R-Box

The TPS story…

Dirk Verhaert 30 November 2013 0 Comments

A DTM style potentiometer was fixed on our throttle slide. Needless to say that we don’t want this old skool solution. These “things” are used in vintage amplifiers and give a lot of cracking but that is not wanted on our engine management.. Although vintage is in we are don’t go with the flow …

We bought a redundant Hall variety (at P&G) but we almost needed a magnifying-glass to see the new solution. Plug and play : forget it !

We called in Nick to construct a nice stainless steel tool and the problem was solved.

It is possible to measure the position of the throttle slide with a 10 bit accuracy without the vintage noise.. or other disadvantages.

A first try out can be seen in the pictures. Probably this will be adapted in the final version and the bolts will be shortened.

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After the electrician … comes the plumber

Dirk Verhaert 30 November 2013 Uncategorized 0 Comments

Because we were not raised from home in an imperial world, this is really 1 big puzzle. I still don’t understand what those American army men think about that now.

I ordered about 2 A4 pages full of different nipples. With Frank’s nightly assistance, we even tried to put that schematically on paper. Phase 1 is now behind us. All coupling pieces have been assembled and now we can start measuring all the pipes to order them as soon as possible.

We assume that the assembly of the leads is super fast so the biggest work is done here.

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The first cables …

Dirk Verhaert 30 November 2013 Uncategorized 0 Comments

They are still very limited in number, but the main power lies in them.

Because the battery is at the very back and the BMW heart has a very significant dose of compression, we can miss any kind of voltage drop over the cable like the plague.

Hence the overgrown 50mm2 cables that we have safely steered through the back wall and bulkhead in our own way.

In order for the “big” cables not to be secured, we have paid some attention to this. Armed with a bar OF POM and a copper threaded rod, Luc has made custom made penetrations. Safety first !!

Now we only have to find suitable rubber covers to insulate the nuts.

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wall to wall carpet ?

Dirk Verhaert 30 November 2013 0 Comments

It took some time before we knew what material we were going to use for the floor plates. It needed to be mechanically ok and should look nice.

It is possible to buy carbon pre-manufactured plates but we did not like them because they did not seem strong enough. This meant that we needed to construct something ourselves. This was also a good moment to test Luc’s inventor skills.

We made a mould in cardboard and made a drawing starting from that mould. We made some files and went to the laser guys. To decide whether we needed a 3 or 5 mm plate Dirk did some jumps on the plates and we decided to go for the 5mm version.

It was nicely cut out and we needed to do some bending at home to get it into the BMW. Because we don’t like unpainted aluminum we decided to go for a red anodized color. Inside the car there is a lot of black and white and the red fits perfectly and is also one of the R-Box colors.

Hate it or love it…

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Water pump cover

Dirk Verhaert 29 November 2013 0 Comments

Since we don’t have a standard water pump we needed to fill the hole where the original pump was installed.

This was not that complex that we needed to contact our Pro E guru Nick but Co driver Luc drew it himself. Inventor for dummies 🙂

The aquajet cut the contour with a hole to weld a small tube to connect to the cold water supply.

To make it look better it passed 8h in a chemical substance with 4500A electrical shocks. This was needed to resist for years to the boiling cooling liquid.

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Strange object in the trunk

Dirk Verhaert 29 November 2013 0 Comments

We are probably not going to win a special art award but this strange thing in the trunk is holding the spare wheel.

It has a quick release belt to fasten the wheel and it does take almost no energy to position the wheel. (once lifted over the edge of the trunk..) The petrol tank and the fillercap are also fixed with this strange object.

We now only need to find a jack to lift the car when we need to change a wheel on a stage.. We are not sure we’re going to find one in the store so probably we’ll build it ourselves.

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The first PCBs in production

Dirk Verhaert 22 September 2013 0 Comments

Some pics from the PCB production at GDM Electronics in Romania.

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An exciting moment : the first PCB panel has arrived !

Dirk Verhaert 22 September 2013 0 Comments

The first panel containing a CCC-Box, a PWR-Box and a MCM-Box has arrived from Romania.

Dirk immediately started with the CCC-Box. It is always a special moment to power a board for the first time.

We only encountered one mechanical issue and a stupid shape error (both from designer Dirk). After one night of debugging the board came to live ! Dirk was very proud since it is not the easiest print.

We also want to thank GDM electronics for the nice job done. Despite the manual interventions they delivered a flawless print, the quality from the PCB and the assembly are immaculate!

In the previous news item you can see some pictures from the Romanian factory.

The next coming nights wil be dedicated to the software. We are soon going to make a you tube movie from the first grafical moments on the TFT.

More specs can be found on the product page in the “electronics” section

to be continued …

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Fuel system

Dirk Verhaert 15 September 2013 0 Comments

Our S14 is not the most economical engine, therefore we need to give him plenty of fuel at all times.

We use a ciruit with a “swirlpot”. Two Holley pumps make sure that the level in the swirlpot stays the same during the race. Each pump has a seperate pick up left or right in the ATL tank and a personalized 75 µm filter. The high pressure Bosch pump is fed from the lower side of the swirlpot through a 6 µm filter and pumps the fuel to the 2 fuelrails on the engine. The pressure is stabilzed by a Fuel lab pressure controller. This pressure is constantly monitorred.

All the parts are build together on an softened aluminum plate which is mounted at the bottom of the trunk. We just need to measure the piping.