Annual contest held by the Triton Engineering Student Counsel in a parking lot in which teams have to collect junk and use it to build a gravity powered cart that is raced down a hill at UCSD (Peterson hill). I competed with two other engineering friends of mine.

Picture 1. Our cart in our first year of the contest. We decided to put the steering in the back, controlled by the pedals in the front. The pedals were connected to the back handlebars with bike brake cables. This design turned out to be disastrously unstable at higher speeds (due to the rear steering) and resulted in one of the steering cables snapping and the cart rolling over on its side.

Picture 2: The cart we built in our second year of competing. We decided to go with a slimmer motorcycle-esque design with the central post as the main frame. We added the cart wheels on the sides of the back wheel to give the cart the ability to lean, and added more mass to the cart, which seemed to make carts faster in competition, by welding disk brakes we found to the cart. The cart ended up being the fastest in the time trial portion of the contest, out of about 32 teams.

Picture 3: The same cart but from a different view

Picture 4: The beginnings of our cart in the third year. We strove to make the actual frame of the cart as massive as possible in order to recreate the speed from the previous year, hence the bollard.

Picture 5: The final product of the bollard cart. It made it to the quarterfinals of the contest.