Objective

Our group project is to design a personal transportation vessel that can cost effectively transport at least two people comfortably, efficiently, reliably, and can travel long distance. The personal aspect rules out large vessels such as large airplanes, boats, trains, and rocket ships. The cost and efficiency requirements rules out items like jet skis, hot air balloons, hover crafts, and jet packs. The obvious option would be to make some sort of hyper mileage, alternative power source car. But thinking outside the box we decided to have it do more than just transport us. We wanted it to be cheap to produce and maintain, carpool lane compliant, as well as being cheap and green to operate. We decided to bypass expensive solutions like hydrogen fuel cells, electric, hybrid, or natural gas kits and recycle a readily available propulsion system and design a motorcycle powered reverse trike. These were the things we need to keep in mind while trying to develop a solution plan to create our final design.

Meeting 2/15/2013

 Our black box...

Our team

Introduction

As part of California State University Long Beach's mechanical engineering program and MAE 471/472 class, we get the opportunity to work in groups to design and build something new. The entirety of th project will be fro January 2013 to December 2013. We are given the luxury of choosing our own ideas in any field as long as we are not copying someones design or trying to build something not realistic within in our skill, financial, or universe's limit. Our group decided that we wanted to get the most out of our education and campus resources by building something we would not be able to do on our own. This blog will cover our journey and hopefully our prosperous careers. Our group consist of 5 engineering students includind Nigel Geisler project manager, Adrian Silva accountant, Scott Snider secretary, Alfredo Guiterrez project coordinator, and Kamran Adlparvar parts analyst. We are group # 5 and our team name is "The Third Wheel".