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So im finally getting around to posting my mini baja stories here and believe me there is a whole series of books worth of stories here.

I guess i should start at the begginin for those of you who dont know what the mini baja is. It is a world wide competition that is held and orginized by SAE International. They usually have 3 competitions in north america every year. In 2011 we chose to go to pioria illinois. This competition was held at the caterpillar proving grounds so we got to see tons of big dozers like the D11!! Now the purpose of the competition is to push engineering students to the max. We have to design test prove and build a baja vehical that cand do all that is spelled out in the 100+ page rule book. You have to use material that you prove to be strong and a design that you have to prove to work as well. The only thing that you are not allowed to change or do anything with is the engine which is a 10hp briggs and stratton engine. This is how they keep the teams equal. other then that you can use any material for hte chassis as long as it is proven to be strong and and drive train design (we used special stuff here). So thats just a brief back ground on the competition.

Now that you all have a back ground il get into me and my friends starting it. SOOOO 4 years ago me and my 4 friends John, Steve, Steve, and Nick were in our 2 year of Mechanical Engineering school and for some god unknown reason we started to talk about how lame some of the sr projects were (we went to a presentation). So somehow or another we stubled on this competition and we thought it would be intereseting. Now remember that most of these schools have been doing this for 20 plus years and our school, Farmingdale State University never has done this before or anything like this. It kind of worked out very we becouse the 5 of us were all specialized in different areas. I was the welder and head fabricator, John was a heavy equip mechanic so he knew what he was doing and he got us alot of stuff and steve L was a smart one so he did alot of the thinking while me and john dreamed, and the other two were good salespeople. So with this and a half ass idea we went to our chair person and gave him a heart attack when we told him what we want to do and how much we needed to get in money which out school apparently didnt have. So we came up with a solution. We worked the corrner!

just kidding we started to go around to companies between classes and pitching our ideas and such which proved to be hard but it worked for a few out of the 200 plus places we went to.

Now we had to get designing. I was the best with Inventor so i spent the time and came up with a chassis design while some of the others were begging companies for money. A month later i came out with the first of about ten variations of the chassis.
At this point we still didn't even have any money to build so we started to go around to the school and beg and finally became a seated club so that gave us a little bit of money to start to build. Now for a Place to build it! Im going to have to do this story or write up a little at a time cause its going to take a long time so comment away and ask questions as you feel and i will answer them and i will try to dig up some photos. And sorry for bad grammar and such