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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Longtime readers of the umsolar blog will recall that, for the past several months, the team has been working on moving out of its old Ypsilanti workspace. Sorting, saving and scrapping the contents of a building that contains so much of the team’s history has not been an easy process, but we took a major step forward this past Thursday when the entire Race Crew took the afternoon off to come to Ypsi and help the Operations division clean up and move out.

One of the main goals for Thursday was salvaging the remainder of the useful supplies and moving them onto campus. Even after the team’s major moving event last February, there was a lot of stuff left in Ypsilanti that we wanted to keep. Cases of aerosolized solvents, wheel-sized blocks of Aluminum, Titanium tubes, parts from Infinium and bulk-sized bags of pasta sauce were among the many things loaded into a trailer for transport to Ann Arbor.

Infinium's Mock Upper is lifted out of the car bay

The weather was uncooperative in bursts. Here, Project Manager Rachel Kramer looks sad as she shelters from the rain while loading a box of historical documents.

Another goal of the moving session was cleaning out the “Graveyard” – a plot behind the workspace full of molds from old vehicles. All of these pieces will be recycled in the coming months, but for that to happen all the molds needed to be brought to the front parking lot where the recycler’s forklift can more readily get to them.

The final task of this monumental moving event was preparing all of our unused furniture for resale. When the team moved into the Wilson Center expansion, it brought as much of its furniture along as was possible / useful. However, many of the areas in the Wilson addition were pre-furnished, so much of our furniture was left behind. On Thursday, that inventory was consolidated into a large pile that stretches half the length of the workspace and half the width of the main aisleway. The team will be working with the University’s Moving & Trucking and Property Disposition departments to clear this pile out of Ypsilanti, sell what can be sold, and recycle the rest.

Strategist David Benson-Putnins carries a bookshelf out to the resale pile.

A bit of history was found behind a cabinet that we moved.

After a hard afternoon’s work in alternating heat, humidity, and rain, the team went out for dinner and cold sodas at its favorite Ypsilanti dive – the combination Wendy’s/Tim Horton’s on Hewitt Road. Although we’re not quite done cleaning out the old workspace (and that process will take time, considering that building and testing Quantum is priority #1), we’re on track to have everything cleared out by early fall. We’ll be sure to post updates of our progress as we go!

This post was written by Interim Operations Director Aaron Frantz, who wonders how the teams of the past got all six couches up the very narrow staircase.

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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!

View of Infinium from the Lead, with Chase and the Semi Trailer in tow.

Lower surface of Infinium sits while the team charges at LeRoy JrSr High in LeRoy, Illinois

Team members (bottom to top) Eric Relson, Gerald Chang, Santosh Kumar, Dylan Keefe-Reitzell, and Sudeep Rohatgi hold the upper surface while charging at Saint Joseph’s High School in South Bend, Indiana.