Week 7, the Front of the Car

This weekends goal was to get all of the front support bars in place. For this I had to guess and check because we had already lengthened the car so the plans were no longer completely right. Luckily I didn't have any problems and cut the bars at the right length, and put the right cope on the end. this was kind of hard tho cause one of the bars making the x as you can see in the pictures isn't solid. so I had to make to bars and line them up

To Be Continued.......

Week Six, Adding to the Frame

For this week it was all bout getting the support in for the frame. Once I had the basic shell of the chassis I had to then add in all the support bars that it called for and a couple extra for some additional strength. one o the things that I realized during this process is that everything takes way longer that you think it does. I Have been going in and working on my project every weekend and I'm no where near my schedule that I had written up before i started my project. One of the thing that makes it take a lot longer is perfection. If the bars cut a little wrong or just barely off its not worth trying to fix it and having it not right, so

you have to just start over, and that's happened many times! As I have pictured above the two bars going across the top are not originally in the plan but we added them for extra support if I were to roll the car over. Adding extra things can be good and bad, good for extra support but bad cause its just extra weight making the car heavier and in turn slower. Also this day I had installed the two bars on each side coming down from the top of the car to the middle for the side windows. so far in the project I'm having a great time and I'm still trying to get the project finished by May but its going to be tough.

Week Five (the Info)

This week I was unable to work on my car due to being on a hunting trip, but I'm going to explain what I did to get to the point I'm at and the literature I read so far. When I thought of taking English 4 I instantly thought that I was going to build something and something that would go. When I came up with the idea of building a sand rail the first thing i thought was, was i going to design it myself or get plans on how to build one. So I looked on the Internet to see if i could find plans for the sand rail that I wanted. It took a few different of places to find the one I wanted, but I found plans from Desertkarts.com that I really liked. So i ordered them. then the next step was to get all the parts for the car, engine, shocks, gas tank, steering, etc. So I called the man from Desertkarts and talked to him for about an hour about what kind of stuff I should get. He recommended to get a 300cc 2stroke motor for it, but that wasn't enough for me, so I went out looking for a street bike motor. I ended up purchasing a 2008 600cc cbrr motor, witch is a Honda race bike motor with 110 hp. the next step was to figure out all the wheels and shocks. So I went on Craig's list and found a nice pair of sand rail tires. Then I went on eBay and went looking for shocks, i ended up getting 2 8in travel fox shock for the front and two 10in travel for the back. The other things that Ive ordered so far is the wiring harness for the lights and ignition, also i have the gas tank, radiator and seat. the rest I still have to order

Week Four, the top of th car

Week three, the second layer of the car

This week I stared work on the second layer of the chassis of the car. from the start i knew it was going to be much harder then the bottom layer, just because I would have to somehow hold the second layer up before welding it, to make sure everything was right. So before putting the pipe in place my dad, Armando, and my self measured out where the pipe need to be. Then we welded up supports to hold the pipe in place to we would be sure it was perfect. After getting all the supports in place I went to the milling machine and put the right coping for the pipe to connect to the already in place, bottom chassis. then it was time to put the two long side rails on the car. I had my dad and Armando hold it up while i welded it in place. After that we put the supports in place and the second layer was done. the one thing that was a hurdle we had to get over, was that the design book didn't say what to do about the front of the car, so I had to think of something that would work and be cool to connect the middle chassis to the bottom in the front. so i took some extra pipe we had and bent it unto a u shape that would fit and connect the two pipes together, and it worked great and made it look cool. As I said last week, this makes the car look way more cool and more like a Dune buggy insted off a bunch of pipes. I'm very excited to continue on my car and cant wait to be able to take it home and start putting it all together.

Week Two: Starting the Build

Starting out the second week was a lot more exciting. I had already cut and bent all the pipe for the buggy, and now i had to put the coping on the pipe so that the pipes will fit together flush. To put the coping on the pipe I had used a milling machine. The picture on the right is me using the machine to put the exact angle on the pipes. previous to this I had never even seen a milling machine in my life so this was a whole new experience. My dad helped me out and taught me how to operate the machine. and after a couple practice cuts i got the hang of it. after putting all the correct copings on all the pipe the bottom level of the chassis was our next goal for the day. with the help from Armando and my dad they taught me how you need to have a table and be able to draw out the plans in full scale just to make sure everything is right and there's no mistakes. so that was the next step, I took a tape measure and a long straight edge and drew out the bottom of the chassis. After it was all drawn out the next step was to weld tacks to the edges of the lines i just had drawn so that the metal could rest against it.

Now it was time to start welding the bottom tubes together. This was fun because i love to weld and watching the metal go from tubes to actually looking like something! after all this we called it a day and now I'm just looking forward to next week!

First Week of Work

Starting this Project was a lot harder then I thought! I just had to put that out there. To get my project rolling I had to start before the semester had begun. One of the first thing I had to do was to figure out a place to build my project. This was pretty easy to figure out due to the fact that my fathers work has all the perfect materials I needed to complete the building of the chassis. So I went in one day and asked my Fathers boss, who is the owner of the company, Ted Toland, if I could work and build my Sand Rail for my senior project, and use the tools in the shop. After I had gotten the OK, I had my father give me the number of there metal supplier and I ordered 100' of 1 1/4" tubing for the chassis. Once the metal had been delivered, witch was a few days, i began to bend the tubing to the correct shapes for the car. Previous to this experience I had never knew how to bend tubing. so I had one of my Fathers friend and fellow employee Armando, teach me how to use the pipe bender. This was a very interesting experience and I had a great time learning how to do everything! After I was taught how to use the bender my Father and I cut and bent the pipe to the correct dimensions for the car. This process was long but fun because after the pipe was cut and bent into shape I could kind of picture pieces going together into the car and it made me want to just keep working! Well after this week, I cant wait to see and write about next week.