Tech inspections and break downs

[bob cat race car driver]

hey everyone,,
we are a second year team heading to FSAE west in a few days, and I am wondering what people had the biggest problems with during tech inspection, the presentation and any break downs while driving....

SO far the biggest problems,
too high db at the exhaust.
unable to answer Design judges Q's,

Can any one add anything?

and congrats to Wisconsin!

[bob cat race car driver]

hey everyone,,
we are a second year team heading to FSAE west in a few days, and I am wondering what people had the biggest problems with during tech inspection, the presentation and any break downs while driving....

SO far the biggest problems,
too high db at the exhaust.
unable to answer Design judges Q's,

Can any one add anything?

and congrats to Wisconsin!

[js10coastr]

For us:
break downs while driving:
-shift button vibrating itself out of commission
-not tightening wheels to specs

Tech:
-chain guard
-bolts in single shear (eventhough our structural equivalence forms were approved... long story)
-safety wire on suspension pieces

...the brake overtravel switch also seemed to be a last minute thing for us.

As for design questions, it's a crap shoot on what type of judge you get.

[Jersey Tom]

We had sound problems briefly. Not many teams at Detroit past sound first shot. I feel it may be because they had an RV parked next to the thing.

Tech.. is kind of a crap shoot based on who you get as well. With one, they thought our safety wire wasn't heavy enough gauge and didn't like threadcount past nylock (I counted it as 2, they counted it as 1). So we go fix that go back, and they then required us to safety wire our single shear bellcrank mounts, even though the previous guys didn't mind and I had seen teams in 06 and 07 without them wired.

While driving, a chain broke and a tripod popped out of its housing costing us our fast auto-x time and endurance. The latter I was sure we had fixed in testing but apparently not.

Design judge questions.. you should be presenting to them. Since I handled suspension, I was talking with a suspension guy (from Honda I think) and Paul Haney. For the first 15 minutes I had their attention, got down and illustrated what was going on with the tires and how we felt we had optimized our suspension kinematics for it, and during this time they only had one brief question. After that for the next 5 minutes after I had finished what I wanted to say I let them ask a couple questions, which were pretty easy and just clarifying things. Judges were very happy with how suspension was presented, that we weren't afraid to try something very different and that we could back it up. I would say of everything our a-arm setup was much much different from anyone else. We didn't have much development in powertrain and lost stupid points for rough bodywork and a couple things not being torque'd down (we were in the middle of re-doing things for tech).

With design.. carry the conversation, get down and let the judges see the car, use as many illustrations as possible. Identify design issues you had, how you addressed them and how you justified them, and how they tested out. This is what they want to see.

If you give them a well-written design report with some good ethos, and then carry the presentation knowing what you're talking about and not just blabbering on about one thing (as I mistakenly did with uprights in 06), it seems to work pretty well.

Edit - I'll add, the judges usually review your design doc for an hour, where you only have 20 minutes to present to them at the event. Take advantage of that.

[James Waltman]

I was a tech inspector for the first time at West last year. I'll be there again next week.

Before you even bother getting in line you can run through the Tech Inspection sheet yourselves.
It's available here:
http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries/rules/
More specifically:
http://www.sae.org/students/fsaetechsheet.xls

This is the form the inspectors will use. It's pretty straight forward. You should be able to check off all of the items yourselves before you try to pass tech.

You should have a basic set of tools with you.
You should be prepared to break down your intake or throttle body so that the restrictor size can be checked.

Make sure that your car is ready to race. Make sure that all of your fasteners are tight.

Have your driver(s) practice the egress test. I saw a few drivers last year that didn't know how to strap themselves in the car.

[mtg]

I'll be there with James as a tech inspector also and I'll definitely restress the advice to check your car over with the tech sheet before arriving in Fontana.

When I was in school, it seemed to help to have an alum or faculty advisor go over the tech sheet- when you aren't the person that built the car, it's easier to catch problems. It used to take us a few attempts and a lot of late night work to pass tech until we started going over the tech sheet multiple times with alumni and others not involved in building the car before competition. Then, we passed easily on the first try.