Monday, October 31, 2011

Great News!

Some great news to share. Jose Wall has some family connections to Moffett Field. He has talked to these connections about access to the on-site wind tunnels. The people at Moffett Field have given us the ok to use their wind tunnels!

Another good news to share. We have our first official rider. Her name is Meghan McNamara. She's currently a student at Sana Clara University where she runs on the women's cross country and track teams. She's also a spin instructor extraordinaire as I can attest personally. After every one of her spin sessions I am totally 100% pooped out!. Welcome to the team Meghan!

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Genesis of the San Jose Human Powered Vehicle (HPV) Club

So how did the San Jose HPV club come about? Well we have to go back to 1997-98. I was finishing up my engineering degree at Cal Poly. I needed to do a senior project. I had worked previously on the Cal Poly HPV club back in 1994. I worked mostly on the fairing fabrication. The process of fabricating an HPV faring is quite long and complicated involving the fabrication of a foam male plug and female molds. For my senior project I wanted to try a new approach and machine the molds directly without the need of a foam male plug. So I designed a new fairing for the Cal Poly HPV team and had full scale molds machined at Scaled Composites. It's a long story that I will share at a later time. So anyway the 1998 Cal Poly HPV team went to Denver to compete in the ASME HPV College competition. And our HPV kicks some serious butt! We won both men's and women's sprints. Anyway George Leone, well known in the HPV community for many years, was the team's unofficial adviser. He had encouraged me to design and build my own HPV after graduation. I've toyed with the idea of starting an HPV team for years. But just now the time is right. I've met some new friends recently who share my dream of building the fastest Human Powered Vehicle in the world! So we march on now. It should be a fun adventure!

Sunday, October 23, 2011

San Jose HPV Club is born!

So over the past month or we have been meeting informally. On Friday, October 14, Jose, Tony, and myself went to Cal Poly SLO to pick up the foam molds for the Lazarus HPV fairing. Thank you George Leone and Will Hilgenberg for helping us load the very heavy molds onto the trailer.

We stored the molds temporarily at Toupal's Upholstery in San Jose thanks to Wade Siemens! Thanks Wade!