CWRU Motorsports (Baja SAE)

At the start of my freshman year, I knew nothing about cars and had no experience in designing or making parts. By the end of my freshman year, I've designed a few parts, big and small, and made parts ranging from materials as soft as brass and as hard as titanium. Oh, and I learned a bit about cars.

Despite that, I still have lots to learn. Here's a list of what I wish I learned/had a better understanding of this past season (2023-2024).

Design

• 1) How contact forces relate to loads seen in real life

• 2) When to conduct a part-level vs assembly-level simulation

• 3) What material to choose/why the material was chosen




Manufacturing

• 1) How cutting conditions affect different materials

• 2) How material properties determine cutting methods

• 3) What ideal chips should look like

Below is a collection of what I've worked on.

• Design

• Manufacturing

• Organization

Design

Steering Rack Housing

Manufacturing

After a year on CWRU Motorsports, I've made some really cool parts with the help of my more experienced teammates (and with a lot of standing at a machine for an entire day...). I hope I can help others do the same as the Manufacturing Coordinator for CWRU Motorsports' 2024-2025 season!

Suspension Inserts

These suspension inserts are titanium and were made on the lathe.

Heim Joint Inserts

These inserts are locationally fit into the tie rod ends' spherical joints, connecting to the uprights.

Spherical Joint Inserts

These inserts are locationally fit into the spherical joints in the uprights.

Clevis-Side Heim Joint Inserts

These inserts are locationally fit into the tie rod ends' spherical joints, connecting to the steering clevises.

Front Hub Spindle Yokes (Pre-CNC)

These spindle yokes are titanium and were made on the lathe. They connect the front wheel hubs to the drive shafts.

Organization

Going into the 2024-2025 season, our team started putting a great emphasis toward improving our workflow and team culture.

Notion

One huge change we made from previous years was a teamwide shift to using Notion as an organization software.

Parts Tracker

The shift to Notion started with the creation of a new Parts Tracker for the upcoming season. To provide some context, our Parts Tracker was primarily meant for tracking the manufacturing status of our car parts, and it started out on a Google Sheet with tons of formulas and manual labor (I guess you could call it that...).

With the new season, there were many new features that the 2023-2024 Manufacturing Coordinator and I were thinking about implementing, so I wanted to test these features out.

Testing these features out on a Google Sheet just seemed arduous, and would probably have led to tons of roadblocks that impeded on the feature-testing. So, I turned to Notion instead, as I use it for my own personal planner which gave me some Notion experience to create a Parts Tracker.

After rolling out my first draft to the 2023-2024 Manufacturing Coordinator, there was huge support to actually keep the Parts Tracker in Notion. We ultimately ditched Google Sheets since all of the automations and features I set up would've been absolute chaos and, in some cases, impossible to set up in Google Sheets.

In addition to the automations, the new Parts Tracker also gave room for more information with less clutter. With Notion's ability to have different views of the same information, our team can now view part design status, analysis status, manufacturing status, vendor/sponsor order status, and so much more.

The Spread of Notion

A few other subteam leads appreciated the possibilities of Notion as well, so they started making their own spaces in our team's Notion workspace. With everything that I learned from setting up the Parts Tracker in Notion, I guided other team leads in making their own integrations with Notion's colorful palette of features.

This signaled a huge shift for our team, as now we had planners and timelines accessible to everyone on the team, and much of our written documentation was now housed in our Notion workspace. Google Drive is no longer the go-to for meeting minutes and other written documentation, and our transition to Notion birthed a robust team wiki, design tracker, part analysis tracker, onboarding planner, purchase order tracker, and so much more.