Final Thoughts

Given that we've spent over 15 hours on the car, I'm proud of what we made. The way it turned out was a lot better than last time. This time, the rolling felt a lot smoother than last time, when it didn't really roll and was bumpy due to the significant reduce in friction. We've improved on most problems including friction, stability, and design/look. 

However, there are still some problems with the car. When rolling down a less steep hill on the street, it didn't roll so well. Disappointed, we didn't know what the problem was because we had put a lot of effort into improving the car. After some thought, I realized that the wheels should have a more even surfaced, be pointed straight, and have smoother surface which would further improve the performance of the car. In addition, to prevent other rolling, we could've glued the pvc to the wheel and the dowel to the card board which would have secured everything so that only the pvc would roll against the dowel so that there would be no decrease in angular momentum of the pvc and wheel because of the slower spinning of other parts. Another idea would be to have the dowels roll inside the pvc and have the wheels glued onto the dowels instead of having the wheels and pvc roll like in our car. Another idea is to decrease the rotational inertia of the wheels by making the wheel have less mass and less radius according to the equation I=mr^2

Despite this, I am still happy with the way the car turned out. I can gladly say that we definitely improved everything about our car from last time and I can say that we also improved our teamwork and efficiency as we finished the car in less than half the time it took for the last car. 

Hopefully, we can win the race tomorrow.