Day Nine: Too Fast, Too Heavy: Classroom Drift

K², our dragster, went under serious remodeling during this class period.  He lost one front wheel, a lot of heavy LEGO blocks, a few gears and the weight was placed nearer the ground in the front.  All of these modifications were the end results of a few different experiements.

Second Design:  Take a few blocks off of the dragster, giving it a triangular shape as one wheel was removed.  Elongating the frame, gave a little more space, taking away the necessity of piling the PICO cricket, motor, and weight all next each other really close.  Here, spreading out these components helped.

Third Design:  The design was moving despite these improvements.  We checked the batteries and found that they were dying.  Replacing the batteries resulted in a much faster time, by about two seconds.

Four Design:  Would making the model longer help?  I mean really, really, long, like stretch limo long.  We pursued this idea, and timed our weirdly shapped vehicle.  This failed miserably we gained about five seconds on our best time.  SO we reverted to what we did have that worked.

Fifth Design:  This last design modification was in the amount of gears.  Our very first dragster had a gear ratio of about 81:1.  That went really slow.  So we lessened the gears to a 1:9 ratio in the beggining of today's work.  During this gear modification, we changed the ratio to a 1:15 ratio.  This worked well and we had a short time.  Here is K² in the final time trials.

We didn't do too bad.  We placed as the fastest time.  It was really cool, going from 27 seconds to 7.05 seconds.  Really exciting.  But, in the bragging right time race of all competitive cars, we didn't do as well.

In the time trials, we had the fastest time, but when it comes to a race, K² placed third or fourth.