UCF Knights Racing Baja

Yet another big milestone! This past month our team has been hard at work making our 2025 car a reality, but in addition to all the technical and hands-on work, we also need funding! Our dedicated team volunteered their weekend in order to support the club by working the 24 Hours of Daytona, as well as the Daytona 500, over in Daytona International Speedway. This event was a huge success, not only helping to raise money to match the funding provided by the UCF Student Government, but also providing a chance for team-bonding (and watching the races!). As we get closer and closer to our competitions, we'll provide updates on major achievements as we continue to build, test, and eventually race our car!

Big things on the way! We've completed Dave's Challenge! Our talented design team was able to model and integrate each of their components into subassemblies and combine those subassemblies into a comprehensive master assembly, where everything down to the individual fasteners are accounted for. In addition to this, our team employed good systems-engineering principles, defining system requirements and deriving subsystem-level requirements with good reasoning and analysis which we will later test our vehicle and subsystems against. Thank you to Dave for your generous contribution of $1,250, supporting the engineering talent we have developing at UCF Baja! With the completion of this milestone, we see a full transition into manufacturing. Our team has been working hard at turning that CAD model into a reality, with sheet metal tabs and structures being cut to later be cleaned up and jigged for welding. Not to mention our dedicated members putting in long hours in the UCF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Machine Shop Sciences preparing gears blanks to have their teeth cut and be heat treated for our drivetrain! As always, more posts soon; stay tuned!

It’s that time of year again! The 2024-2025 Baja Design Season is well underway. I decided to pay a visit to my old team, UCF Knights Racing Baja. Baja SAE is a collegiate design series centered around the design, manufacture, and racing of single-seat experimental offroad vehicles. It is a competition that encompasses the entire engineering cycle and is present at nearly every large engineering school in the country (and many abroad!). In my opinion there is no better program out there for a young engineer to be involved in. In continuing my support of the team, I decided to present them with a challenge. They had until Valentine’s Day to finish their complete CAD master assembly and develop robust system level and subsystem requirements based on performance goals and official rules. If they did this, I would write a check to the team for $1,000. If they shattered my expectations and completed the challenge by early January, they’d get a $250 bonus. As expected, their competitive spirit emerged and the team made quick work of my challenge! They derived quantifiable requirements based on anticipated event performance with supporting analysis and showed me an incredibly detailed, over 1,400 component dynamic master assembly. I am so proud of my team. I’d like to give props to the officer group (Colby Loy, William Mitchell, Benjamin Tracy, Garrett Anderson) for cracking the whip and organizing this endeavor, and a huge congratulations to the immensely talented subsystem design team (Timothy Montes, Lozier M., Chris House, Christopher Palomino, Luke Eckhardt, Katherine Hixson, Jim Araiza, Xen Evanson) for their accomplishments! They still have a lot of work to do! I wish them the best of luck at their competitions in Maryland and Arizona! To my network, these talented young engineers are graduating soon… I hope they can impress you as they have impressed me! #baja #bajasae #cds #sae #engineering #automotive #rally #racing #offroad #ucf #knightsracing #CAD #requirements #bestbajateam #theyregonnawinfirstplacethisyear #pleasehirethem

Happy New Year everyone! We at Baja hope your holiday season has been great, but now it's time to get back in the saddle again as we continue to push hard manufacturing all of our car's components. First of all, we've achieved a major milestone in the manufacturing of our 2025 car, we have a welded chassis to show off! Headed by our chassis subsystem lead Jim, our team of talented students designed and ran simulations on our chassis, Aleksei designed MDF welding jigs to properly locate our chassis tubing, and our team of talented welders got our chassis done before New Years Day! Huge thanks to the many members who worked long nights coping and preparing chassis tubing for welding, the chassis couldn't have gotten done without them. Looking to the future, we'll be hosting two more New Member Knights for Spring 2025 on the 10th and 16th of January! This is a great chance to come out, meet some people, and get a feel for what Knights Racing is all about, so don't hesitate to stop by! Stay tuned for more posts as we continue to make progress and have a great New Year!

With the semester coming to a close it's time for another update post! As we wrap up the year we'll see the welding of our chassis with some pretty welding jigs made with the help of Old Goat Custom Woods. As well as that, thanks to the accommodation of Mitsubishi Power Americas and Blue Origin, our members were able to tour two of the premier engineering companies in the Orlando area! Helping students to learn more about the power generation and aerospace industries as well as what manufacturing looks like in industry.

For the past 6 months, my team and I have dedicated ourselves to designing and building something impactful for the UCF Knights Racing Baja team: a CNC Plasma Tube Notcher. As a former chassis lead, I have experienced the challenges of designing and fabricating a competitive chassis. That inspired me to create a solution that would improve the process. This machine precisely cuts and copes metal tubing, drastically reducing manufacturing time and improving accuracy. Combined with a refined CAD workflow, it ensures the chassis subsystem is ready for assembly faster and with less manual effort. This project has been a challenging and rewarding journey, and I’m proud of what our team has accomplished. I’m excited to see how this tool supports the Knights Racing team in future builds and competitions. I want to take a moment to thank my amazing teammates for their hard work, creativity, and dedication. This project wouldn’t have been possible without their collaboration and perseverance, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together. A big thank you to UCF, our Senior Design advisor, and the Baja team for the opportunity to create something meaningful!

Taking a break from the car... How about some people! Our new members have gone above and beyond this design season, rapidly developing their skills and putting them to good use in repair, manufacturing, and design! Here are some of the new members in question! From left to right: David, Gary, Julia, and Gia. Julia has been instrumental to developing a robust mechanical linkage system for engaging four-wheel drive for the 2025 car. The system was designed by her in Solidworks and is currently being prototyped, leveraging additive manufacturing, and as we continue to move along we'll see the final iteration manufactured and put on the 2025 Baja car! Gary, aka Cord, has been busy leading efforts to repair the previous years' cars and get them back in running order. This ambitious challenge has had him tearing down and rebuilding engines as well as diagnosing and solving powertrain issues. This challenge has not been without reward though, as many members have been able to enjoy more seat time and gain a better understanding of the subsystems integral to our vehicles! David and Gia have both been a huge help to making our ambitious suspension rework possible in a timely manner without sacrificing quality. These two have been honing their TIG welding skills throughout the semester and greatly contributed to both, the repair of some of the older vehicles mentioned above, and the welding of the suspension rework, both the new chassis mounting points, as well as the new suspension arms. Watch out for some more new member highlights further into the semester, as we've had a great influx of talent this semester, and be excited for what's next to come!

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate! This past month our subsystem leads have been hard at work testing in order to make our 2025 car the best it can be. Some stand-out examples being our PVC chassis to validate chassis dimensions and ergonomics, as well as a full suspension rework for our 2024 car to predict and tweak suspension performance for the final design! Not to mention some outstanding new members have been hard at work getting the 2023 car back in working order to get everyone more seat time, as well as hands-on experience working on a Baja car! Lastly, our team also had a fun time expressing their artistry and carving pumpkins this spooky season! Stay tuned as we begin to transition more into manufacturing, with our custom tube-frame chassis first and foremost!

Another post! This past Thursday our dedicated members brought our 2023 and 2024 cars up three floors to the UCF Student Government Senate Chamber to show support for our club! We were able to spread the good word about what UCF Baja does for engineering students, and successfully secured funding for our 2024-2025 design year. We're extremely excited to see what the rest of the design year holds for us!

Quick little update post! This Fall semester has been off to a great start! Our New Members Knights have been a great success and we were able to inform interested students about what Baja does! We recently held a CAD workshop where engineering students could get familiarized with SOLIDWORKS and participate in a steering wheel design competition! In addition to design experience, we've been busy at our workshop giving our members opportunities to get hands on experience manufacturing and fabricating parts for testing and repair! Lastly, our leadership brought the 2024 car to a parade to help spark interest in engineering in the youth! Thanks to Brady Dungan and Vera Fodor for the pictures of our members getting their hands dirty!