Establishing MACH - A Bumpy Ride
When I was a freshman, my friends MACH president Caden, treasurer Andrew, and inventory manager Felipe approached me about joining their vision for the first auto club at Mudd. It’s been a surprisingly ambitious undertaking, considering we know of no prior automotive engineering projects, courses, or specialists at Mudd.
The dream began with the idea of building an electric vehicle from bicycle parts to collect the surprisingly not-insignificant amount of scrap material around the Claremont Colleges, demonstrating our values as future engineers of sustainability, resourcefulness, and community. The idea began to take shape as some kind of electric motorcycle and sidecar. Then, after five semesters of planning, ideating, and petitioning for a total of $2,900 from our student body, the design evolved into a sleek, full-on hybrid go-kart, which will incorporate an electric motor and 440cc Yamaha snowmobile engine we found a great deal on, and even ATV parts that someone donated! Below is an intermediate design sketched by one of our members, Young.
While we’ve settled on this go-kart design, our vision of an electric vehicle that collects scrap around campus has lived on as we’re now working on hybridizing our frame, exploring both an electric motor and ICE motor in parallel. Beyond contributing to just about every aspect of design and assembly, I’m continuing to advance that vision by helping manage our club’s meetings, budget, and documentation as vice president. I still remember the excitement from when we had one of our first general meetings, where we ran through introductions to our leadership team and initial ideas on a Miro board, then began collecting and fleshing out ideas on a whiteboard. I even sketched out a pretty thorough diagram of what we once called “Beats Walkin’ 2” in honor of Caden’s bicycle. The journey since then has been a fun ride!
