Airbiter lives! The epoxy appears to have cured during the day Saturday, and the team stayed up until midnight reassembling the trike.
So what went wrong? The consensus was that steering shimmy was induced by the flex in the steering linkage. The original layout had a vertical member linking the tie rod to the steering arm on the kingpin.
Now the tie rods are connected directly.
The camber was off on the remounted wheel, but it was rideable.
Calvin practices before the start.
Props to Rose Hulman who let many teams, including us, use their generator to power Dremels for emergency repairs.
UCF’s fairing conforms to their mascot, but that tail looks less than aero.
SD State is leading the competition, and you can see that they’ve added a grocery basket to their bike. They took it off during the race after doing the requisite number of drop offs and pickups.
Bikes lined up in order according to placement in the mens’ and women’s sprints. This puts SDSU and Akron at the front.
Since we didn’t run the sprints, we’re at the back.
Just to make things more fun, our left crank arm fell off and had to be reattached just before the start.
And we’re off, with the usual chaos of a LeMans start.
Calvin is delayed at the start because it takes a while to get belted in, etc , but is soon passing many bikes.
Clarkson is determined to run their bike the entire time.
Sadly, MS&T’s very pretty bike had a wheel failure on the first turn and decided to soldier on with a shoulder harness.
Rider switch to Valina. We’re in the lead at this point.
Pedalling strong with a bag of groceries just behind her head.
Rose Hulman having their share of troubles.
Now it’s Evan’s turn.
Chain came unshipped during his heat. This started happening more and more as the race went on.
Evan comes into the pits after he’s had enough. His knees were bloodied from scraping the fairing. This was partially because we elected not to move the BB position in the transition to the taller riders.
Bill’s turn.
The shoebox.
Good to see MS&T running again near the end.
Pitt had a nimble and fast unfaired recumbent, and strong riders. They won the enduro. Here they take the checkered flag.
Bill finishes strong.
Flat spots from braking, where we’ve gone through the tread to the blue rubber and fabric casing.
Team checking the online report of enduro results. We came in fourth, dropping out of third just near the end due to some mechanicals.
The requisite group picture.
Our team. Can’t get them to all smile at once.
Then time for lunch and the awards. Calvin is volunteering our table as part of a trivia contest while they delay to give the judges enough time to tabulate the results.
We get second in design
and second in innovation.
Then it’s time for the long drive home. Weather forecast is not so good, but we have trouble believing it as it was 30°C on Saturday. Thanks much to hosts Penn State!
On the way home, we stopped at the original location of Duff’s for some Buffalo wings. Wings highly recommended. Duff’s beer not so much ; D’oh!
As we approached home, the weather got worse and worse. In Oakville, there was a sudden bang, and we had to pull off to check the bike. Part of the wooden stand had broken, and the straps were barely holding the bike onto the roof. We got to the next exit and strapped the bike back down.
All in all, it was a very eventful weekend. If we had managed to run the sprints, we would have placed well overall. As it was, even without the men’s and women’s sprint scores, we placed eighth overall. As always, I am extremely proud of how the team performed under pressure.
Full results are available here.
The future of the team is in flux, as Calvin is stepping down as captain, and many of the senior people like Arbiter project lead Bruce are graduating. The team is also seriously considering not coming to ASME anymore. The competition is structured so that bikes such as the ones we tend to build are not favoured. This is not in anyway to diminish the achievements of the teams that finished at the top of the field. Most of them are better organized than us, and in particular South Dakota State has executed brilliantly, winning East (and they were second last year), and West this year as well.
The only thing that is fairly certain is that we will show up to Battle Mountain one more time.
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