Lightning+McQueens

Team Members: (First Names Only) Ainsley Clement Doug William

We have been working on our car for a few days now, having work days every now and then. So far we originally made the car outline but then figured it out that the minimum length has to be 40 centimeters. After we made a new outline of our car out of Foam Core and that seems to be working well. Doug just attached the front wheels and he is now working on the back wheels. Ainsley is sick today which has affected our progress but I think today we will get a fair amount of work done! ~William

Today we are going to create our real car. I thought that the one we were building before was our real car but apparently that was just for testing. We are all searching for toy wheels to put on our car and we're thinking of making a 3 wheel car. These are some of the pros and cons of having 3 wheels vs. 4 wheels. 3 Wheels: Pros: A lot less friction between the axles. If we were to get a wide wheel then it would work very well. Cons: With so much force in the one wheel in the front, it might spin and not get any traction at all. So in all with this information from Tommy I think we are leaning towards doing 3 wheels. ~William

Right now Ainsley is sanding down some doorknob holders. Her dad has some bike wheel tubes that we can put around them. Doug also went down to the Art Studio to get some toy wheels from Jamie, I don't know if any of them are doing to be useful, but it was interesting in seeing what some options would be. We seem to be getting a lot done today. While I have nothing to write about I have been reading what other people have been writing about and Madeline has been writing some very interesting and off topic things. But it's interesting none the less, I need to go to the shop now with Ainsley to get something, I'll write again later! ~William

Turns out I didn't need to go down to the shop but Doug went down anyways to see if they had any wooden wheels. Madeline has been doing a countdown of how many minutes are left in the class to tell her group to keep working. Getting a little annoying... I'm not sure where Ainsley went but she has been really productive this class.

The past few days, we made the wheels for Optimus Prime ® (Our Car). We cut out some 6 wooden wheels and put 2 together, then pulled rubber over it so it would run smoothly. We are having 3 wheels on our car. We put straw and beads on the axel so it would turn well. We still have to put on the front wheel. We are deciding how we we should put it on.

This is Clement. We are putting on the last wheel. Its the front one. There is only one in the front because we thought it would go faster that way. Also we tried hooking the motor up to the wheels with velcro. It ran unsteadily. Now we plan to put it on with hot glue.

We had our first test run today and it would have gone well if our car had moved but it didn't. After letting Ainsley mess with it for a little it started working and went pretty fast. We got a solar panel today and we are thinking of how we are going to make it work. Clement and William thought it would be fun to skip class to go watch a play so they didn't do anything this class, but neither did I. Since our front wheel is kept on by velcro, it keeps falling off or moving the direction of the wheel so the car goes sideways. Also, our back wheel keeps falling off, but apart from these problems, we are doing fine.

We are now working on our solar panel. We have made a platform that it fits in so it wont fall over when were charging the batteries. Also, to make it tilted so it faces the sun we have sticks with velcro on them that attach to the platform and prop it up. We are going to put it out in the sun now because it got kinda sunny. We tried to make the car go faster by putting graphite on the wheels and gears. It didn't work