Many post secondary students see summer as a time to focus on something other than the demands of their education.
Not so for the University of Saskatchewan Sled Dogs, a student design team that builds one-quarter scale tractors.
“At the start of July, we’re sitting down with our faculty advisers and we’re going to develop a test program for summer and hopefully as we move into the fall we’re going to have a lot of new ideas to base next year’s design off of,” said team captain Zach Martin.
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Martin and his 15-member team placed 12th in a field of 23 competitors at this year’s American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers one-quarter scale tractor student design competition in Peoria, Illinois held May 28-31.
The Sled Dogs won the best appearance award for the third year running and placed fifth in the written design report, an improvement over last year in that category.
The U of S team was one of only two Canadian teams in this year’s competition. Quebec’s Universite Laval placed 16th overall.
The goal of the competition is to design a prototype tractor that matches the rules and standards laid out by the competition committee and can compete reliably.
The main event is the tractor pull where each team attempts to pull a progressive sled the farthest to demonstrate the tractor’s performance.
Tractors are judged on man-oeuvreability, manufacturability, performance, serviceability and other key design aspects.
Each prototype must use at least one of the same model of Briggs & Stratton engine (the average entries used four engines) and Firestone tires.
The tractor weight has to be 850 pounds or less without the operator.
Nick Hladky was in charge of design for the team. He recently graduated from mechanical engineering and is employed at Midwest Combustion.
Hladky said the biggest change from previous years was to go from a hydrostatic to a mechanical driveline. With any prototype comes risk and knowledge gained through failure.
This year’s project was no exception, with a mechanical breakdown during the manoeuvreability course.
“We ended up being disqualified for not completing that event and that cost us 100 points. If we hadn’t lost those points, it would have put us into sixth place,” said Hladky.
The competition emphasizes that teams buy manufactured parts for their tractors, which they have to design and build from the ground up.
The Sled Dogs are most proud of their custom frame, which they consider the most unique part of their newest prototype.
They designed two aluminum c-channels and cut out a pattern using water jet. The number of parts on the frame was reduced from last year. It’s easier to assemble and significantly lighter. Three Briggs and Stratton engines are joinedwith a belt system driving a continuously variable transmission (CVT) from a Polaris Ranger.
The CVT is attached to a transaxle, which was pulled out of a John Deere Gator all-terrain vehicle.
“The real design is meshing all these parts and making them work just perfect together and having a frame that can support it all and have it be in line with the competition rules. That’s the real challenge,” said Hladky.
The tractor also boasts sophisticated controls.
“We’ve got a stepper motor that has a computer program on it that has the curve response for our throttle.”
Despite the breakdown at this year’s competition, the team is considering a similar design for next year.
However, it will have changes, said Martin, because the competition puts heavy emphasis on innovation.
“This was the first year doing a mechanical drive. So we switched from hydrostatic to this CVT into a transaxle. We thought we had properly specked our CVT for size of weights in actual size of the clutch but when we got down there and started looking at tractors that other teams had done and teams that have three, four years with the CVT, we realized that we had drastically undersized our CVT and our weights and because of the undersize, we didn’t get the performance that we wanted,” said Martin.
He added that the U of S entry went beyond the competition requirements in one aspect. The competition asked for a pulling tractor while the U of S created an overall functional tractor.
“That’s something we feel we achieved this year: it has a broad range of speed, very man-oeuvreable, reliable for a prototype piece of equipment, easy to operate. It’s on the right course for functionality of the utility tractors that you get from the ag suppliers,” said Martin.
The Sled Dog entry won for best appearance for the third year running.
“There’s a lot to be proud of when you win best appearance and we find that helps with marketability of the tractor. It’s important to look good,” said Martin.
This year the Sled Dogs had 10 students from Agriculture and Bioresources, two from Mechanical, one from Chemical, two from first-year engineering and one from Geology.
“This is one of the best things that a student can do because you get to start from the beginning…. Come up with the design, evaluate this design, find out what is wrong and do some analyses on it, draft it up on a computer so you get the whole industry thing.
This is how industry does it. Then you get to build it once you’ve printed all your drawings and you have to test it after and make it look good,” said Hladky.
As team captain, Martin finds sponsors, companies that are willing to donate time and money. This year there were 21 major sponsors.
This was Eve Wright’s second year on the team. Going into her fourth year of Agriculture and Bioresources, Wright has set her sights on practical experience.
“A lot of engineers come out (of university) knowing everything in the books, but not how to apply what you learned to the real world. So I wanted to do something outside of the classroom and learn some more about it. And one-quarter scale, because it’s a large team and there’s a lot of people that have been around a while that you can really learn a lot from,” she said.
Hladky even brought his boss in to check out the tractor.
“He was just tickled pink because he realizes that it’s off the job training for me. He thought it’s one of the best things a student can do from an employer standpoint because he knows that the student becomes more aware of the real world industry.”
