The longer we have reached into it, the more extensive the project of building two cars has turned out to be. Right now there are a lot of things going on simultaneously, and we thought we might show you a few of the things happening.

Joakim and Nina trying out the brakelights on Baldos II

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Preparations
As you might have read in our last post, the Baldos II is heading down to Monaco to participate in a conference regarding environmentally friendly technology. And since His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco himself is participating, we had to shape it up a bit. Baldos II is right now under reconstruction (we’re up to beat the 152.2 km/liter that we’ve already accomplished) so we had to do some modifications for it to look more as a car than parts of a car. We had some issues with the ignition module and the free wheel, but most of it was fixed during the week.

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Design
The design and manufacture of the prototype, Baldos ‘X’, is also moving forward. Since air resistance is one of the primary concerns when building a prototype, we designed the chassis as small as possible. This means, on the other hand, that there’s not too much room for other systems; like the wheel suspension, driver’s controls, driver’s seat and the driver herself.

Hmm... - will there be enough room for the helmet?

We printed a model of the vehicle on a piece of cardboard, and both Janne and Christophe ended up lying on the floor, on top of the cardboard, trying to see where to squeeze everything in. Our primary choice of driver, Stina, has a slender figure and she probably won’t have any trouble fitting in. Janne, our reserve driver, is a tougher case – as a final resort we might modify him to fit in the car instead of the reverse.

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The new CNC-milled stator for the electrical motor

CNC
Janne is also involved in producing parts in the CNC-machine. For those of you not familiar with the system, CNC stands for Computer Numerical Controlled and refers to a computerized production system used by many factories over the world. The system has some clear benefits – you can use several kinds of tools in a single machine and get a lot higher tolerance levels on your parts than if you did it by hand – but it takes a lot of time to learn, and a simple mistake in the programming might imply doing it all over again. Fortunately the results have been promising so far; the stator (designed and manufactured by Joakim) for example will make a valuable contribution to the electrical motor.

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Lastly, we had an addition to the Team; Fredrik has joined us! He has already been working on the new ignition module for the engines and will continue to supply us with his programming expertise in the future as well. Welcome to Team Baldos, Fredrik!

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Planning a trip to the riviera sometime soon? If so, why not pay a visit to the CleanEquity© Monaco conference march 4th and 5th? “The Worlds No.1 event for emerging cleantech”. Baldos II is heading there right now!

Well, let’s do the math here. The distance by road from Luleå to Monaco is 3728 km (according to Google maps). With a fuel-consumtion of 0,0065 l/10km the Baldos II would get there with the equivalent of 21,3 l of gasoline. That’s like € 21 for getting to the Côte d’Azur – not bad for a tight student’s budget!

Unfortunately there are some other facts to be considered. It’s maximum speed of 50 km/h would imply travelling constantly for more than three days and nights, and the fact that it only takes one student at a time and has no stereo could make such a long trip somewhat boring. So, for this time, the Baldos II travels inside a bigger cousin of hers.

The students who are right now driving the Baldos II to Monaco are Mattias, Fredrik and Ulrika from last year’s Team Baldos. They, together with Max (who is part of this year’s Team Baldos) were the ones to improve the vehicle enough to make it allowed for street-use. With this mind it’s only fair letting them represent the team down there.

Like a glove

The "DES459" in the "600 Mabi"

Mattias, Fredrik and Ulrika right before takeoff to Monaco

This year’s Team Baldos wishes them the best of luck in their representative journey; and please avoid betting with the car in the Casino.

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It’s been a while now since our last post on this page. One might think that we got overwhelmed by all that attention from everyone and took a moment to just lean back and enjoy the commotion. Quite on the opposite, we’ve been working hard; so hard we just haven’t found the time to post anything.

Mattias designing one of the parts of the alternator

The production is now well on its way. There are still some gaps to fill in concerning the final design choices, but they are shrinking by the hour. Everyone in the group are right now either reading up on something, designing something, producing something, ordering something, improving something, or redoing something that should have been right in the first place. If you were to take photos of us working now would be a good time since we are all sitting entirely focused on some detail or system in one of the cars. Next time we will post some images.

One thing that has amused us in the last week is a survey published by Manpower Sweden (Swedish). It says that the number one dream job among Swedes is engineer (!), even outdoing jobs such as writer, pilot, musician and adventurer. This because “engineers might earn a  high salary and also have an ability to improve the community”, according to the study. Well, the salary part might not be too overwhelming in our case, but here we are, designing a vehicle that very well might improve things later on. And yeah, we feel kind of good about it, so we encourage all other Swedes to stop dreaming and go for it.

Another thing is that a Swedish magazine Ny Teknik (“New Technology”) made a car designer draw his impression of a future SAAB model, now that the company is back on track again. The results turned out something like this. Doesn’t that color and shape just remind you of something? Hmm…

From now on we will send out two posts a week to keep you closely informed about our progress, so stay tuned!

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In the last few days we have eagerly followed how the news of our little red record-breaking car has spread around the globe.

The amount of sources that has written about us are now so many that we no longer have a chance to refer to all of them, but except for the prevously mentioned Sweden and the Netherlands, we have also been noticed in France, Italy, Great Britain, Australia, Japan and Russia. The explanation is perhaps the English translation of our original Swedish press release – you can find it here.

We are of course glad for the attention, although we have to admit it creates some performance anxiety before the race in May. It seems the results of our efforts are appreciated by others, especially since we have moved beyond the stage of talking and actually achieved something environmentally friendly, and that is of course a positive thing.

This week the project has moved into a new phase. The concept development and system-level design are completed, as well as the production planning, and now begins the extensive detail-design and manufacturing/ordering/modification of parts section. This has been a key part of the earlier projects, and judging from them our progress at this stage will be crucial for the quality of the final results.

Some of you have asked for more contemporary images and movies from the car, and of course we have some more to share! These are the official images from the test run:

Photos: Leif Nyberg

And here are some movie clips of the car:

• A warm-up lap during one of the test-runs

• An indoors trial race as a preparation for measurement (Note the ICE kicking in at 9 sec)

• Baldos II on the winter roads of Luleå

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