Our Team took basic design guidelines from students at Broughal Middle School, to a fully functioning, injection molded, matchbox car. 3D CAD, CAM, and MoldFlow software was used to optimize design and produce a car that outperformed our competition.
This ME240 manufacturing project — built as "Pink Panther" — took a small-scale race car from concept sketch to a finished, injection-molded body. The original concept was a Batmobile design contributed by students at Broughal Middle School, adapted into a full SolidWorks CAD model and carried through mold design, CNC machining, and injection molding.
The project was completed with teammates Ramy Alain, Ethan Chester, and Dylan Mahoney, with design input from Broughal students. The full process was documented as a poster for the 2024 ME240 Race at Lehigh.
The car's mold geometry was modeled in SolidWorks — including ejector pin holes — and optimized using Mold Flow and basic injection mold design techniques. These plans were then used to CNC machine matched aluminum mold plates. Those plates were then run on an injection molding machine to form the car frame, bottom, and wing pieces in a single shot.
Once molded, the parts were cleaned up, assembled with a set of wheels harvested from a store bought car, and hand-painted by the middle school students in the team's pink-and-black "Pink Panther" livery ahead of race day. The Pink Panther outperformed the rest of the teams in ME240 oon the track and won first place.
