Chopper has been Painted!

The new car has been painted! We decided to go back to all Insignia White for Chopper v2.0. Here's a quick picture with more detailed too come soon. You're actually looking at the bottom of the car - it's flipped upside down on the table.

Thank you to guys at Metan Marine for doing this for us - new bronze sponsors.

Also, notice our new thermo-formed headlight covers (the black corner of the car in the picture above). Definitely an upgrade from before. Here are some pictures and description of the process:

The body IGES file was cut in SolidWorks to show the section of the nose for the head lights. Extra area is needed to allow for folding which will occur during the thermo-forming. 1/16 inch was removed off the surface to account for the plastic. (It's annoyingly difficult in Solidworks: Copy body without translation, shell one body, subtract). HSMWorks was used to make the 3-D machining contours. I was very grateful to not be messing with MasterCam for this part.

Machining on our Ez-Track with the EVT Porsche in the background.

Finished positive mold after a little sanding and some added epoxy with micro-balloons for s few small diviets

Thermo-forming at the MIT Pappalardo Lab. A big thank you to Dick for helping out when everything was busy with Robocon.

The last step was to cut them down to size and properly attach them to the leading edge of the car.

P.S. Enjoy the new Blog layout. I'll try to change the background picture from time to time. This one if from our road-trip out in the midwest. The team is packing the car up after a long day of testing out in Iowa.