Comments on: Belated Rolls Report 11/21 & 22

By: revo

revo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:34:01 +0000

when I was safety chair predecessors mentioned a few things that they had seen that would be worth looking out for etc (and the “bring a bright flashlight for the people who are going to try to waste your time by trying to have you safety in a dark room”).
I did the same while I was still in town/in contact with new safety chairmen each year. I think that is fairly routine (and certainly should be stronger with the committee voted in during the end of the spring term when a graduating safety chair would still be on campus).

Records of accidents were not necessarily passed down from year to year, I certainly didn’t have old records (at most a notebook with the previous year’s info). Even if I did, most of the accident records weren’t that informative/insightful for updating safety procedures.

If there was a harness failure it may only say “harness attachment point failed”, not “the attachment point for the harness was made of butter and broke under the stress of a collision with the curb, this was fixed by using steel attached with 25 layers of carbon which was shown to only fail with xxxx force applied”. Simply saying “harness attachment point failed” might be fine for the current safety chair because they see the buggy after the accident and after the repair, but looking at old documents, without context, would be fairly useless.

By: bordick

bordick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:21:23 +0000

The Sweepstakes Safety chair came into our basement and inspected all of our buggies, Top to bottom, inside and out: including our harnesses and how they attached. We had to install a driver and show how she was attached and the attachment points. It’s the safety chair’s role to ensure the safety of the buggy/driver combination before they even do a capability test. If you’re implying that this process is flawed, we may want to recommend a fix to this process prior to completely removing it.

The safety chair had a notebook with some “best practices” and yes, there was some flowdown of info from the prior year’s safety chair.

I don’t see how some graphic designer, unfamiliar with buggy and the course, is going to help us understand the structural components of composite assemblies or how they will react under dynamic loads.

By: tommyk

tommyk — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:44:27 +0000

Learning from past mistakes sounds pretty awesome, I’m for it. Are crash records and injury reports a matter of public record or only the inner sanctum of the elected committee types?

I’m not sure I know enough about how the safety chair operates since I only know the mechanics’ side of things and a few stories of some teams being not only standoffish during inspections but bordering on hostile, confrontational and overly protective of ’secrets’. The current system puts most of the responsibility on each teams mechanics with some checks and balances vis a vis the safety chair and following design parameters – maybe these should be evaluated publicly at design comp?

Does each safety chair get briefed and assisted by previous chairs? What does a safety chair drinking party look like? Do they measure the breaking strength of a shot glass with an infinitely stiff lemon?

The example i gave earlier about mockups might be an interesting requirement for new buggies and maybe significant repair jobs … require a failure test of life size components with estimated stress levels (mike going to town with a ball peen seemed to be a good measure of how much stress an axle should be able to handle) maybe something slightly more scientific could be figured out.

Things that don’t work:
-nails as harness attachment points
-ill-fitting helmets
-relying on the harness system to keep a skinny driver completely stationary in a spacious buggy
-letting drivers convince you their arms are short enough when they aren’t.

Things that do work:
some composite tips …
extra kevlar layers at high shock areas like attachment points
lots of pressure during layups (no voids in your mold!)
isolate aluminum from carbon (recently had a aluminum sleeve fall out of a carbon canoe after about 10 years of use due to battery effect corrosion)

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:15:04 +0000

I hear you on making Design Comp non-useless Tom, but, well, for example let’s say a team, on a quest to save as much weight as possible, went with a pushbar mount that laminates only to the inside bottom of the buggy with no mechanical attachments and then decided to loop the harness around the pushbar mount. Is a design judge going to look at that and say ‘Hey man, a fat AEPi alumni could fall on the pushbar and break the mount off; that’s totally not going to be restrain your driver if she runs into a curb at speed. By the power vested in me as a design comp judge I award you zero points and tell you to stop being naughty. Now go and roll that buggy on raceday.’? The only way that becomes meaningful is if they mandate design comp (boo for more work for mechanics before raceday) and if they give design comp judges the power to decide that a buggy is unsafe and cannot roll the next day at raceday (boo, and boo for qualifying a buggy for raceday that is deemed unsafe).

Maybe I’ll start a new design comp thread in forums. But anyway, for safety would it help to have folks give examples of what they’ve done which has worked? I had drivers crash into curbs at speed and into parked cars on the hills and didn’t have any injury issues. A compilation of what has worked (and what has not worked, for those with other experiences) might be helpful.

By: tommyK

tommyK — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:40:10 +0000

I’m not sure this is a ‘find a better design’ problem as much as its a ‘build it right’ problem. I’ve seen pushbars and axles fail (I’m looking at you Rage). The ‘grab my hands’ rule isn’t a design check, it’s a check on sleepy mechanics forgetting to properly load/tighten/fasten a driver in. I think there’s a missing overlap in the role of design competition and safety inspections. Safety is one of the categories that design is graded on, shouldn’t all buggies built have to submit their build methods and any safety qualifications to an esteemed board of secrecy sworn educators, professionals and colleagues?

Committee to Restore Utter Dignity to Designcomp
tommyK

By: the cook

the cook — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:13:30 +0000

the bottom of the pushbar/pushbar mount provides a seriously strong mount for the harness, it can be looped around rather than just through-bolted. The load is thus distributed evenly to both the top and bottom skins

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:48:51 +0000

Though I suppose the attachment point is the problem, right? Yeesh. I dunno how you can standardize with the variety of construction techniques employed. Could add a ‘pick up the buggy w/ driver inside, incline to 45deg, shake for 30 seconds’ step to capes, which would be fun, but doesn’t replicate a crash. But it would be cool to watch.

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:30:52 +0000

In my day we used seat belt webbing looped around the rear axle on each side of the pushbar and secured to the front through an eye-bolt. Owing to the loading system and the physical characteristics of a human female we figured it to be most likely that we needed to keep a driver from ejecting from the front hatch as in the event of a spin and tail-first crash her ass (and, I suppose, the pushbar… ow…) would keep her from emerging from the rear hatch.

If memory serves we sourced the webbing ourselves though. Any thought on having Sweepstakes supply suitable webbing? Might avoid the 4AM realization that Carl got drunk and forgot to pick up the webbing we need to roll the new buggy with (‘will duct tape work?’ ‘well, we NEED to roll…’), etc..

By: tommyK

tommyK — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:20:44 +0000

In my day we used to make mock-ups of anchor points and test them with free weights to meet the stipulated design rules. A few years later the new head mechanic proved a new attachment method was vastly superior to our old design through head to head comparisons.

What kind of access and freedom of information should safety-chairs have to measures such as these? Should harness designs, safety hardware and attachment methods be publicly available information for everyone’s use? On display at design comp?

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:54:35 +0000

Just to clarify for DTD, the driver had all proper safety equipment, was securely in her harness, and the harness was securely attached at all 3 anchor points. It was the anchor points themselves that failed, not the harness.