After months of packing, moving, demolition, and cleaning, the day has finally come: The team has officially vacated the old Ypsilanti workspace. It’s been a hard process, but we managed to sort through the years of sentiment and history to return the warehouse to its original state. Check out the photos below to see what we were left with.

(Warning to any team alumni reading this: It’s really, really clean. Brace yourself – you might not recognize it!)

Panorama of the shockingly clean workspace (plus the dumpster), looking from the side wall. The only remaining element of the old loft is the Operations storage area (brown shelves in the top left)

Looking from the far end of the workspace towards the door.

The team would like to thank Larry DeRousse and the Detroit Balancing Service for being a wonderful landlord for these past many years. Their help and cooperation in housing the team and keeping the facility up and running has been truly indispensable. We’d also like to thank David Hawks and the University of Michigan Construction Services department for their assistance in clearing out the facility and removing our very well built loft. We look forward to many upcoming years of settling into the Wilson Center and generating just as many memories there as we made in Ypsilanti.

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The Operations division standing at the on-campus storage site, in front of the first truckload of transferred equipment. Cecilia Yung, Eric Hausman, Ervin Lee, Katie Rulkowski, Aaron Frantz.

Since 1999, the U-M Solar Car Team has been based out of a workshop in Ypsilanti, MI. The space suits the team’s needs, but the location is a problem since the Ypsilanti workspace is 20 minutes away from the University of Michigan’s central campus. The team has always had at their disposal the College of Engineering’s workshop called the Wilson Center. But there’s never been enough room at this site.However, in December 2008 the Regents of the University approved a 10,000 square foot addition to the Wilson Center that included a large, new space for the Solar Car Team. Three years later, the addition is nearing completion, and the team is making preparations for the big move into UMsolar’s new workspace.

Armed with shelving and material racks, the operations division has been transforming a third location, the dusty on-campus space used for old plugs and molds, into a transitional space that can hold equipment that’s been moved out of Ypsilanti but has yet to be moved into the Wilson Center. Today the operation division moved the first load of equipment that included tents, sleeping bags, and cooking supplies from Ypsilanti and onto the on-campus location’s storage shelves.

The team will continue to move supplies from Ypsilanti to the transitory storage space, and the plan is to have everything out of Ypsilanti by late January. At that point, the Wilson Center will be ready for UMsolar, and then the even larger move from the on-campus storage site to the team’s permanent home in the Wilson Center will begin. We’ll post a behind-the-scenes video showing you our new place in the Wilson center in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

Classes are over and work is starting to pick up in the Ypsilanti workspace. Despite the large amount of work required this week to prepare for painting of the body, spirits are high and everything is coming along nicely. Today was windy and rainy, but thanks to one of our Base-X rapid deployment structures, we were able to work through the nasty weather and keep on sanding bondo.

Base-X in Ypsilanti: Gerald grinding Carbon Fiber

Now that we are working full time in the workspace, more effort is being made to keep the space clean and organized. With the chassis successfully built into the body of the car, we were able to put away our long bulkhead layup plates and reclaim precious floor space. Jeremy Nash, on the micro-electrical division, spent a good chunk of the day organizing and cleaning the electrical work area. It hasn’t been so clean in quite some time…

Clean Electrial Area