BYU Baja Racing Team
Baja SAE challenges student teams to design, build, and race an off‑road vehicle that can survive rough terrain, endurance events, and real‑world engineering constraints.
The project pushed my mechanical intuition, teamwork, and rapid problem‑solving in a way no classroom ever could.
On my team, I worked on a cross‑disciplinary effort to take a vehicle from concept to competition, designing components, troubleshooting failures, and contributing to a car built to handle suspension hits, acceleration tests, and a multi‑hour endurance race.
Reconceptualizing the Front Axle for Weight Minimization
A teammate and I explored using a high‑impact wrench socket as a lightweight CV‑joint alternative. A CV joint lets a shaft transmit torque at an angle, and we only needed it to spin freely one way and lock the other, similar to a ratcheting socket, so the tool’s built‑in one‑way mechanism made it a viable option.
Front axel required one of these two differential elements
Sprag Clutch
Sprag clutches and ratcheting wheels are both used when you need one‑way rotation, free in one direction, locked in the other. That was the core intention behind our CV‑joint alternative.
Ratcheting Wheel
Portals, U‑joints, CV joints, and socket wrenches all solve the same problem: transferring torque between parts that aren’t perfectly aligned. Each one is a different mechanical strategy for getting rotational power where it needs to go. After stress‑testing our car on a treadmill and running multiple test drives, we confidently settled on the ratcheting socket. It was lightweight, affordable, and incredibly easy to assemble, just click it into place, while still giving us the one‑way rotation and locking behavior we needed.
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High Impact Socket Wrench Joint
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Portal
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Large CV Joint
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Heavy U-Joint
Once we chose the ratcheting socket approach, I led the spline modeling and Mastercam machining of four prototype axles and four final parts. I designed the spline so it interfaces with the socket exactly like a hand‑tool driver, while the opposite end of the splines mates directly with the wheel.
Documentation
In addition, I wrote a business proposal for our stakeholder outlining the niche vehicle requirements, and I created BOMs for each subsystem along with selection matrices, cost analysis, efficiency analysis, and a concept weight estimate.
