Custom Gearbox | SAE Baja | CCNY Racing

Who is CCNY Racing

We are a passionate and diverse group of engineering students who love to design, build, and race! Every year, we take on the challenge of creating a custom off-road vehicle from scratch, pushing our creativity, teamwork, and technical skills to the limit. 

We’re currently raising funds to compete in the 2026 Baja SAE Ohio Competition, happening September 24 - 27, 2026, where we’ll put our latest vehicle to the test against teams from around the world. With your support, we can bring our design to life, represent City College of New York, and show what student engineers from New York City can achieve!

The Baja SAE Competition is an international collegiate engineering challenge that pushes students to design, build, and race a single-seat off-road vehicle for a hypothetical manufacturing firm. Each year, over 100 university teams from around the world showcase their innovation and engineering excellence through detailed design presentations, cost and marketing reports, and rigorous dynamic events, culminating in a grueling endurance race that tests both driver and machine.

CCNY Racing represents the City College of New York’s motorsports team, made up of a diverse, talented, and driven group of engineering students. During the 2025 Baja SAE season, our team proudly competed at the Baja SAE South Carolina competition, where we successfully qualified for and participated in all four main dynamic events including acceleration, suspension, maneuverability, hill climb, and the grueling four-hour endurance race.

This accomplishment marked the culmination of a full year of dedication, innovation, and teamwork by our team and the broader CCNY chapter of SAE. Through countless hours of design, fabrication, and testing, we turned our vision into a reality. We’re proud to share that our efforts earned us a top- 44 overall finish out of almost 66 competing universities, a testament to the hard work and determination of every member of CCNY Racing.

The Challenge

For our 2026 vehicle, one of our biggest engineering challenges was the drivetrain.

Our vehicle requires a gearbox that is:

Lightweight to minimize vehicle mass

Compact to fit within our limited chassis packaging space

Robust enough to withstand the shock loads and continuous loads encountered during Baja competition

Reliable enough to transfer power reliably throughout the endurance race

After evaluating commercially available options, we found that no readily available gearbox met all of these requirements simultaneously.

Rather than compromise on our design, we decided to develop our own. But this decision came at a cost; we now had to machine it in a timely manner, which comes with a significant monetary expense.

Our Design

Our custom gearbox was designed entirely around the requirements of our vehicle and the conditions we expect to encounter during competition. The team has developed the complete gearbox assembly in CAD, including the housing, shafts, bearing interfaces, gear arrangement, and mounting features. The design process has required us to consider factors including gear alignment, bearing support, shaft loading, housing stiffness, manufacturability, packaging, weight, and serviceability.

Gearbox Architecture

Our gearbox utilizes a 3:1 reduction ratio through a spiral bevel gear arrangement. The bevel gears allow us to redirect power through the drivetrain while maintaining the compact packaging required by our vehicle. We selected commercially available KHK spiral bevel gears and designed the surrounding housing, shafts, bearings, and mounting system around them.

The selected gears include:

KHK MBSA4-1545L spiral bevel gear

KHK MBSA4-4515R spiral bevel gear

Materials and Construction

The gearbox housing is designed around 6061 aluminum, selected for its favorable combination of low density, strength, machinability, and availability. Keeping the housing lightweight is particularly important for our vehicle, where reducing mass directly benefits acceleration, handling, and overall vehicle performance.

The gearbox shafts are manufactured from 4140 steel, providing the strength and durability required to transmit significant torque while withstanding the dynamic loads associated with off-road operation.

Manufacturing Requirements

Because the gearbox is a critical drivetrain component, dimensional accuracy is particularly important. Proper alignment between the gears, shafts, and bearings is necessary to ensure reliable operation and minimize unwanted wear.

Our design therefore specifies ±0.05 mm tolerances in critical areas, particularly around interfaces where dimensional accuracy directly affects bearing alignment, shaft positioning, and gear engagement.

Why PCBWay

Manufacturing the gearbox represents 28.7% ($3,145) of our overall vehicle budget. For a student team operating with limited resources, manufacturing costs tend to be our biggest challenge. PCBWay's manufacturing capabilities, competitive pricing, and short lead times make them an excellent fit for this project. As a student racing team, every dollar matters. PCBWay's competitive manufacturing costs would allow us to produce the gearbox components we need while keeping our overall project within budget.

With the Baja SAE Ohio competition only weeks away, timing is critical. Our team needs a manufacturing partner capable of producing high-quality components within a short timeframe so that we have sufficient time for assembly, testing, and validation before competition.

PCBWay's rapid manufacturing and delivery capabilities can help us meet that timeline. The gearbox is a critical component of our vehicle. It will be subjected to significant loads and harsh operating conditions during testing and competition. Working with a manufacturing partner capable of producing accurate, high-quality components gives our team confidence that our design can move from CAD to a reliable, competition-ready assembly.

Looking Ahead

Our goal for this 2026 season is to not just build another vehicle but improve upon and push the limits of what our vehicle and we could accomplish. We excitedly hope to have PCBWay join us on this journey. Your support would turn our gearbox design into a physical component that will be an integral part of the vehicle for the Baja SAE Ohio competition.

In return for your support we would include the PCBWay Logo on our vehicle, team apparel, and in our social media posts for the 2026 to 2027 season.