It's Made of Wood... Yup.

Earlier in 2013, I started designing a version of Chibikart. Athought I knew I wanted my vehicle to be substantially larger and more comfortable to ride, the final goals for the project were not set in stone at the time and continue to evade me. I'm going to keep this post short because the project is not complete and this is basically just a photo dump with some words in between.

...just like all of my other posts.

The t-slot extrusions, known to me as 80/20 (supposedly 80% of the strength of aluminum at 20% the weight) will serve as the frame for this build and hopefully be adequate for any future four-wheeled vehicles I may feel the need to create in the near future. Special nuts can be inserted into the slots and removed without harming the extrusions, making them ideal for builds that are somewhat fluid in nature when it comes to component placement.

Thanks to the help of Evan Lane, I was able to cut sprockets from 1/8" 6061 Al using the mill in the BU Tinker Lab. <-- BU students, please come do things here so you will enter the job world with real engineering experience!

Test run on foam insulation

We made a fancy jig to hold it.

Number of end mils broken doing this: zero.

Done! Chamfer was added to the edges later, I promise.

The sprocket spacers were cut next.

A few tapped holes later, we've got drive wheels!

There was a small (big) snafu with materials and I was on a deadline for a competition (that I completely misunderstood the criteria for) so I was forced to lasercut all of the pieces that I needed so I could show the judges a thing that looked like a go kart and not a $800 pile of nuts and bolts...and a frame.

Here's a picture of the rolling chassis plus the throttle pedal, which I was overly excited to use, so I put it on as soon as I could.

The front wheels line up - cute.

The brakes were next

Then came the motors and chain.

Special thanks to Abominable Snowman Steering Systems.

A few hours later (in which I did not take pictures) a fully functional kart was completed. Not pictured: the seat, (arrived a few days later) the correct battery, and the sensors+boards (too lazy to put on before aluminum parts get here).

Please note comically large steering wheel. 

Current home:

Anti-grav comes standard in jasontrollers.

For the record, I did ride the wooden kart down the hallways of 44 Cummington for a few feet, but the wooden parts, especially the uprights, were very unhappy and were sagging from the weight of my huge ass. Stay tuned for when aluminum parts are cut and we do garage testing, hopefully by the end of the summer!