Decades ago, my university's solar car team had a problem at the competition. Their super light magnesium wheels were cracking and failing. The team's biggest supporter and a true pioneer of CNC machining, Chuck, started calling around to local machine shops to see if anyone could turn some new wheels out of aluminum. He found one machinist who agreed to do the work, but laughed because he knew there wasn't any aluminum billet large enough anywhere in the state. Chuck made a few more phone calls, and an hour later there were 4 large aluminum billets on their way from Michigan in a Cessna. That machinist had a very long night!

Of course, the team decided not to use those aluminum wheels and instead tried to round off any sharp edges on the remaining magnesium ones. Another wheel broke and the car was damaged too much to continue competing.

If somebody pulls strings like that for you, you need to use the aluminum wheels.

Depends on whether Chuck confirmed they wanted to do a thing like that first.

Fair enough, but I think I still would have used the Al wheels. They used known defective wheels, wrecked their project, didn't cross the finish line and potentially upset a big supporter. Not the kind of thing I'd do in a startup, at least.

Look at me though, judging people's decisions on the internet through a second hand story.

Chuck actually recently published a book, documenting his career within CNC machining. He started a company whose product became the gold standard for CNC software for decades.

https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Cold-Steel-Computer-Aided-Manufa...

Thanks for posting that. I'm totally grabbing that book.

For anybody else interested I did some search-engining on Chuck Hutchins' name and came up with this neat blurb about him: https://www.machinedesign.com/archive/article/21818368/the-c...

I imagine it was identified as one of several possible solutions, and the team pursued more than one solution in parallel. As a non-mechanical engineer, I personally would have voted for the aluminum.