CENTER TWP — Lance Armstrong had it easy. He just had to race the Tour de France.

He wasn't asked to compete, then repair his bicycle with parts made during all-night machine shop sessions, oh, and bed down and feed his racing team at his house.

But that's what Center Township resident and Butler High graduate Ben Smith faced when his Olin College Human Powered Vehicle team contended this spring in ASME HPV Competition East in Grove City. Smith is the son of Janet and the late John Smith.

Smith, who will be a senior majoring in mechanical engineering at Olin in Needham, Mass., and 17 team members arrived at his mother's house at the end of April for the three-day competition staged by the former American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

“We took four cars and met at the house,” said Smith. “We were all over the place, we filled most every room with people.”

“My mom was thoroughly overwhelmed, but she handled it well and fed us well, too,” he said.

Smith said the competition, which ran from April 27th to 29th, consisted of men's and women's speed competitions, an endurance event and a design competition.

“The first event is a sprint event, they call it a drag. They race head to head against another vehicle. It's a bracket system,” said Smith. “There's a men's and a women's drag event.”

“And the big event is an endurance event split between four drivers and whoever completes the most laps wins the event,” he said. “The final event is a design report that we write that provides an overview of our design to the judges. They evaluated the design from that. The cumulative of all the previous events decides who wins the competition.”

Smith said it was fortunate the team stayed at his house where he had a machine shop equipped with a lathe, mill, and welding equipment.

The team needed to take advantage of Smith's resources, working on their vehicle, “Seabagel” every night.

The team had problems with Seabagel's slow-speed stability system and rollover protection system.

One rider's enthusiastic pedaling during the men's speed race ripped off the bicycle's chain and would have resulted in the vehicle falling over if it wasn't for the adjustments to the slow-speed stability system.

“During the endurance event each vehicle has to stop and start unassisted,” Smith said. “For that to happen, you need a slow-speed stability system. That was malfunctioning, so we used my machine shop to make repairs.”

“We tried a new rollover protection system which splits in half to allow the top to come off. The judges considered the attachment method between the top and bottom to be insufficient,” Smith said.

“During the night we designed and fabricated latches to firmly join the top and bottom,” Smith said, saying the all-night session took place between Aprl 27 and 28.

“We ran a day shift and a night shift. The day shift was the drivers and the night shift the repairmen,” he said.

Smith said he was not only a repairman but he manned a leg of the endurance competition in Grove City's Memorial Park.

“It was exhausting. The course was long and hilly, and we were pushing ourselves to the limit during the race and the night before the race,” Smith said. “It was challenge, but just being in the heat of the moment pushed us all through.”

The Olin College team took home a third-place finish out of 35 teams, placed in the top five slots in every event and won the 2012 Knovel Award for Design Innovation.

“We had to build a vehicle to fit every single rider. It's not right to build a bike a rider can't ride,” said Smith. Rather than adjusting the vehicle's seat, the Olin College design allowed different riders to slide the pedals backwards and forwards.

“The great part of it was it made the whole system lighter, and it didn't make the drive train heavier,” Smith said.

In the endurance race, he said, the sliding pedal design took up less time than adjusting the seat, allowing for faster pit stops.

“I love the Olin HPV team because it allows me to gain experience in mechanical engineering projects outside of courses. I also really enjoy building a vehicle for a competition, because it gives us a high goal to strive towards,” said Smith's teammate Jackie Rose, a co-leader of the team. “Also, the team itself is an excellent group of people, and I love working with all of the people on it.”

“This year's vehicle, Seabagel, is definitely the best the team has produced, and I think we did phenomenally at competition. The whole team is really looking forward to next year, and I think we have a real shot at winning overall,” Rose said.

Smith said, “I've been a team member since freshman year. I'll be a senior in the fall and will serve as a mentor and fabricator and try to train the up-and-comers.”

While Smith said he hopes to work for a bicycle maker or a bicycle component fabricator, right now he's staying far away from from gears and ratchets.

He's been working on a small organic farm in Montrose, Colo., since the start of June and expects to be there until mid-August.

“I'm working as a farmhand,” he said. “I would say I was looking for a break from engineering.”