Cockpit Cooling

June 15th, 2010

an issue that became apparent at Brands was that I had totally overlooked cooling of the driver! I have in fact done my best to cook him, with an almost perfectly sealed cockpit. This was a bit of an oversight but nothing that cant be fixed. So the idea is to take in some air from in front of the bubble, where it is high pressure, and exit it somewhere where there is low pressure, as shown (ish) below.

 

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Engine Out Again :(

June 15th, 2010

As I previously mentioned, to fix the electrical issue, I actually think the fix is a part swap. However to do this I have had to take the engine out. while the engine was out, I did give it a quick once over, tappets etc, but all was found to be fine so at least that is good news!!! You can also see that the car is running once again on the super stiff dampers… Only however until the revalved dampers return from Penski. Its a shame that the engine has had to come out again, but its actually not so bad to do, but I do have a few things I would like to change over the winter…

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Clean Up

June 7th, 2010

After the somewhat aborted test at Brands, due to the electrical issue, I have spent a fare bit of time, with others also, musing over the electrical gremlin and some aero improvements. However the first issue was/is to clean up the car and make sure nothing is damaged/worn etc. The passenger side CV decided to throw some grease out. This was actually because we overfilled it, after advice from a colleague… But once it had thrown out what it wanted it seemed to settle down so at least no real damage!

 

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Developments

June 1st, 2010

I realise I havent actually updated this for quite a while! But things are still going on. The car has been out at Brands Hatch testing, and this has highlighted an interesting issue. The car has decided that it will start but after a random amount of time the engine will stop. While looking at all the data etc it seems it is losing the CAM sync signal and then gets a false signal. This confuses the ECU and so it stops the engine. When totally stopped it will start up again absolutely perfectly though!!! Rather annoying!

I think I have a fix but this unfortunately involves replacing the crank rotor for one from the latest Hayabusa. This has a reference tooth which means the CAM signal need not be timed quite so accurately. This will however mean a quick trip to the dyno just to check that the CRIP angle etc has been changed correctly. Hopefully this will mean the car is back out again in a couple of weeks.

However I do have a raft of mods and tweaks to make. These hopefully will make the car a little faster. These include some aero tweaks, new springs, revalved dampers and some different geometry settings.

Now that the development of the 125cc 2 stroke control unit is almost done, I am thinking of making a paddle clutch. You can buy these but they are MASSIVLY pricey. I think however I can make one for circa £250. The plan is to make it cockpit adjustable aswell as software adjustable. I dont think i will be too tricky, and I want to test it fully on the Arachnid before letting out the door, so it may not be implemented for a while, but hopefully it will allow me to make the car a true 2 peddle car which should be easier and more natural to drive. Lets see how it goes.

Fuel Filling System

May 9th, 2010

I was somewhat dreading plumbing up the fuel filling pipes. Only because I could see it was going to be very fiddly and take an inordinate amount of time! The first job was to make some ally T pieces. These were just made of 2 inch ally tube, although I had noticed that 2 inch pipe and samco all seemed to be about the same size, whereas what was sold as 2 inch necks on the filler plate appeared to be more like 2.5 inch! Anyway, the samco stretched enough so it wasnt really a problem, just very awkward!

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