Baja SAE
Senior Design Project (9 month design cycle)
By Cole Rutkowski
Introduction:
I was on the Baja SAE team for my Senior Design Project for the 2025/2026 school year. Baja SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) is an international collegiate competition in which students design, build, test, and race an all-terrain single seat vehicle. The competition includes multiple dynamic events, including hill climb, rock crawl, and a four-hour endurance event. The competition also includes static events, including a business proposal, technical inspection, design evaluation, and cost analysis. Check out our Instagram! We posted frequent design and manufacturing videos and updates.
What sets us apart from other Baja teams is that we function strictly as a senior design project (rather than a club team). We have a 9-month cycle for designing and building our vehicle, and most of our team has little to no prior vehicle design experience. The restraints of our project challenge us in ways other Baja teams and other senior project teams aren't. Each member of our team out of necessity receives a full view of the design and manufacturing of each subsystem.
I was the chassis and manufacturing engineer for our team. The Baja SAE rulebook is a 130 page document, of which about 40% applies specifically to chassis and chassis-related constraints, which makes chassis the most rule-restricted subsystem. INSERT PICTURE HERE OF RULES I was responsible for designing a chassis that 1. protected our driver, 2. was rules compliant, 3. effectively packaged our subsystems to meet our subsystem and overall design goals.
Throughout this project, I coordinated and communicated heavily with our subsystem engineers and machine shop.
Effective, constant, and consistent communication is the most valuable skill I developed during this project.
We manufactured the entirety of the vehicle in-house (except the front uprights), and negotiating space to use the
weld shop, mill, lathe, and waterjet required daily chats and updates with our machinists.
The chassis subteam was responsible for the packaging and integration of all subsystems. We were a center-point for
communication between other subteams that often had conflicting goals and interests. For example, our early isolated designs
for the rear suspension would have gone directly though our CVT! Obviously that's not possible, so as the chassis engineer
I communicated integration requirements between the drivetrain engineers and suspension engineers, and as a team we negotiated where
to compromise on each subsystem's design goals to achieve the overall design and performance goals of our vehicle.
I constantly and actively sought out design updates from our subteams so I could, for example, update pickup points
for suspension arms, pedal mounting, seat mounting, and engine and CVT mounting all while confirming assembly and packaging
clearances and rules compliance. In such a high-speed design cycle, subsystem designs can change on a dime, and I had to be
ready to pick up every update and change the chassis and assembly at a moment's notice.
As the manufacturing engineer, I was the lead for an in-depth manufacturing review with our director and machinists. I compiled and standardized our drawing package, and reviewed and approved all drawings for our custom components. I made drawings for chassis tubes and assembly. My primary manufacturing work was with tube fabrication and welding. I was 1 of the 2 primary welders for our chassis and was required to pass visual and destructive weld tests at competition.
