Qdoba Mexican Grill will be hosting a fundraising event this Friday between 4-10pm. 20% of all purchases made by customers presenting this flyer will be donated to the UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team. Be sure to go to the Qdoba on North McCarran this Friday to help the team out on their quest for 1st place at this year’s ASME Human Powered Vehicle Challenge! Directions to the participating Qdoba Restaurant can be found below.
A photobucket gallery showing the newest pictures of the UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team has been created! As of now, we have built 3 mutant bikes, 3 carbon fiber test pieces for rollbar model verification, and are nearly complete with the first prototype of this year’s frame.
Be sure to check the link to keep up with what goes on down in the depths of the Palmer Engineering Building!
Frame Design Team with Prototype
The frame team has been working diligently over the last few months on frame design and how their vision is becoming a reality! Prototype building has begun and the Palmer Engineering basement is a buzz with pipe cutting, welding, classic rock radio stations, and pizza. The prototype will provide proof of concept to the main design feature on this year’s human powered vehicle. Once the prototype is finished we will begin testing and analysis on the design and begin working towards the final bike’s development. Pictures of the prototype will be uploaded as soon as they become availiable, so continue to check the team’s website for updates.
Details for the 2010 East and West Coast ASME Human Powered Vehicle Challenges have been announced.
The East Coast competition will be hosted by Central Connecticut University on May 7-9, and the West Coast event will be hosted by California State University-Northridge on April 23-25.
The UNR Human Powered Vehicle Challenge Team is still looking for sponsors and we are halfway to our fundraising goal for this year. If you would like to join our team of sponsors or would like more information regarding the team, click the “Become A Sponsor” Tab above this post.
Here is a little teaser of the 2010 UNR Human Powered Vehicle fairing design. The design utilizes our new low-impact and low-cost manufacturing process. Frame modeling is beginning this week and by the end of the month, we should have a model of the complete bike. Keep checking back here to stay updated with the team’s progress.
After the first few meetings of design and fundraising talk, we got the feeling the true meaning of the UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team was getting lost on some people. So to account for this, a fun little team building exercise was planned for last Tuesday’s meeting.
After getting eight bikes donated to us by Reno Kiwanis, we divided everyone up into four teams and set them off on their own to design and build two tall bikes and two tandem-train bikes. Everyone had a blast chopping up these old bikes and welding them all back together, showing just how creative a bunch of engineers can be when you give them free reign over some scrap metal and a Welder!
In the end, our welding machine broke down midway through the build-off and we couldn’t finish everything, but once it gets fixed, we will be back up and running with a fleet of funky bikes!
A UNR Sagebrush photographer was there snapping photos of the build off, so check back here in a week or so for the link to the story. Once we get in touch with the photographer, we will have some pictures up of all the fun we had.
Thanks again to Reno Kiwanis for donating our building materials and thanks as well to Jason Erikson and Scott Waters for helping the team out at the meeting! The next team meeting will be October 6, once again, 6:30 in the Palmer Engineering Lounge.
We had an awesome time out at the Battle Mountain Human Powered Vehicle Championships on Friday. Watched the early morning qualifying runs and even got to help out and compete in the drag races held later in the day! We witnessed three world records get set during the evening races. Sam Wittingham broke his own record going 82.8 mph, Barbara Buatois broke the record she set earlier in the week at 75.4 mph, and Greg Westlake set the handcycle world record at 44.4 mph! An amazing feat by all three riders. This really shows just how efficient and powerful a Human Powered Vehicle can be.
Click the above pictures or this link to check out all the pictures we got at Friday’s event and be sure to look at the videos too. The video of Sam going 82 mph is insane; most people don’t believe it is a human powered vehicle in the video!
More pictures from the whole week of racing, along with speed results and more can be found at here.
Sierra Nevada Corporation is the newest sponsor of the 2010 UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team! Thank you to Scott Waters and everyone over at SNC for their help and support with this year’s bike. SNC and Scott have also offered FEA and CFD advisement for the team’s design. This will really help us to build the fastest and safest design possible. Thanks again to SNC and Scott!
If you or your company would like to sponsor the 2010 UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team, have a look at our sponsorship page for more information.
The UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team will be heading out to check out the Battle Mountain World Human Powered Speed Challenge this Friday. We will be checking out all the awesome bikes and hopefully we will be lucky enough to see some record breaking speed runs! Pictures from our travels are soon to follow! Click the picture above or this link to check out the event’s website.
Our second UNR Human Powered Vehicle Team meeting went off with a bang yesterday! We had all the new members from the first meeting returning, even with a few extras! Our numbers for this year are looking really good and the fact that we have more than two women on the team is something we are very proud of.
As for the meeting, Chris and Brandon discussed with the team some of their ideas and insights into this year’s “Secondary Human Powered Bike Project”. After some brainstorming, they are going to come back into the next meeting with a general plan for what will be done. Can’t wait to see what those guys will come up with! We also discussed some fairing designs and are still working on designing the Lamborghini of three-wheeled Human Powered Vehicles so stay tuned! Testing of various design ideas is still in progress and more ideas are coming through the pipe as we speak!
Probably the coolest thing about yesterday’s meeting was we had Jason Erikson come down and bring his Varnator human powered vehicle which will be racing in this year’s Battle Mountain Championships! The bike is really cool and everyone was excited to see a 60+ mph human powered vehicle. We learned a few things from Jason and he let us ride his training recumbent up and down the university roads. Thank you Jason for stopping by and helping to show the new team members what a professionally made human powered vehicle looks like!
So thanks again to Jason and everyone who showed up, we look forward to seeing you all again at our next meeting on September 22, once again at 6:30 pm in the Palmer Engineering lounge. We are still in the process of acquiring sponsors for this year’s bike so if you are interested, click the link at the top of the page!
