Chico State Baja Racing Team is in full swing of competition this weekend in Gorman, California! Aaron Ahlers, in charge of the drivetrain, tells us a little about the experience they had making parts out of the 662 titanium round bar we donated.
This is the first time our club has been fortunate enough to work with titanium, so we were a bit apprehensive about machining it at first. We did mostly turning operations to make the parts. This went pretty smooth in our Haas ST10 as long as we kept fresh carbide inserts on the tools and used the feeds and speeds that HSM Advisor gave us. The milling operations went very smooth as well since we are lucky enough to have some of the best carbide tools made by Xceliron specifically for titanium. We did run into issues on drilling and tapping, as we did not have any coolant drills or taps that were meant for titanium. After learning what we have about how it machines, I’m sure that we can find even better uses that will cut out more weight and make our car more durable. That is if we are lucky enough to get more next year!
We can’t wait to see how they do! To see more about the team, visit their website https://chicobaja.org