OC welding students to compete in international competition.

The students of Olympic College’s welding program will soon put their building skills to the test against engineering students from all over the world.

The 2009 SAE Collegiate Design Series, a mini-baja competition, features static events, like the judging of the designs, which will take place May 8 at the Portland EXPO Center while the dynamic events are May 9 and the endurance race on May 10, both at the Washougal MX Park in Washougal, Wash.

The team, made up of Joel Atteberry, Laddie Cox, Nate Farmer and Eric Potter, built a vehicle which will compete in several events including a hill climb, maneuverability test, acceleration test, a rock crawl and an endurance event, said Al Kitchens, OC welding instructor and adviser for the project.

The significance for the team members is OC will likely be the only two-year school entering the competition, according to Atteberry.

“Going through the entrance list I have not seen another junior college on it,” he said.

The competition attracts schools from across the globe and teams competing this year are from every corner of the world, according to Atteberry.

“There is at least one team coming in from Saudi Arabia,” he said. “The competition is limited to 100 contestants and I think there are about 90 in it so far.”

The OC team has been working hard since January designing and planning and actually started building in February to get their vehicle ready to win.

“We had to sit down and talk together about what our goals and ideas were,” Atteberry said. “We looked at a lot of the other team’s vehicles and aesthetically, we weren’t very happy with what they had come up with. To us they looked like the $100-$150 go-cart kits you buy down at Ace Hardware.”

The team decided to go in a different direction than what the other teams have been doing for years, and thanks to video of past mini-baja events available on www.YouTube.com, they were able to create a custom design they’re confident will give the other schools a run for their money.

“We wanted to be more like a real baja racer on a miniature scale,” Atteberry said. “We came up with a design from scratch that incorporated the desert buggies and rock crawling rigs since there is a rock crawl competition associated with this as well.”

All of the teams were required to follow certain guidelines in their designs, Atteberry said. Certain safety issues had to be addressed like minimum head clearance for the tallest driver of the vehicle and safety belts are required. Also, limits on the vehicles length and width are part of the design rules.

“We had to take our design, which we liked, and modify it a little bit,” Atteberry said. “It was interesting making some of the stuff work.”

According to Atteberry, the other teams are made up of engineering students, whereas the OC team is a team of welders.

“They are all engineering students,” he said. “They take engineering classes and a lot of them use this event as their senior thesis, so we are definitely coming at it from a different perspective as welders and people that off-road in our spare time. I think we brought a little more practical experience to what works and what we have seen break.”

The group is confident that practicality is going to reign supreme over theory, Atteberry said.

“At this point we’re expecting to show them up,” he said. “What we have built as of now is better than anything else we have seen.”

The engines for all of the vehicles are supplied by Briggs and Stratton and the rules prevent teams from making modifications to them.

“They donate the engine, but you pay the shipping and handling,” Atteberry said.

Most of the ideas for the design of the frame came from watching videos of past events, Atteberry said, including the “boat-keel bottom” which was done to add ground clearance during the rock climb.

“We watched a couple of videos and the vehicles were basically just sleds going down that rock pile,” he added.

Another customization the team made to hopefully give them an advantage over the other competitors was in their transmission.

“We took a 1982 Yamaha YZ-250 that Laddie had sitting in his garage and we cut the whole front end of the engine off, welded up the front where we cut it so that we just had the transmission,” Atteberry said. “That means we have a 5-speed transmission with a centrifugal clutch instead of just a high low gear box like most of the other schools are using.”

“When it comes to hill climbing having those low gears will make a big difference,” Kitchens added.