Queen McLightning
Event Location: Cocoa-FL
Competition: Junior Solar Sprint
Division: 7-8 (JSS Blue)
School: CLC Hawks
Team Size: 3
Hello and welcome to team Queens! Our car’s name is Queen McLightning. Our team’s members are…
- Anna (7th grade, 1st year Junior Solar Car)
- Juliet (7th grade, 1st year Junior Solar Car)
- Kaia (7th grade, 2nd year Junior Solar Car)
Photo and Basic Info
Throughout our eight weeks of solar car–curtesy to Karen Metcalf, who put together this whole thing–we worked on our solar car! During this time, we have built, broke, and rebuilt to create what we have now. Our theme is Lightning McQueen, and our goals for it is the be exceptionally light. This goal was semi met, as we think we could have made it lighter. During the sprint a new member was added, as our sister and friend. She did solar car last year as well and was a big help to us.
(Photo of design + car process)
Materials:
- 2 long wooden sticks
- 1 ping pong ball
- half of a fake egg
- 2 Velcro straps
- 1 motor
- 2 gears (one small and one big)
- 2 batteries
- 1 solar panel
- 4 large black wheels
- 4 rubber bands
- 2 metal axles
- 1 battery pack
Measurements:
Height: 11 cm
Weight: 293.5 g
Width: 15 cm
Gear Ratio:
Back Wheel size:
Front Wheel size:
Photos of car (redo all)
Front
bottom
Left
Right
Top
Design process:
| Date | Time spent | Activities |
| December 2, 2022 | 1 hour | Sketching out our design, and finding the theme for our car. |
| December 16, 2022 | 1 hour | Finding out how we are going to incorporate our theme into our car and eliminating ideas that wouldn’t work for us. |
| January 6, 2023 | 1 hour | Tried using a board for our base but then going back to the original idea of using Styrofoam. |
| January 13, 2023 | 1 hour | Cut the Styrofoam with a hot knife and attached the wheels. |
| January 20, 2023 | 1 hour | Our car broke, and we had to re-do a couple of things |
| January 27, 2023 | 1 hour | We added a frame at the bottom for support, because we felt it needed more. |
| February 3, 2023 | 1 hour | We “fixed” the motor, and re-did the wheels. |
| February 10, 2023 | 1 hour | We ran the car and fixed the changes that we saw. |
| March 23, 2023 | 1 hour | This was after school, when the three of us made the frame. |
| April 1, 2023 | 3 hours | During this time, we fixed what was broken, and started from scratch, again. |
Car Video
(Video of car running) It would not let us edit this but this is actually just the explanation video
Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity!
The front of the car looks very nice. WOW! That base is something else! I can’t wait to see how that does on Saturday. What a creative and unique idea!