*** UPDATE ** This event has been canceled. Sorry everyone. We’ll be having Open Hack night instead.
Interested in getting started with Git? Curious about what’s so great about this DVCS stuff? Have no idea was DVCS is? Join us for an awesome night of Git and GitHub and get bootstrapped. Jared from GitHub (@ShepBook) will be presenting and will be hanging around to answer your questions!
Progress has been slow. in the past week we’ve gotten all the requisite parts, but have been lacking in time to assemble it all.
all 4 wheels are now on the kart, and the original body fits surprisingly well. Fronts are 4″ steel wheels from Harbor Freight, $6.99 apiece with some real bearings in there. Rears are 5″ azusalite nylon wheels from a member’s gravity car.
some of our drivers, too, fit surprisingly well. We’ve had to widen the roll cage a bit to accommodate adults, and we removed some of the crossbars from the existing ‘rollcage’ so they wouldn’t interfere with seating position, but aside from that the exterior of the body is just about completely stock.
the body rests on a simple frame of angle iron. It supports our vertical loads well, and is torsionally flexible. This is good because it will serve as rudimentary suspension and will prevent the castered front outside wheel from coming off the ground under cornering. The front wheels have caster so they experience negative camber during cornering, which should allow the tire to maintain a proper contact patch. While we expect understeer due to the relative dearth of weight on the front axle compared to the rear (and the better tires with a larger contact patch on the rear), caster should help mitigate it.
Power will be delivered to the rear wheels from the EV warrior motors via #35 chain. Attached to the rear wheels are 60-tooth sprocket drums. Since these are also part of the braking assembly, their cost is not counted toward our $500 target. The donor kart did not need a chain drive so we had to remove the original brake drums to make way for the new ones. brakes are azusa 4.5″ drum assemblies, also from the gravity kart. they will be actuated by a hand lever on the steering yoke.
We even have comfortable seating worked out! A member brought over many, many office chairs so we a good selection to pick out the sturdiest, perfect-fitting seat. with the nature of the seat and the posture, the kart is surprisingly comfortable to sit in and feels stable as well. The body has been cut out to lower the bottom of the seat to within an inch of the minimum ‘axle height’ rule. this, combined with the slightly laid-back posture of the driver, should keep the CG as low as we can get. perhaps we won’t need the frame extensions we’ve kept on for provisional wheelie bars!
Now it’s on to drivetrain and steering. we hope to have the thing rolling by the end of Wednesday night
We’ve decided to build an entry for this year’s Power Racing Series race at the 2012 NYC Maker faire! Some of our members have been interested in doing similar things for a while, and having a PPPRS event this close was motivation enough to get of our lazy butts and do something about it.
The first steps were to procure a power wheels vehicle, motors, and batteries. A power wheels Xtreme Machine, some EV warrior motors, and a pair of brand new optima yellowtop D34′s fit the bill just fine.
first, we had to do a test-fit just to see if any of us could still fit in there. Some of us could, some couldn’t, and only one looked to be enjoying it.
Then we dug up some scrap metal from previous projects, and got to cutting and welding.
We’ve been having some fun decorating, painting and building new workbenches for the hackerspace. We also realized we have a lot of junk to sort through! Whew!
Anyway, if you haven’t stopped by yet, we wanted to show the progress of how things are coming a long. Here are some updated pictures:
We recently moved into a 1250 square foot facility and are in the process of renovating it to suit our needs. The space is located at:
6410 Landay Ave
Baltimore, MD 21237
The floors were looking pretty bad when we moved in, so we gave them a vigorous cleansing using a floor buffer and a power washer. The floors still were not up to par, so we painted the floors using acrylic floor paint and then added paint flakes to really kick it up a notch.
We need a place to work, so we built a few work benches. 40 2×4′s, 2 sheets of plywood and 2 sheets of laminate was just the right amount of wood to build 6 benches which are 32″ high x 30″ deep x 48″ long.
As you can see in the background, we have also moved much of our stuff into the space. That’s not all…We have really been hard at work in making this space feel like a warm and welcoming place to hang out and learn new skills. Paul King gave the place a slightly more social feel by adding a little graffiti to the newly renovated office wall.
Maybe that should be E=I*R but does it really matter? Google ‘Ohms Law Chart’ and you mostly find V=I*R as examples. Besides, it’s only paint so we can fix that! We plan to add a lot more electronics-related graffiti to the wall. I bet that Ohms law triangle will get used more often that people think…
