Gopher Motorsports identifies 'cost of disorganization' for FSAE teams

When the Gopher Motorsports team at the University of Minnesota built its car for the 2016 Formula SAE® event in Michigan, the team discovered that proper wire harness labeling can save almost $800,000 in preventing the “cost of disorganization” among U.S. FSAE teams and cars.

Each spring, collegiate engineers have more than the requisite final exams, summer jobs or graduation on their minds. A year’s worth of work culminates at the international collegiate automotive engineering event held in mid-May. More than a car race, the teams’ cars are judged for design, build, testing, performance in the race itself as well as marketing potential and more. Just one miss-step can affect the overall evaluation of a car that a team has spent a year building from the ground up.

The Gopher Motorsports team was among 120 other collegiate teams at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich., who hoped to win and/or improve their world rank. The team placed an impressive 18th overall at Michigan. The Formula SAE® competition is also held in June in Lincoln, Neb., as well as other venues around the world.

After competing in 2015, the team thought that labeling the wire harness would give them a better edge in design and build as well as safety, troubleshooting and testing. “By not labeling our wire harness last year, we created many problems for ourselves,” said Corey Dolan, a team electrical engineer (above, top row).

“The wire harness is a complicated component that can be prone to failure," she said. "Anyone who didn’t work on the electrical system at the design stage has to trace and follow the wires for testing and troubleshooting, which can waste a lot of time. Plus labeling helps with safety when disconnecting power for repairs.”

Using an Epson LW-PX900 industrial thermal-transfer label printer donated by K-Sun Corp., the team labeled and color-coded all wires on the harness using LABELWORKS PX Tape heat shrink tubing.

“We think it helped in our design score and the marketability assessment,” Dolan said. “Plus color coding helped greatly in writing a manual so that we can easily trace and troubleshoot the system down the road.”

The team also found that the durable, chemical- and heat-resistant features of LABELWORKS PX Tape is useful to mark components on the engine/power train, for tool and part organization, to speed repairs and maintenance, and make year’s build easier.

“Last year we took out the wiring harness and had to label it with masking tape and a marker,” Dolan said. “We had to guess on some of the wires, and it took about five hours to finish. This year when we remove the wire harness, anyone will know exactly where each wire connects. That time-savings will be critical.”

The LW-PX900 is both hand-held for portability and PC-compatibility. “The magnetic feature allows the printer to attach to any metal surface, so that is useful to free up our hands when making repairs,” Dolan said.

Winner of a prestigious iF Design Award in 2016, the LW-PX900 impressed the team for the time saved and better organization from labeling. As part of a presentation that accompanied its car design, the team's Business Logic group assessed the “cost of disorganization” across FSAE teams.

They found that wiring is a major contributor to vehicle unreliability, and last year some 70 teams out of 109 did not finish all events due to car performance issues. The group estimated that 25 percent of those performance issues were due to electrical system failures, which are greatly impacted by lack of or improper labeling, representing what the team calls the “cost of disorganization.”

With an average FSAE team budget of $45,000, the Gopher Motorsports team estimated that $787,500 was lost due to the “cost of disorganization” from the lack of proper, durable labeling of wire harnesses across the teams.

Other teams in the competition have noticed advantages with labeling as well. Cornell University’s FSAE team used a K-Sun BEE3-EZ+ label printer when building its car this year. The team came in at 23rd at Michigan, up from 50th in 2015.

2016 project manager and former team electrical lead Sarah Behringer chalks up her team’s improvement, in part, to proper labeling. “Professionally labeling the wire harness really presented our car well to both competitors and judges, who looked at every aspect of the car,” Behringer said. “They definitely noticed that we had a neat harness.”

Cornell Racing labeled its wire harness last year, but it didn’t last. “We were printing paper labels and then applying them to our wire harness with clear heat shrink tube,” said Behringer. “With the BEE3-EZ+ and colors of heat shrink tube, it’s one step instead of two. It’s so much more durable because our method would get dirty and they would fall off. We really liked the ability to use a printer wherever we are working on the car, whether in the shop or on the test track.”