We’ve been happy to support the Michigan Baja Racing Team since 2015. We’ve seen them face great success over the years with their student designed and built vehicles. Once again we were able to support the team this year with a material donation of 662 titanium round bar. As they gear up for competition starting in April, I was able to check in with Jeremiah Johnson, Manufacturing Director, to see how the titanium was used and how they feel about the upcoming competitions:
The titanium was used mostly to make parts in our transmission, gearbox and driveshafts. Specifically, several of our CVT shafts, gear shafts and universal joints, including one five-axis part that features an integrated hub to mount our brake rotor. These specific parts were very well optimized last year and didn’t undergo any significant redesign work this year – we are pretty happy with the massive weight savings over steel components that we were able to get! Our design focus this year has been in ensuring vehicle reliability over mass savings, but we were still able to reduce the vehicle’s weight by nearly five pounds, as measured at our unveiling ceremony on March 11th.”
Their first competition of the year is April 11th-14th, at Tennessee Tech University. They then travel to Gorman, California on May 16th-19th for the second competition, and finish the season in Rochester, New York June 6th-9th.
Our big focus this year has been ensuring design robustness and reliability; we lost a lot of points last year from small failures and overlooked components. We’re are also testing some new designs to improve our steering and towing capacity.”
We’re looking forward to seeing how their vehicle performs and are confident that their hard work will pay off!
Read more about the team here: http://baja.engin.umich.edu/index.html