Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design
Clean Sheet Snowmobile Design - Tube Chassis
Team members: Matthew Wyatt, Darrell Flagg, Otis Clapp, Brian Wild
In 2003 we started to work on a sled based on a 2003 4-stroke Arctic Cat. The Arctic Cat 660 4-Stroke uses a modest engine to produce a good workhorse 4-stroke snowmobile. One approach to add interest to the design would be to put a bigger engine in the snowmobile. However this incurs costs in fuel economy. A different approach was taken with British sports cars of the 1950's and 1960's. Cars such as the Lotus 7, the Berkley and others used standard engines as small as the 900cc Austin to produce a car that ran with the supercars of the time. This tradition continues in the Chaterham 7 or even the modern Lotus. As the Lotus web site puts it:
"The most elegantly effective and traditionally Lotus solution is the one with the least number of parts effectively deployed"
These cars are the model for the clean sheet design of the UMaine Clean Snowmobile. Novel design of the structure will be emphasized while making use of as much of the existing sled design as possible. design should be based on open wheel and sports car racing. The Redline snowmobile also showed some innovation that may be worth reviewing.
This is not a construction oriented project. The final result of this project will be a detail design and fabrication techniques and resources that will need to be obtained or developed. More of less work can be done on the resulting design by the team, but the focus is on design not build.
Current Progress
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