How cool would it be to design and make your own diecast? Lehigh University has such a program! The class will break up into groups comprising of a few Lehigh students with a couple local middle-school students and they go through the entire process. "The middle-school students help do the conceptual design of the cars, while the Lehigh students supervise the CAD, rapid prototyping, fused deposition modeling, injection molding and machining of the cars. The younger students paint the finished products and help make posters."

At the end of the spring semester, they race at the Manufacturing Expo! Winner gets bragging rights and also gets to return next year to face new challengers.

But after all the time spent on designing and creating thier racers, there were concerns about their old track. You can't have fair races if the track is not fair. Those concerns were solved with Race Grooves Dual Lane Track!

Greg Layser, who sent us the following pictures, also wrote and let us know that "Everything ran smoothly" and that the "Track works great."

Greg also shared the following information regarding the track.
"The track was 48 feet long. The shaded box had no purpose. We simply used storage shelfs as the supports for the track. We let an undergrad do that."

You can find Lehigh's article on this event at the following links:

2003 Their last year using orange track.
2004 Their new Race Grooves track set-up!

On a side note, if anybody has any pictures of diecast that they have created for this program, we'd love to show them here! Please use the contact link at the top of the page.

Thanks again to Greg for sharing the following images! You can click on any image to see a higher resolution image or if you have high-speed internet access, your page is here.