Olin Baja SAE
Learning Goals
Automotive Design
Suspension Design
Steering Design
Skills Developed
Working on Task Based Teams
Suspension and Steering Design Theory
Designing for Fabrication
Year
2022-2024
My Role
Suspension Sub Team
The Baja SAE team was the first project team I joined at Olin College. Most of my work has been done on the suspension sub-team working on designing the A-arms, steering rack placement, and tuning the suspension and steering.
The Olin Baja team, especially during COVID-19, had very limited structure and hadn't qualified for a Baja competition in 4 years. Also with this lack of structure came a complete lack of documentation on the previous designs and design theory supporting them. This forced us to look to other teams and resources when it came to learning how to design our next car. While slow, this process taught me how to find existing design theory, in this case, the theory for suspension and steering design, and how to interpret and take inspiration from our competition.
In 2024 our team successfully qualified and participated in the Baja SAE event. The event created a huge number of areas for revision on the car as well as validated and invalidated many of our designs and choices. ​
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My current role on the Baja team is redesigning the steering mechanism to improve and reinforce it over the system we had last year. The two things I'm aiming for in the next generation of the car are to have perfect Ackerman steering and to start considering the instant centers and roll centers of our car in our design as this is not something that has been done previously.
Me giving a lesson to the suspension sub team on designing for roll and pitch