadvantage would be the acceleration event. I reckon you could easily score at least 600 points, and in most comps that will bring you a lot of credibility and maybe a top 10 place.

I hear of a lot of Indian teams concerned about their lack of resources in their home country, and I note that you bring up the issue of knowledge of Honda and Yamaha engines. This is a fair point. But you do have motorcycle manufacturers in your own country, and I can't see why an Indian manufacturer (Royal Enfield, Bajaj, etc) would not want to sponsor or help out an Indian university in an international competition. And a reliable 25-30hp engine is a lot more competitive than a Honda that isn't running.

Please take the above as constructive - I just think that respectable competition finishes are a lot closer than you are willing to believe.

Cheers,

quote:

Originally posted by Silverback:
Yes Ben, I get that point...

But even with limited testing on a component the team believe that it will work...

And there in lies your mistake. Believing something will work when an objective analysis of the situation suggests it won't.

As a design judge the biggest mistake I see is people building cars they don't have the resources to build well. I also say that as someone who made the same mistake as a student because a fellow team member really wanted to build a carbon tub, when we didn't have the resources to.

In the end we built a space frame in 6 days and finished 13th overall at FS, but we would have been top 10 easily if we'd; A - finished endurance and B - bitten the bullet earlier and accepted our lot.

As an aside - the teams with carbon tubs often do well because you can't finish that type of car without doing the sort of objective analysis the judges want to see so they do well in design.

If spaceframe cars have the same amount of objective analysis they'll score just as well and be just as fast on track, it's just that it's more possible to build a functioning tube frame car without doing that work, so lots of teams don't bother.

A big team missed FS this year because they crashed their carbon tub car a week or so before comp and couldn't repair it. Another team had a big crash at a similar time and rebuilt their spaceframe car and competed well. There's a lesson there.

Ben

quote:

You have said that you have already built a car with a 350 engine. Why don't you enter that? Or at least use that engine to refine a vehicle and notch up your first event completion?

Geoff, We would have entered that car, if we didnt have a completed car fit with a honda cbr600, working well and under the fsae rules as well as we could check!! The solution to the engine problem as I see it is not an Enfield (or Bajaj, who dont make any engine with an hp of 35) but three extra months of hard work... and of course better management with small compromises. There are enough FSAE competitions around the globe, you just wait for the next one, instead of rushing the car for earlier one..

We could have rushed the car for any of the FSAE west, FS UK, or FS Germany.. but we will go for FSAE Japan, just for the extra time it gives us...

[By the way Geoff, most of my team are totally inspired by your work at RMIT, one of them is even talkin of applying at RMIT for postgrad, ]

In an article Pat Clark wrote, a team argued "why use a 600cc engine when a 450cc engine can win outright". Pat Clark's response, "I see this as justification of laziness"

Well whatever we are, we are not lazy.

Arpit,
Do NOT quote me out of context!

Geoff and I are good friends and anything I have written or said about RMIT is a matter of record!

For the record, and I have discussed this often with Geoff, RMIT's design solutions are not those that I would choose. However, I fully resspect their choices and heartily applaud their success. Let me tell you, there is no animosity between the RMIT team and/or their faculty advisor or past m,embers such as Geoff, and the suggestion that there might be is NOT appreciated.

I watched RMIT struggle up from a poor team with no money and little support (sound familiar?) Instead of whining about it on public forums and telling the world how hard things are, the team, ably led by Geoff, set out in a new direction, one I was critical of at the time, and have become one of the preeminent FS/FSAE teams in the world. When RMIT won their first event in the UK Geoff and I wept for joy together! We mourned that Carroll Smith was not there to see it. They had proved that a lightweight single cylinder car COULD win, and have repeated the victory at least three more times.

I started this topic by letting struggling Indian teams know that the Enfield India team was releasing a new fuel injected engine that might meet the needs of Indian teams. Not just for an engine, but for the teams to form strategic relations with a company that doesn't want to be seen as makers of poor quality product forever.

However. what seems to be an Indian trait of thinking 'The whole world is beating up on us' seems to have hijacked the thread.

By the way, a 'Silverback' is a Gorilla. I'll make no more comment.

Am I upset? You bet!

Pat!

Mr. Clark

Sir, With due respect, you misunderstood the intent of my post! I am really sorry if I have offended you in any way. At the time of quoting you, it wasnt in my mind that RMIT uses a 450cc and neither was it my intent to criticise using a 450. I am too young, too inexperienced to be doing that.

Also, like I have mentioned, me and my team are inspired by RMIT. We love their work and hope to someday accomplish their level of worksmanship.

Whatever my posts might have indicated, I do not believe we have it harder than any other team in the world. I was merely trying to communicate problems we have faced while taking the decisons and the thought process that went behind those decisons. Maybe I have said more than I should have and I apologise for that.

Regards
Arpit

P.S. I know silverback is a gorilla. In fact I do look like a gorilla