Things didn't go our way on Sunday. From the beginning we were using motors that are a few years old. They seemed to be running ok in the lab but one of them was showing symptoms of a bad bearing. We thought it fixed itself and remained optimistic. On the last day of the competition as we were approaching the regenerative braking challenge, we decided to see how applying reverse current would change our regeneration. Instead of amplifying the recharge, it caused that bad bearing to cease up. This caused a catastrophic motor failure on that bad motor I was talking about. Now, one motor was acting like a break. I heard what sounded like wires arching and confirmed later that there were sparks coming from the bottom of our locomotive. We quickly realized we couldn't complete the regenerative braking challenge. We decided to skip the regen and continue to the traction and sound challenge. With our bad motor acting like a brake and making a tremendous amount of noise, we made it up the hill reaching a max speed of ten kilometers per hour. Speeds reached on Saturday hit the 15 kph mark with room to go but 10 kph on the traction challenge wasn't going to cut it. We knew we had lost the entire competition and waited for the results to come in.
We ended up coming in 3rd out of four teams. We had a lot of issues surface the last week of building and then a motor failure the last day of competition. I believe that if we had our motor in working order we could have won the regenerative braking challenge and possible the traction challenge. But, we'll never know, until next year.
I want to say thank you to all who have supported me in this trip and I am happy to say that I have been asked to return next year and help build the next locomotive. I plan on coming back. Cheers Mates!
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