Since our most recent dwelling doesn’t have an attached garage, it is very difficult to warm the building and/or work in the building during the winter. With the “storm of the century” bearing down on us, I’d have to leave all my heaters on for two days to get it comfortable enough that my back wouldn’t seize up as soon as I get under the car.
That said, I did do some work on installing the unit in the car and got together a plan for installing the driveshaft sensor and the EGT sensor. We already have one EGT in the #2 cylinder (it is a separate unit) and I am going to install without a bung, the racepak EGT in the #1 Cylinder. I decided to go with a non-bung install and instead use a hose clamp / set screw collar combination to save time and possible damage to the headers. Its also easier to move the EGT to another cylinder and simply cover the existing hole with a piece of tin and another hose clamp. We have done this on other sets of headers so I know it can be done without any leaks (although I wouldn’t have believed it if we hadn’t done it before)
So we are getting closer to the first event and I need to spend probably another 30 hours in the garage to get all the things ready that I want to be ready for race 1. It should be a very nice spring.
Tags: data acquisition, garage
Having just moved from FL, I had no idea it would be so cold, for so long. No wonder people are so excited about the summer time.
Where I was at before – it was racing all year long. It was still too cold to really think about risking breaking car parts – but you could go to the track in January and see some streeters running. Here? No way. Wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) even consider it.
Anyway, I’m in the middle of a Racepak install and can’t finish it because I would spend $100 just heating up the garage to spend a Saturday getting it done. I’ll wait for a warm day and git ‘er dun.
Crazy, but I just bought foam from a craft store and it cost $26. Couldn’t believe how much it was considering it was only 18 inches long and 4 inches thick. It should be plenty to put on the bottom of the racecar hood so that we can set the hood on the roof without worrying about scratching, but who knew that foam would be so expensive. $56 / yard is quite an investment.
Tags: hood
Here’s a picture of the kit of parts we ordered.
I did some tweaking of our wiring and got a switch and wiring hooked up. Once we get the unit installed we’ll have power for it. Decided to wire it to the network on the car that has power to the switch 100% of the time. The other network only has power when the main toggle is switched and that network is only for use while running the engine. We want to be able to power this even with the engine off so we can hook up the computer and what not.
I’m very excited to get it setup and hooked into the MSD. Then we might tackle the driveshaft sensor and the location of the unit.
Tags: data acquisition
I’ll post some pics once I get them from the camera in the garage. I got a chance to sit down with all the documentation and look at all the sensors. Crazy to me how light weight the whole thing is – and there are almost no moving parts – especially in the main computer – nothing rattles or bounces. All circuits and flash drives – I don’t imagine it will get beat up too much.
Looking forward to having it on to see what is really going on with the main components of the car. Should be illuminating.
Also worth noting is that it cost roughly half of what it originally cost to back-half the car. Wow. But then again, that WAS 20 years ago.
Tags: data acquisition
Even though we weren’t racing, Dad and I had alot of fun inspecting the car and reviewing our current setup. Made some interesting discoveries of things that are not functioning properly, things that need to be updated after 6 years of nearly idle rest. I say nearly because we definitely took the car out for a few hard runs – but it wasn’t anything like what we did the last few weeks was intense because of rapid “round-robin” the one weekend, and colder than normal conditions on another weekend.
Its pretty amazing to me how well the car is holding up given the time between runs, the age of the rubber on the tires and all the factors that use/abuse racecars.
Well, I was going to be pretty excited to get my new RacePak this weekend. I was led to believe the kit that I ordered would be tested and packaged to be sent by the beginning of this week, giving it plenty of time to get here all the way on the right coast – Maryland. Too bad, so sad. The reason it was going to be cool to get it here was that my crew chief and I were going to setup a plan of attack for the winter and how it should be setup/laid out in the car. Installing the system requires bracket mountings, electrical wiring routing updates and many more customizations I’m sure we’ll discover in the coming weeks. If it can’t get here by tomorrow, I guess we’ll just have to wait until December (hopefully it arrives by then)
Tags: data acquisition
Made the first big purchase of the winter. In a few weeks we’ll have a new Racepak system arrive at the house. Gonna spend the winter discovering how it all works and getting it setup/tuned. Its going to take some fabrication work but I think it will be worthwhile because we have always wanted to have access to this kind of data, and now we will have the ability to monitor an entirely new realm of information.
I’ll try to post pictures and other information about the process as we go through installing the hardware on our car. Feels like this kind of stuff puts in the realm of nascar or some of the top sportsman/modified classes. What we do with the data will probably more accurately put us in that category because almost anyone can collect data – its understanding it, wading through it and learning something. In software engineering we call this “data mining”. Learning something from the data that isn’t inherently visible without knowing how to structure and query the data.
Its not a decision I take lightly because it means a significant investment of time and resources, but I have made a big decision:
Tags: 400, 455, Engine, rotating assembly
Data Power – Buddy Fey
Competition Car Data Logging – Simon McBeath
Analysis Techniques for Race Car Data Acquisition – Jorge Segers
Competition Car Data Logging Manual – Graham Templeton