We built a car!

We completed our first car, known to us as Hubert, for our first family just in time for Christmas! It was a struggle from start to end, Alyssa and I were very stressed throughout the process but it's done, it works, and we made one little boy very very happy.

In building the car, our modification added up to:

- Shifting the seats over so that the driver's seat was lined up with the steering wheel

- Rewiring the vehicle to put in a kill-switch

- Pairing the kill-switch to its remote and making sure that works (originally it didn't!)

- Moving the accelerator pedal to the left

- Putting in panels to cover up the kill-switch and support the new position of the pedal so that the wiring can run underneath

- Covering that all up and adhering it down so no water can get into the wiring

- Adding a seat belt so the child is secure in the vehicle

And we did it!

There was no shortage of issues in this stage of production. We discovered as we were making the car that the seats were not centered on the steering wheel, which had to be fixed so that the child could reach it with his left foot. The board we originally cut to fix that was not square and the holes were off so we had to make a completely new one. We had a scare when all the wiring was complete and the car wasn't working--leading us to realize that the kill-switch remote was not paired correctly, and is not only difficult to pair but runs out of battery so quickly that the battery in the remote has to be replaced alarmingly frequently and re-paired each time. We're working on getting a new remote for that. The seat belt was too long and had to be cut, it's holes were too small to fit where we wanted to put them so we had to drill them larger, all the bolts/nuts we needed were in metric, most adhesives refused to adhere plastic to plastic, etc. This car gave us a hard time, but we made it through.

This was such an amazing, unique experience to create a gift that could legitimately revolutionize someone's life with our own hands. As far as future projects go, we learned that more time would lower stress a lot. We had the hard deadline of Christmas for this one and the time we had between that deadline and us receiving the parts necessary to get started was not nearly enough. Yes, we finished it, but at what a cost to our sanity! In the future, as there shouldn't be any such hard deadlines (besides the end of the school year) this should hopefully be less of an issue.

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Now that we've finished up Hubert, what's on the agenda?

Well, going into the next semester, we're looking to:

-Get connection with Tesla and other large companies that would be willing to sponsor our cars

- Use those sponsors to bring in the monies!

- Locate children in need of cars through Go Baby Go or other sources and find out what modifications their children need

- Get people at LASA interested in the program

- Contact NHS about getting hours for workshop participants and getting the word out to NHS

- Buy some cars and necessary parts!

- Host a workshop to build the cars!

- Hopefully, host more workshops

- Assess what current Juniors would be interested in leadership opps next year for Project Zoom Zoom

Thank you for all your support, we are excited to be moving in to this new stage, and a special thank you to our first family for trusting two 17-year-olds to build their son a car. I hope he loves it.

Until the next time!

- Project Zoom Zoom