Category Archives: Power Racing Series

From Kansas City to Motor City

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

Once again the Milwaukee Makerspace Racing Team made it to Maker Faire Kansas City to race, hang out with people from other spaces, break things, and have some fun. We’ve been attending Maker Faire KC for about six years now, and it’s always a blast (even when it rains.)

We managed to fit four people and two race cars into a rented pickup truck, which worked well enough with a little creative Tetris inspired packing. The team consisted of Pete, Mat, and Andy for this outing, and we picked up Marshall from the Bodgery in Madison along the way. (And boy, it’s a good thing we did!)

Marshall didn’t bring his Mystery Machine, so we made sure he’d get a chance to drive one of our cars, which he did, but he also spent some time replacing the controller that failed on the Wienermobile Saturday morning before the first race. (And yes, Marshall just happened to bring a spare controller with him!)

Mat’s Unicorn Kart is just a year old, but it’s seen half a dozen races already, and it’s proving to be a fairly fast and reliable car, which is the combination you typically want on the track. He also debuted a new Unicorn front-end which looked amazing (and held up pretty well, despite losing hooves during the races.)

Andy was only there on Saturday, so he did a bit of racing on the Wienermobile, and yes, he drove it backwards for a bit in preparation for the “Backwards Race” (don’t ask.) We didn’t bring Andy’s Dead Bug because he’s been rebuilding it and it just wasn’t ready in time, and well, we didn’t have room.

And yeah, that’s actually Pete standing at the finish line with a medal because he won a sprint race. Typically he’s behind the camera or otherwise helping run the races, but with a smaller team this year he was more than happy to finally get a chance to drive again. (Don’t ask how long his legs hurt after the race weekend.)

Sunday’s endurance was quite a race! We let the other team from Milwaukee (Murray and Ethan) drive the Wienermobile a bit since their car spent more time in the pits than on the track during the weekend. In the end, Unicorn Kart got first in the Endurance, with the Wienermobile coming in second, and we won a bunch of other medals for Moxie and other things, etc.

But that’s not all! We’re headed to Detroit this week for more madness. Detroit has twice as many cars, and three times as many crazy people, so we’ll see how it goes. We may not go the fastest, but if we have fun, we’re all winners!

Wienermobile and Wienermobile

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

If you joined us at Maker Faire Kansas City maybe you got to see the debut of the little Wienermobile we built for the Power Racing Series. Besides being well received from the crowd, it did pretty good in the race! Due to Moxie points (which get awarded for being awesome) we won the overall race weekend. We came home, wrote a blog post about it, and started getting ready for Maker Faire Detroit…

Detroit was a blast, and well, a few things broke, but meanwhile the folks at Oscar Mayer noticed what we did, and sent us an email asking if the BIG Wienermobile could come visit the LITTLE Wienermobile. We responded with an enthusiastic “YES!!!”

And that’s how the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile came to visit Milwaukee Makerspace on September 1st, 2017. You may notice the two Wienermobiles look quite a bit different. Well, there have been many different Wienermobiles over the years. Due to some confusion about which model we based ours on, we looked at the fact that the vehicle was designed by Carl G. Mayer in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1952 and received its patent in 1954. So we split the difference and chose number 1953. Good Enough!

Honey Mustard and Sammie Jo (yes, the “Hotdoggers” get cool nicknames) loved our little version of the Wienermobile, and we gave them a quick tour of the space, explaining what a makerspace is, and how it works, and showing off Willie’s boat for the very last time.

Since the Wienermobile was there at 9am on a Friday, a lot of our members were at work, or sleeping, or building Daleks. We had a good group of members though, many who helped with the construction of the Wienermobile in some way. (Not picture: Kathy and Kyle, the primary builders! Unfortunately they were out at Burning Man showing off some of their other crazy projects!)

Mat (pictured sitting on the Wiener) served as our driver, providing a demo of the capabilities of the Wienermobile at full throttle. (Reminder: we really need to fix the brakes before driving it again at full throttle!)

Besides all the awesome members who showed up to meet the giant Wiener, we should have a shout-out for Rick, who was busy grilling up Oscar Mayer wieners for us! We all had an early lunch that day, and everybody got to grab a wiener.

Oh yeah, when the Wienermobile is parked outside your makerspace, there’s a good chance the neighbors will notice. A bunch of people who live near the space stopped by, got whistles and stickers, and then got to go inside the Wienermobile. I heard at least three different kids describe it as “COOL!!” and “AWESOME!!”

What can we say? We like big buns and we cannot lie! If you haven’t seen the little Wienermobile in action yet, make sure you visit us at Maker Faire Milwaukee on September 23rd & 24th, 2017 at the Expo Center at State Fair Park. We’ll be racing it against 15 other similarly weird and wild vehicles in the Power Racing Series.

And who knows? Maybe the big Wienermobile will show up again!

The Wiener is a Winner!

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

We built a scaled-down version of the Winenermobile and took it to Maker Faire Kansas City to race it in the Power Racing Series and we won!

Yeah, that all sounds a little crazy, but that’s the sort of thing that happens at Milwaukee Makerspace…

I think it was mainly Kathy’s idea to build a Wienermobile, since “Oscar Mayer Weinermobile” [sic] was on the “hit list” of desired vehicles for the series.

Building it involved carving the body (dog and bun) from foam and then covering it with fiberglass to create a solid structure. It was messy and time consuming, but it turned out great!

Because the Power Racing Series is all very last minute, here’s what we had just a few weeks before Maker Faire KC. A pile of parts still not fully assembled. Kyle spent a lot of time putting things together in the last two weeks while Pete worked on figuring out the electronics. Somehow it all worked in the end.

People ask how it drives, and hey, it drives like a tiny Wienermobile! Actually, Kyle said it’s like riding a quad, and he proved to be our best wiener rider. Most other people got thrown off the wiener at least once, but he held on tight and rode the wiener to victory!

(While the Wienermobile is a fast car, the Power Racing Series also awards points for being “awesome” and we managed to have the most awesome vehicle of the weekend, racking up the most Moxie points helped us secure the overall win for the race weekend.)

If you like hot dogs, you’ll have another chance to catch this winning wiener at Maker Faire Detroit and then again at Maker Faire Milwaukee.

Spindles of Wood

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

“Spindles of Wood” is not the name of the latest album from some obscure Icelandic emo band! Instead they are actually the front wheel spindles for our No-weld PPPRS vehicle. (You probably remember the frame from last time.)

While most teams in the Power Racing Series just buy pre-made spindles and weld them in place, our “No-weld” spindles were built using wood, glue some staples/screws, and use some 5/8″ bolts to attach to the car, and for the wheels to attach to.

We’ve still got to get the whole steering thing worked out, but we’re on our way! (Things are moving a bit slower than we had hoped, so we might debut this thing at Detroit in July instead of Kansas City in June, but we’ll see how it goes.)

No welding? No PPPRoblemS!

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

If you’re not familiar with the Power Racing Series, it’s a challenge to build and race an electric vehicle. You start with a Power Wheels car and transform it into a powerful machine that can transport a human, and oh yeah, you have a budget of only $500. (Pictured above is a car made by some 15 year old kids a few years ago for Maker Faire Detroit!)

You can find super-cheap (and even free) used Power Wheels cars on craigslist, and usually the batteries are dead and there’s no charger, which doesn’t matter, because we replace all that with more powerful motors, batteries, motor controllers, brakes, etc.

One of the goals of the series has been to get high school age kids involved, but some of the skills needed to build a car may be out of reach of your local high school, such as working with metal. Welding equipment may not be available, and mentors may not have metalworking skills, so we wanted to develop a reference vehicle that uses no welding. We chose to mainly work with wood for our build, but check out the “no-weld car” wiki page for some other builds…

Here’s the start of our frame. It’s all wood, glue, and screws. We’ve utilized a torsion box design for strength. So far we’ve only used a saw, drill, and some clamps. No specialty tools that are out of the reach of your common workshop. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re going to try to make this car super-cheap, and easy to build, so that many teams (of kids and/or adults) could easily build it. As members of a makerspace, we may tend to forget that not everyone has access to the tools and skills we do.

We’re also working on front wheel spindles build using wood and bolts. Yes, you can buy metal spindles for cheap, but a lot of what we are doing is experimenting with materials and geometry, which should provide some valuable lessons along the way, and it should be cheap/easy to modify things, try-test-try again, and see what the outcome is.

You can check out more about this project on the Milwaukee Makerspace wiki. We’ll do our best to add updates as we go. Hopefully this thing will be ready to race in June at Maker Faire Kansas City!