BEng students develop entirely new type of coupling enabling disassembly of off-road go-karts for easier and cheaper transport.
By Amamda Wirring Nielsen
Off-road go-karts, also known as crosskarts, are becoming widely used in Denmark, and this type of off-road co-kart is enormously popular among both children and adults after the adrenaline rush of high-speed karting.
The all-terrain vehicle is not just popular in Denmark. In many countries around the world, people have taken to off-road crosskarting.
The Danish company Bocart has been inundated with enquiries about this particular type of go-kart. The company is seeing an increase in demand for off-road go-karts, especially from the Nordic countries—a demand which Bocart is keen to meet.
However, shipping the crosskarts is something of a challenge due to their shape and size. As they do not fit a standard EUR pallet, transport costs are exorbitant.
Bocart therefore contacted DTU Diplom, inviting students to take a look at the problem and come up with a possible solution.
Daniel Davidsen, Olga Lubbers, Troels Lund, Malene Sørensen, and Jakob Mølhave accepted the challenge and soon identified the main problem as being the fact that the crosskart could not be disassembled.
“On the one hand, we had to decide on the best place to separate the crosskart frame, and on the other hand it had to be easy to put it back together again. Of course, the construction still had to be strong enough. We had to make sure that safety and strength were not compromised so as not to risk injury,” Malene and Troels explain.
The solution was a completely new and special connector which makes it possible to disassemble the crosskart without compromising either safety or strength. Moreover, the design of the kart was optimized to make space for this special connector, while also improving a number of minor design flaws.
Following the redesign of the off-road go-kart and the introduction of the newly developed coupling, Bocart is able to reduce shipping costs by 60 per cent. Thanks to the updated design and the new coupling, the crosskarts can now be shipped on standard pallets. The students have thus made it both easier and cheaper for Bocart to meet the strong demand for off-road karts from other countries.