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Pictured above, the Solar Arrow Raycing Team of CH Yoe High School |
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Finish line photo in Columbus, Indiana. |
| Here is a picture of the beginnings of the Solar Arrow I. Students are carrying in the 6160 T6 aircraft aluminum donated to the project by Alcoa Aluminum. | 
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After a little time was spent in the Temple College Annex welding shop, the frame started to come together. After we had it spot welded, we took it to Alcoa where all welds were finalized by Alcoa workers. |
| Six months it took to construct the solar array panels. Shown here is the reason. Each cell had to be soldered by hand carefully, placing the wire connector tabs just right so the full size panel would work correctly. Each of the modular panels contained 36 of these fragile glass squares. 1080 cells on the car, but they went through almost 2000 to get that number of finished, working cells! |
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Everyone gets to help make the array. It was a huge job. Many hours were put in to the work by the students. Lots of lost sleep, too!!! |
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First race day problems... Tire blowout, Battery pack drained (100 mile penalty to replace the batteries), and motor arm bearings mounted backwards. Here the guys force a new tire on the rim |
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Still in Hamilton, Texas, trying to repair the motor swing arm mounts and find out why the electrical system isn't working correctly... It was a long day. |
| Matt goes stir crazy trying to figure out the electronics. |  |
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Brent tries to help Brian and the others figure out the electronic problem. The day ended with us pulling in to the hotel at 9:30 pm. |
| Texas Motor Speedway, in the pit area. We finally figured out we needed 30 ohm resistors to prevent backflow of electricity. We had a bunch of 1 ohm so we soldered bundles of 30 together to make what we needed. We then got on the road and out of negative miles. |  |
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Finally on the road. Runnin' fine!! This is what it's about. Going down the road! |
| Tulsa OK, we remove 300 pounds of metal and parts from the car to lighten it! | 
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The car got a major overhaul during the rest day in Tulsa. Bobby Brock, our mainframe engineer worked and then drove all night to bring us the replacement modified Geo Metro Strut for the front end. The strut went out on us somewhere between Ada and Tulsa, OK. |
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In the pit in Pittsburg, KS. By this time the Solar Arrow was performing like it should have from day one. This is where Dr. Faber's foot got run over by the car, breaking a toe bone. |
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We weren't last yesterday, evident by the start today, we started ahead of the California car and soon after leaving we caught and passed the Mexico car. 5 more days of racing left. |
| Home at last. The Arrow is escorted by city police and families of the racers. | 
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The majority of the team after the race is shown here, tired and worn out, but ready to do it all over again! |
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In 2002-2003 the Solar Arrow Project was moved from Cameron to Waller Texas. Waller is about 45 miles from Downtown Houston on the NorthWest side. Still quite rural, Waller is growing. Contained within the School District boundaries are 600 square miles. Prairie View A & M University is only a 5 minute drive away. However, there is very little in the way of business and industry. This makes it a bit difficult to get another program started. So we start over with our fund raising efforts. |
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On County Fair weekend, Doc took a road trip to Columbus Indiana (the home of the Solar Stealth Solar Car Team) and picked up loan materials to construct Solar Arrow 2. Basically a frame, motor and array to modify along with miscellaneous other parts. A great place to start. This is the beginning of the loan program. These materials will be available for loan afte completion of Solar Arrow III. |
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There is a lot of work to do to get these materials into a working solar car, but they are a great help in getting our project started again. Work was started the week these parts arrived. First projects were to rework the chassis, build a front end and to reconfigure the array into the new dimension of 1.8 x 5 m. |
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