Making The Car
Young Engineers Club Field Day Activity
Team Report
By Jaspreet Landa and Alastair Bullock
The day started at 8.40 sharp. After a short brief by Mr Gray, we were off building our projects with mugs of tea and coffee to aid our decision making. The group of nine young engineers had previously been split into three groups. Two groups were making a ‘Mardave V12’ carpet races with the remaining group making a ping pong shooting buggy! After emptying the boxes containing all of the kit, we began deciphering which components went where. Our group consisted of Jaspreet, Vivek and Alastair. Jaspreet was the group leader and he was focusing on marketing, whilst Alastair and Vivek spent most of their time building the car. Inside our kit there was a remote control and various perplexing components. We did not have any instructions so the task of putting each component in its correct place was moderately difficult! We did however have a constructional diagram from a previous Mardave car which had a similar base.
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Competition was fierce as the other group sped into the lead in the race of building the car. As far as we could tell the group were already firing ping pong balls after the first hour! As we continued with our build, Mr Gray, Jaspreet and Arnold (The B teams marketing manager) went out for a session of deep discussion. They were trying to think of suitable ways and companies to approach to raise enough money for the young engineers venture. After another cup of coffee we decided to focus our attention solely upon the clock, anticipating lunch time! After the delicious nuggets, chips and beans from the bakery, we steadily progressed with the task in hand.
By three o’clock we had just finished building the car and we were ready to race! The other group which had been in the lead had just realised they had forgotten one of the first components alongside the actual motor not being connected! After a quick test drive round the playground scaring the pigeons, Mr Gray approached us with his own mighty machine, challenging us to a race. Sadly, we lost, but now the challenge is to modify the car to make it better so we stand a chance in the true competition at Silverstone. It was a very enjoyable day!
Junior Young Engineers
By Chris Houlton
I started Young Engineers at the start of the spring term, egged on by the tantalising prospect of building a remote controlled car and racing it at Silverstone. I started with a group of four from my DT set which soon grew to five, unfortunately some were keener than others and eventually the number dropped to two. Our task was to build our own RC car just to have fun with in school; we weren’t involved in building the Silverstone cars at first because that was the job of the Senior Young Engineers in yr11 and above. Personally I thought this was great! We were left free to do as we liked and our own RC car soon took shape.
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After a few weeks we received more interest from skilled “DTers” who wanted to join in with the project so our numbers grew again. Though we weren’t the only year nines taking part; a small group was working on an electric buggy project for a competition later in the year and a third group of year nines were involved in preparing the presentation for our Silverstone RC cars for the pre-race day judging. It was a great atmosphere, especially a few days before the judging when there was a final rush to get everything finished and everyone had to chip in.
Unfortunately we narrowly missed qualifying for the final at this year’s competition, but we had a great time anyway and I’ve really enjoyed taking part in Young Engineers. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys DT as it really gives you the chance to learn about new things and apply your skills to something really fun! Give it a try…
