It has been a busy 5 days in the land of the solar car project at the University of Minnesota. On Thursday, we gave a presentation of our last generation car, Borealis III, to one of our major sponsors, 3M. A little show and tell of the car, examples of how we use their gracious donations, a Q&A session with some of their employees and a small presentation of our progress on Centaurus I. While there I met the man who invented Post-It Notes.

Saturday we started the task of taking a pile of foam and turning it into a solar car. We started with this:

and put it on these:

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a picture of all the foam on the bases, my camera battery died. But other people did, and I will get pictures up as soon as I can. We were able to get all the foam cut and sanded to fit, recut and resanded until everything fit perfectly. Sunday was a day packed full of fun noxious chemicals. We glued all of our foam to the mold bases, and let them cure overnight.

Safety First, of course!

This morning, we met at PaR at 8am and loaded up the mold bases into the trailer and the Ryder truck and drove them about 45 minutes to Remele Engineering in Big Lake, MN. We met one of the guys that creates the tires that Lance Armstrong uses in races (owner of the business next to PaR) while we were loading up at PaR.

At Remele, we were graced with a fantastic tour of the facilities. The monstrous machinery that they have in that building is quite impressive. More impressive however, is that we were in a facility that produced the backbone for the International Space Station, mills the Radar Shields for Navy AEGIS Cruisers, raydomes for Raytheon, structural components for the joint strike fighters and much more.

Solar Car: Loving every minute of it.