The bike moves forward

My team has been working hard on our bike. We have started to put the carbon fiber on the shell. It's pretty busy once we start. The carbon is like a fabric, which has to get cut to size, and the core material is cut and stitched together, before we start putting it on. Once we are ready, we mix a resin which will give the carbon its strength.

It then gets spread over the fabric, and we layer the fabric over the mold and make it smooth. The we put the vacume bag, so it will lay flat over the mold. Here you can see the mold as we got the vacume bag ready.

This was the first of four stages of putting the carbon on. Once it is all on, we will cut the top off so we can get in, and then scoop out the mold, and we will have the perfect shell for our bike.

we made cookie for Halloween

Jessica made sugar cookies

Peter ate them all!!!!

dont they look good a little runny on the icing but still good.

The Start of the Bike

Yesterday I started with my team building the bike we designed. The work we did was to cut pieces of foam to start the mold for the areodynamic shell.

We started by tracing the shape onto the foam.

Cutting each piece out

Glue everything together

And start shaping and sanding the piece

And this is how far we have gotten so far.

I am not in any of the pics because I was the photographer of the day. Our goal is to have the bike completed by Thanksgiving. That is a pretty fast schedule, but we do have to have it done by the end of the semester. And once it's build, we hope to get into the ASME national competition for Human Powered Vehicles. If that does not happen, we at least will beat the other team.

Also Jessica has started a new blog for her art with one of her classes. If you would like to look, go to: http://jessicadamstendt.blogspot.com/