Bodywork Design.

[Designboy]

Just wondering how many schools use a member with a product/industrial/transportation design background in the development of their bodywork. If there are any, what programs are you using to build the surfaces?

[Designboy]

Just wondering how many schools use a member with a product/industrial/transportation design background in the development of their bodywork. If there are any, what programs are you using to build the surfaces?

[Dominic Venieri]

We design our body as part of our solid model in solidworks.

www.formularpi.com (http://www.formularpi.com)

[Michael Jones]

In Cornell's case, it's non-structural and thus more an art than a science...we use Rhino to design (3D modelling program), import the frame and major conflicting parts information and design around it.

Construction is done by the body team, which can be anyone but generally consist of the lunatic fringe of the organization. Proud to include myself in that, of course.

No formal technical approach underlies this process but certainly the principles of good design do. I'm actually writing up someting for a conference on "pleasurable interfaces" based on the 2002 nose, which I swear is a representation of sexual intercourse. Take a closer look if you don't believe me. The grooves are there because of the front anti-roll...it's that benign a cause, I swear....

[This message was edited by Michael Jones on December 16, 2002 at 12:58 AM.]

[vinHonda]

Apparently, bodywork is key to do well in design.... and not a very fast car.

Use industrial designers if you can. If not, slap aluminum sheet together. I think our car is nice..... perhaps not as nice as a 'sexual intercourse' nosecone.....

whutz up mike?! com'n home to T.dot for the holidays?

University of Toronto Formula SAE Racing Team
www.fsae.utoronto.ca (http://www.fsae.utoronto.ca)

[Nigel Lavers]

We also have an industrial design team doing the body work. They are quite experienced (this being their 3rd bodywork design) and end up getting credit for the work they do as a senior level design project.

We use Rhino as well with an imported IGES model of our main chassis/suspension systems to check for interference and ergonomics. Our main goal is to make it attractive and simple... nothing too extravagant.

We actually are planning on building our own plugs and molds and doing the layup ourselves as well.

Nigel
UofA

[Michael Jones]

Our body folk aren't industrial people by trade, but the team tends to attract those who have a knack for it and the enthusiasm to sand molds and shells on the free parking shift (5pm-7:30am.) We do it all in-house - molds, layup, prepping, painting, etc.

Only advice I can think to give is do it early. We've been notoriously bad at that. 1999-2001 bodies were being worked on until the last minute. 2001 car left Tuesday, and I was still sanding the damn thing. Body left Wednesday, dried on the way, and had lettering applied at the hotel. Not good.

2002 body was off the mold April 1 (perhaps not the best deadline given that the cost report's due that week...worked 97 hours that week.) and completed early May. Much more sane.

Hey Vinh! Yeah, heading back home this week...I'll drop by and check out the new space sometime...

[Designboy]

For all the effort going into the bodywork, I wish there was either more weight given to the aesthetics of the vehicle, or better - a seperate contingency award for the best-looking vehicle.

Our team uses Alias Wavefront to model surfaces over an iges file of the chassis. Bucks are CNC machined and molds and final parts are created in-house. What is the inspiration you have drawn on to create the physical shapes of your bodywork? As I'm sure many of you have found, the FSAE car is not quite proportionally the same as a Formula One car and it is very difficult to make it look like one.

[Michael Jones]

I prefer to fall back on Carroll Smith's comments on that in final design last year, and not only because his effusive praise damn near made me explode. He's right. There is only 5 points for aesthetics, but everyone knows that the effect of a positive first impression adds an intangible but not insignificant effect. This applies not only to body design, but also packaging, polishing, attending to all little details, etc. If it looks right it is.

Bad industrial design is evident; good design is almost invisible. Nicely packaged FSAE cars don't really stand out at you, save for an implicit feeling that the system was done right. There are I'd say about 20 cars that regularly hit that level, and they're awesome to see as objects. Cars with stuff clearly tacked on at the last moment do jump out at you, and rarely in a good way. :-)

[MikeWaggoner at UW]

I think we're going really minimal this year. We used to have big fiberglass or carbon noses on our cars that weighed 8-12 pounds but I think this year we're going for a smaller, uglier nose and relying more on craftsmanship (many finely crafted components put together well, screw overall aesthetics.)

Western Washington University FSAE
dot.etec.wwu.edu/fsae

[-Gabriel]

Our bodyworks from the last 3 years were designed by a engineering student with Catia V4 , definitively not the easiest way to do it. I had the chance to work with industrial designers this summer and Rhino seems to be pretty popular to create 3D shapes rapidly.
Our molds were machined in 'rainshape' (?) and ABS plastic was then thermoformed on them. It is a quite expensive way of doing a bodywork, but we were lucky enough to have a sponsorship on the process. Once you have done the job in 3D modeling, it frees craftsmanship for other less time consuming job. I think the possible mold shapes are limited due to the thermoforming process. The result was a bodywork in 6 pieces that looks less clean than it could in my opinion.
This year we don't have any thermoforming sponsorship /infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif so we will start fiberglass in 1 or 2 weeks, with the help of an experienced industrial design student. We will try to make it minimal to save weight. By the way how much do your bodyworks weight?
Finally I would say that if the bodywork doesn't make your car faster, it helps to make it "look" faster (!), give a good first impression for the judges, and can help finding sponsorships.

Gabriel Denoury
Formule SAE Polytechnique de Montréal
www.fsae.polymtl.ca (http://www.fsae.polymtl.ca)

[matt giles]

I am about halfway through the building process with our bodywork. I hand carve our bucks from blocks of foam, and then surface them with fiberglass. It is highly labor intensive. If we had access to a 5-axis CNC it would cut about 4/5 of the time. Considering the time we have to put into it, i'd like to see an award for bodywork too. More man hours go into our bodywork than into our frame.

-it does help attract new members through. A formula car shouldn't look like a lowered mini baja.

Matt Giles
Kettering University

[Michael Jones]

A five-axis CNC would make it easy initially at least. Yeah, our process is incredibly labor intensive. I spent about 125 hours on it last year - although about 70% of that wouldn't been saved from any rationalized design/manufacture process, since it's detail sanding mostly.

I'm amazed people are starting now. Wow. We don't even think about it until February.

Aesthetics is nothing and everything at the same time, I guess. What's kind of funny is that I'll spend 14 hours making one of the curves look just so while making myself look like a bum with way too much primer in his hair.

http://www.yafle.com/images/hci2.jpg

[Charlie]

Wow, I can't imagine spending more time on a body than a frame.

At Auburn our cars have looked quite plain the last few years. We've used aluminum hand-formed panels. They are extremely light (3-4 lb body, total, with paint) but hard to make really compound curves with.

I know the look is important, but we finished 18th in design (multi tie as usual). This year we are making an effort to look more like some of the best appearing teams, with a composite bodywork. But by no means is it even close to our primary focus, I mean, we want to win the competition and there is no award for bodywork.

But it helps recruiting and sponsor sales, as well as a couple design and head-turning points. So we are making an effort to improve.

-Charlie Ping
Auburn University FSAE 1999-present

[Jeff Curtis]

Lookin pretty rough there, I think all these years on the team might be turning you into Kolp! /infopop/emoticons/icon_eek.gif

Jeff

[Michael Jones]

Nah, I could never get that ugly.

[Marc Jaxa-Rozen]

CATIA v5 has an extensive surface modelling feature set and we use it for the rest of the car, so it's an easy choice for us...I would choose 3ds max as a second option, mostly because I have lots of experience with the package, but Rhino has comparable capabilities with less bloat.

Incidentally, CATIA's surface tools are based in part on Alias/Wavefront (Maya and Studio Tools) software, which is widely used amongst industrial designers.

[Scott Wordley]

We've been using Industrial Designers to do our bodywork for the past couple of years. They were actually from a Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design double degree although you wouldn't realise they were engineers from the way they approach the project. Although the final results have turned out pretty well both years it hasn't been easy getting there. We learnt in 2001 that you need to keep them on a fairly tight leash otherwise they'll get completely out of control. Unfortunately in 2001 we had pathetically weak team leaders who weren't willing to tell the body boys what to do. As a result of this a CAD file of the body was sent off for CNC machining without having been checked by anyone. It turned out that the body was at least 50mm wider than the chassis in most places and the sidepods came up as high as the drivers ears and went down below the ground. The body boys had to reshape the plug by hand and in the end not one surface from the original machining remained.

2002 was a huge improvement. We were lucky to secure another sponsor to CNC the plug (a huge time saver) and we used Rhino to design the body provides much greater freedom for curves and surfaces than AutoCAD which we had previously used. Although the design of the body was fantastic, when it came to actually making it our body boy was nowhere to be seen.

I believe that Industrial Designers can be a big asset to the team when it comes to the design of the body, especially in terms of the 3D modelling capabilities which they bring with them but you need to know how to deal with them. You need to explain to them right from the start exactly what is expected and required from them, make sure they realise that you have final control over anything they design and keep a close eye on them.

Regards,

Scott "Maverick" Wordley &
Roan "Goose" Lyddy-Meaney
MOnash FSAE Wingmen

[David Money]

We actually spent 6 months making our body work from the plug to the molds to the finshed parts. The plug took the longest because of the way we did it. In the end though it paid off because the body looked great and is still holding it's own over 2 years later!! We spent a lot of time in the design phase to make it look like a real race car. We knew that, yeah, the rules only show like 5 points for asthetics, but in reality it is much more important than that. I don't think a judge is going to crown a racing bathtub as a FSAE winner. It has to look like a racecar too, not just drive like one. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[Dominic Venieri]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by David Money:
We actually spent 6 months making our body work from the plug to the molds to the finshed parts. The plug took the longest because of the way we did it.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

What technique did you employ to make your plug and bodywork? Ours took about 3 months start to finish and we think it came out awesome.

Nose Plug (http://www.formularpi.com/gallery/pages/14.htm)
Side Pods Plug (http://www.formularpi.com/gallery/pages/15.htm)
Finished Body (http://www.formularpi.com/upload/images/2002kevin/Image03.jpg)
2002 body design rendering (http://www.formularpi.com/upload/images/2002/rendered.jpg)

www.formularpi.com (http://www.formularpi.com)

[David Money]

We did this totally screwed up method to make out plugs. We had little $$ but fair amount of resources so we took about 6 cross sections of our desired nose about 2 inches apart, cut them out of MDF, and then spaced them apart using all-thread and nuts. We then connected the MDF using furring strips from Home Depot. Our downfall started here because the firring strips were not actually wood even though they saur as hell looked like it. Instead, they were made from some plastic crap. In our next step, we placed our wooden bucks in a box and filled it with a good 2 part foam from my work. We then cut the excess foam away down to the furring strips and sanded it down. The problem was that the foam heated the plastic furring strips and defoemed them. (This is when we discovered that they were made from plastic) It took forever to ovecome that as plastic doesn't sand well. When we finally got our plugs made, a member who worked at a local composite place said that he wanted to do the molds. After many promises that it would work, he made the molds out of Plaster mixed with shredded rope. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_rolleyes.gif There was only 2 problems with this scenario: 1.) The mold release he used was water soluable and guess what one of the major components of plaster is? 2.) Plaster shrinks when it dries. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_redface.gif It actually took a chisel and hammer to salvage the plugs. So we had to repair the bucks. After that was done we did molds from fiberglass (2 part for nose and 1 for top cover) and made parts from them. The fiberglass parts were then made off of the molds and joined together and finshed. Lesson learned: NO plastic furring strips, and NO PLASTER. I will send pics to you tonight so you can laugh if you post your email address. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[Dominic Venieri]

venied@rpi.edu

We took the whole body, cut it into 2" cross sections, prtined them full size front and back, cut them from foam with a hot wire cutter and glued it all together. that took about 3 days. we then spent about 2 and a half months filling and sanding drywall compound to get it smooth and shapely. then we resin coated that to make a smooth hard surface, sanded that, waxed it up, and wet laid carbon on top of it.

this year we hope to use a different core that can be vaccum bagged, and then we are going to oven cure a pre preg carbon.

www.formularpi.com (http://www.formularpi.com)