Design:

When designing our kart our team wanted to prioritize acceleration and simplicity. Our team decided to use a reverse tricycle design, and power the lone rear wheel with both motors. This allowed us to significantly reduce the size of our chassis and limit the amount of parts required to hold the motors and electronics. After having decided on this design we moved forward and started mounting all our components in our 3D model. We decided to mount all the electronics on a 3D printed mount above the wheels. 

Manufacturing:

When manufacturing our kart we utilized several of the machines offered at UCLA such as a plasma cutter, laser cutter, and 3D printer. The main chassis was constructed out of 80-20 Aluminum extrusion due to its good strength to weight ratio as well as how easy it is to build with and attach too. We attached each 80-20 beam together using some 0.25" aluminum gussets we designed plasma cut. We then checked all of our measurements for our models and began 3D printing all of our components. 

Once we were able to achieve an appropriate fit on all the components we mounted the rear electronics containers/motor amounts as well as the steering column assembly. We then mounted all the all the electronics, and attached both motors to the single rear wheel. 

Results:

On the day of our competition our team was nothing but confident in our kart. We had spent the entire prior week testing our design and making minor improvements to the brake and steering systems. While our chassis' torsional stiffness was considerably low,  we were able to account for this by leaning considerably into our turns and counteract the centripetal force.  Additionally, our overall kart was only ~34 lbs, which was the lowest weight out of all the karts by 4 lbs.  This help lead to our outstanding performance in the time trial race and achieving 1st Place!