A New Day :)

The race started, and we wacthed as everyone lined up at the starting line. Sadly, we're not there. :'( We will be though....SOON! Nothing can bring us down, because we just have to believe that we can do it. If you put your mind to something, nothing will get in your way. I mean, we're high school students, and we're building a solar car!

So right now we're still fixing the wheel, putting on the axel. Then after that we can test the brakes! :D When we have the wheels on, we can actually get through all the scrutineering. There's six stations that we have to go through, and we haven't passed any. :/

Dan & James working on wheels and axel

But...Everyone is more energized now that we have parts to fix, and things to do, beacuse yesterday, since we had so much to fix, but so little to work with, everyone's sprits weren't so high. But today is a new day with a different story :)

Wojtek and Mr. Ouellette :]

Writer Zack Van Eyck interviewing our members :)

Dylan expains the reasoning behind the Powerade bottle.

Bad Luck....

All the teams are continuing with thier scrutineering stations, but we haven't got to any yet. :( We are still working on the brakes, its a mystery why they're not work. We got a new Master cylinder from the Houston Team. We installed new metal pipping for the brake fluids and we have bleed them for about three hours.

Alicja working on brakes

We have to take out both wheels so we can remove the axel and get new ones made of another stronger material.We went for our electial scrutineering, but the lights stopped working. O_O That's another problem.

Mr. Ouellette , Dan, and Wojtek went to a metal shop outside of dallas to get a new pair or axels, it took all afternoon. With them gone, we didn't have much to do beacuse we need the axels, to put wheels on, to do ebverything else.

If it wasn't bad enough, towards the end of the day, while we were waiting for the axels to get here, the car tipped over and fell on its side. :'( Everything seems to always happpen to us. Thank goodness no one was close to the car, or even worse under it! Now there's two more things we have to fix, the tie rod, which is completely bent, and the aluminum bar on the back of the car cracked. Oh Boy.....

Day 2

Everyone was up at seven and started on the car. Alicja and Dan were still working on the brakes. They just don't seem to want to corporate.
Today seemed like a very bad day, because most of the memebers were not here last year, so they weren't used to the heat, seeing how in Connecticut, the hottest temperature was like eighty degrees. So our advisor sent them back to the hotel. We learned a new thing today though. If we get everyone trying to work on the car, then less work gets done. But if we had less people around the car more work would get done.

Texasss!

On our way to Texas! :)

We're finally back in Texas. We only have three returning members;Dylan Yott, Alicja Urbanczyk, and Maggie Li. The b right side is that we have nine new members; four seniors, three sophomores, and five juniors.
Last year. we only had one driver, this year we have eight! :) Since we have so many drivers, a few of them are going to help drive the other solar cars.

When we left the airport, we went straight to Sonic, because back in Connecticut there are No Sonic anywhere!

Rock Cats Robotics Night

For the past month we've been selling Rock Cats tickets for May 27th, and we got fifty percent of the amount. While we were there, we set up a table and posters displaying our work, it helped us raise about $ 120! :)

Having work to show people what you've done really helps because they see what we've actually accomplished.

New Members

The scale model of the new car is coming along great......except for the fact that we ran out of PVC pipes. :/ not good.
At first we started to put the model together with masking tape, but we learned the hard way, and realized that it kept falling off. So we made it the way a first grader would make a pinata. Paper Mache! :) It was extremely messy but very fun. The more we worked on the model the more excited we got for the race.

Exciting news!
We have recruited a lot of new members to join the SKIDDLES solar car team (hopefully we can send them all to Texas this year).

-Abell Asres
-Agnes Kosciolek
-Alejandra Munoz
-Christian Torres
-Daniel Jablonski
-Daniel Marcantonio
-Eden Beaudoin
-Heidi Holt
-Kamal Sahoobah
-Mahmud Chowdhury
-Sam Kelly
-Wojtek Marianski
This is exciting! :D


Our beautiful family :)

-Skiddles

PVC Model

Today we decided that we couldn't have everything done if everyone was at one working station, so we split up into sub groups. Ian led a group of the members to the design, where they will make a scale model of the new car out of PVC pipe. Eden led another group of people to brainstorm on some ideas for fund raising seeing how we are in great need of money. @_@ While those members were occupied, the rest of the members, mostly the ones who went to Texas already, worked on fixing up the old car for show and tell. :)

-Skiddles

New Design

The Dell Winston Solar Car Challenge is eight months away! yay! :)

One of our Junior members, Ian Martin, created a new design for the upcoming race. It will carry five solar panels instead of three, for more efficiency and power. The new car is also designed so that the tallest member (6'2) can drive as well as the shortest member (4'11). :) Which is a big difference from the old car we have because it would have been very very cramped inside the car for someone at the height of 6'2. Another change the new car has, is that instead of having a joy stick for steering, we will have an actual steering wheel. Much easier!

-Skiddles

New Beginnings :)

Our team usually doesn't start the solar car until the beginning of January because our team participates in the CT BEST and the South's BEST Robotics Competition, but this year we decided to started early because of the success we had in Texas.

We talked about the good and bad about the competition. Also, about what we can do to improve the car, etc. Finally, everyone decided that we should create a totally new solar car, a better, faster, and more efficient one. Especially since we'll be on the road race this coming year. The meeting dispersed with a feeling of excitement and anxiety.

-Skiddles

Football Game

Today the Skiddles team attended a New Britain High School football game, which we raised $150 from donations. At the game we brought the car and set up a table with all our posters and achievements.