MUN Concrete Toboggan is a club at Memorial University that designs and builds a toboggan consisting of a superstructure, steering and braking systems, and concrete running surfaces that compete annually against universities/colleges across Canada and the USA. Undergraduate students from universities all over Canada compete at The Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race every year with their own fully designed and made concrete toboggan.
The Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race is the largest and longest running Canadian Undergraduate Engineering competition that is fully student-run. This year’s competition was supposed to be in Calgary, however because of COVID-19, it was cancelled but set to continue next year in British Columbia. 30 people can officially go to the competition with the toboggan however the club accepts as many people on the team as needed. 60% of the team must be in applied science majors however the rest of the team consists of students from any major. This is the first year there were non-engineering students on the team.
“When I first heard it was an Undergraduate Engineering competition that kinda deterred me from going … however the majority of the Universities in this competition have full business teams running their finances and social media”
-Alison Kavanah, External Relations Lead
The skeleton design for this year’s toboggan was created in a computer program called solidworks, which is primarily used by engineering students. In this computer program, the team does the overall designing of the toboggan and force analysis which simulates what would happen if the toboggan were to crash.
“We must have a fully functioning steering system, braking systems, a full enclosed rolling cage and a crumple zone. The concrete needs to be pretty solid so we spend a lot of time mixing and testing that to get the perfect mixture that will withstand as much as possible. It all has to be 350 pounds without riders in it but the whole system has to allow 5 riders at 200 pounds each”
This year’s concrete toboggan team has gone through a lot with the pandemic and the cancellation of the competition.
“One of our biggest challenges this year is that the team has been off and on running since around 2018 … with COVID the teams had fully shut down and when we started to pick up the pieces, there were only three or four of us who had any experience with a concrete toboggan. The fact that we did what we did in four months, which other schools usually take 8 months to a year to complete, we are very proud of that.”
-Mitchell Riberdy, Team Captain
Anyone interested in joining the team for next year’s competition, the new senior staff will be starting recruitment in mid-February. The MUN Concrete Toboggan team is looking for undergraduate students from any major and in any year of study from first to last.
Alison Kavanah emphasized, “Even if engineering is not your background there is still so much you can learn from this club, like I know how to mix concrete now!” With a similar sentiment, Mitchell Riberdy remarked, “This is all extracurricular. We do this because we want to go, we want to compete, and we want to represent MUN on a national stage.”
For more information on how to get involved with next year’s team email munconcretetoboggan@gmail.com.