Dropping the Vehicle, 2009 Version

Written by Tom Nugent on Sunday, June 14th, 2009

While practicing braking at the 2007 SE Games in Utah, we had an incident where our vehicle (built like a tank) was accidentally allowed to free-fall down our treadmill cable from a height of nearly 4 meters. It survived with no issues (see the video if you’d like to relive that moment of terror for us).

Ben Shelef, organizer of the Power Beaming competition, blogged about stress testing going on at the competition site (Dryden Flight Research Center) this week:

It is always difficult to place your project into a stress test – you poured your heart and soul into it, and all you really want to do is protect it and treat it gently so it doesn’t break… Which is of course silly – you should test your brakes in an empty parking lot, not in the middle of traffic.

As part of our preparation for those tests (which are themselves preparation for the actual competition), we’ve been doing a number of tests, including dropping the vehicle (on purpose, this time) down the cable onto our bottom bumper. We were a bit nervous about it before the test, but this test and many others went pretty well:

As you can see, the structure is very robust, despite being engineered to be lighter than our previous entry. The climber vehicle will undergo other testing at the competition site (Dryden) this week to evaluate its mechanical robustness. We don’t know if the Dryden safety personnel will have any concerns, but this video shows that descending the cable shouldn’t be too much of a safety concern, mechanically speaking. We’ll find out this week if anything else is of concern. While some of our team is at Dryden for those tests, the rest of us are preparing for yet more tests of our own here at our shop.