Chassis Part 1: Design and Frame Build 

+Aditya Sreekumar certainly can do, I'm away at the moment so it'll have to wait until I'm back.

Hi where I can get a Solidworks sowftware to download?

just google solidworks first thing, but it's a super expensive program

its ffree for students

@@thomsenmotorsport7201 a question you might've had many times is Why H beam vs double A arm suspension?

Yeah I'd like to make it public. Most of the drawings are finished but it's not quite there yet.

@@thomsenmotorsport7201 AWEWSOME!! Can't wait to try do it myself - even with my limited skills...

Thanks George!!!

Hi, glad to hear you think it would be useful. I used trigonometry in the design of the car, though mostly math using matrices so that I could apply it directly to the points of the chassis and suspension without having to make any changes or intermediate steps.

Where do you live

I was able to semi automate construction of the stiffness matrix. I have a list of nodes and elements then run through each element and build up the stiffness matrix one by one. I'm sure it could be done better than how I did it.

I'm a mechanical engineer and mostly work behind a computer screen, had to do a lot of learning and practice to do this.

I'm a mech tech. How did you unwrap and create the templates for the tube knotching? Did you use sheet metal and flatten?

I have no degree but that won't stop me

@@joedanero5360 I too have no qualifications. But have a deathwish I think 1/4 scale would be a best starting point. If it don't bend/break 1/2 scale then full scale.

@@reggy698 I have qualifications which lead me to ask the question I asked. I've done similar with other patterns and since my question have learned how this was done.

+Morgan Smith at the time I wanted to do as much as possible myself so I did it this way. In hindsight is have had them bent up.

Morgan Smith I watched the vid and this was the first thought i had. But still very cool non the less. Even buying a semi-pro tubing bender and dies would massively decrease the cutting, welding and fabrication time. And also increase strength. And the cost of the bender would probably be offset buy the millions of cut-off wheels that would have been consumed during the build. Lol

During design I was able to take CofGs from Solidworks for anything I designed. I could weigh heavy items like the engine and H-Beam and add those as well to get an estimate for design purposes. Once it was built I measured it experimentally by tilting the car.

He Said solidworks, i personally recomend to use estructural members function for the tubes

Between the drawings I put together to build it I do. I mentioned in another comment, there are 30660 millimeters of tubing in the car, cut into 89 separate lengths in sizes between 19mm and 38mm diameter. The material is 350 mild steel, seemless DOM tube.

⁠​⁠​⁠@@thomsenmotorsport7201 how much for all the drawings with dimensions and materials?

Thanks. The music was from Epidemic Sound: [0:00 to 3:32] Waikiki - Chill Cole [3:33 to 11:05] We Drive by Night - Chill Cole

@@thomsenmotorsport7201 Thanks for response man. ( You are a lifesaver) :) Have a good one.

+Muzammil Shareef solidworks

The spec is in the rules. Any fab shop with a tubing bender can do that. Not a pipe bender - a tubing bender

Right answer from mr fishhuntadventure.

I got quotes for the chassis to be fabricated at a cost of about $4k ex GST. It cost me maybe $1.5k in materials to build it myself so certainly it was cost effective. I had to buy some tools like the welder but I'd have needed them anyway to build the rest of the car.

That's a good deal of savings. United States needs a good open wheel class like the FV car you've got there, I think it would be popular.

Solidworks

+Jim Galapo this was done in my father's workshop. He had most of the tools but I bought the welder.

G'day, I'd recommend getting hold of a decent CAD package, I'm using Solidworks and it's made this stuff very simple. You can see in the video how I was able to make paper templates, this helped immensely when cutting everything.

If you're using a large cutoff saw, the blade flexes while you cut and you can never get an accurate fit. I use a 100mm angle grinder with the thinnest metal-cutting blade. Also, you can use a dark marker pen first, then mark the metal with a sharp scribe to get a bright line you can follow. I hope that helps!

+Drew Bransby Mechanical engineering

+RWES thanks, from a car builder with 2 years experience!

@@thomsenmotorsport7201from not a car builder and have no experience

@hansa Can you brief a little about your academic journey and work experience in Automobile industry?

Now 12K

Not so many people plan to build a racing car you know ;)

@@felobazo24 Now 30k

@@ulysse21 Correct!!! there is also 4x4, electric, drag, dirt oval, nascar, street, pro mod, speed/salt flats, drift, endurance, desert, hill climb, lemons, cannonball, sand dunes, amphibious... I'm sure a few more

now its 30k

+Ectos with what you've learnt you could make a hot wheels version of this car.

lmao this car actually earns one of those stickers for sure lmao

Thanks. Funny you should comment here, your blog was very useful to me early on and guided me a lot on the chassis manufacture and bodywork plug. On the chassis, I used your method of making a Solidworks tube profile then just added more to it to allow me to use the tube notcher. I found the tube notcher produced nice accurate cuts, I felt less confident with the angle grinder but used it where I had to. Good to hear from you anyway, your cars looking great.

Thanks. We laid it out on the floor, measured, tacked it together, measured, welded, measured... Basically we just measured over and over, whatever we could to make sure it was perfect.

+Whiskey_Sierra I do have FSAE experience, at UNSW. It certainly helped but it's another level again doing it all yourself. Great to hear it's useful to you, thanks.

that’s how you achieve success on any project whether it be a horse trailer, a roll cage, or a super vee chassis.

Thanks. I've enjoyed every lap, almost done its first season of racing already.

Thanks. I used Solidworks to do the 3D CAD design, Excel to analyse the strength.

350MPa mild steel tube, cold drawn seamless (CDS). CAMS mandate it for the roll hoop and I used the same material throughout the chassis.

Solidworks and Microsoft Excel did 99% of the work, I'd recommend those (or an equivalent)

Each category and country will have its own rules. I'd only be able to say what the rules are in Australia, so it wouldn't be beneficial to say the specifics there, if someone wants to do the same they should check the rules that would apply to them. For instance, 4130 isn't the material allowed for the roll hoop by the CAMS rules which apply to me.

G'day, look up "The Finite Element Method using Matlab", I had access to this (and Matlab) in university and originally wrote the code back then. I've since converted it, using the exact same equations but in excel. Be prepared for a huge matrix if you're doing a chassis which takes a while to solve. Once you've got the stiffness matrix then you need to work out the loads and constraints for each scenario. For instance I simulated a frontal crash by applying a load in a rearward direction to the front nodes and constraining the chassis at the engine mounts - strictly speaking there would be loads on all the chassis members due to the mass of the chassis (and what's connected to it) decelerating but most of the mass is within the engine so I simplified it that way. Anyway, that book was what I used to learn about how to do all that. Good luck with your project.

after just completing my finite element subject at uni i could just imagine the stiffness matrix required for this in both excel and/or matlab haha

You could also make the cad model in Fusion360. It provides impact and load stats.

use programme called solidworks dasault ! much better and faster !

god luck !

It can be done without those, but I'm not one of the old school who prefers pen and paper.

That's exactly its purpose. It looks like the guy who flips wasn't strapped in very tightly, he came up in his seat a lot which made it worse than it should have been. The roll hoop also looks too low. The rules we have require the line between the top of the primary and secondary roll hoops to be at least 50mm above the drivers helmet which should in theory prevent this sort of thing. In practice I see a lot of cars where that's clearly not the case. Most likely the car is built for a certain (low) driving position but the owner decided they wanted to sit higher in the car for whatever reason. Or perhaps the rules changed after the car was built. Nothing will change unless they check the clearance during scrutineering. I hope we don't see any serious accidents as a result of anything like this.

We lost a driver the year before I entered the sport. Very unusual though, he was the first and (hopefully) the last. Safety improvements have been made in response (side impact protection incorporated into this chassis as an example).

With one man start to finish a couple years and a hundred grand or more I'd say 😁

Look at his design. Add up the lineal feet. Price the raw stock. Multiply the number of joints by 35 minutes each, divide by 60 and multiply by dollars/euros per hour you wish to use. Add ~US$12,000 for tools and overhead. That’s YOUR cost

Thanks. Glad to hear you're getting something useful from them.

+Dilan Valentinoff I have no problem with people trying to learn new things. I'd hope people would be the same if I had questions about a subject I'm not familiar with.