- Hey team, it's Tim from RaceCraft here, welcome to this week's member's webinar.
Today we're going to be talking all about the Video VBOX system from Racelogic.
Before we get into that, let's get through a little bit of a pre show first and like we
always do, I'll give you guys a little bit of an update of what's been happening here
around the shop.
Just jumping over to my laptop screen here, I talked a little bit about this in the
last pre show.
One of the upgrades we've been doing to our SR86 powered, sorry SR powered GT86
which is a little endurance racing car, is moving the ignition coils from being coilover
plug to being sort of a more conventional external single coil per plug and this is a
modification here that we are using the rocker cover to mount the coil.
So like most cars, there's a pretty big space premium that we've got in the car
as far as trying to find space in the engine bay.
By the time you've got a large intake manifold, you've got turbos, intercooler
piping and some not particularly wide engine bay at the best of times.
It's certainly pretty tough to start finding places to mount everything.
Certainly finding places where it's easy to get to things, making it easy to service them,
it makes it even tougher.
So what we ended up doing is cutting down the rocker cover and mounting the coils on
top, so this is, last time I showed you guys a little bit earlier in the process, this is just
before Jimmy fabricated welded on this top plate.
So here basically in each one of these spots here we've got one of the sets of ignition
coils being mounted and then essentially you can connect the HT leads directly down
on top from each coil down onto each coil on plug, a coil on plug style but with an
HT lead in between.
The idea here is that again it just gives us a much more effective way of packaging
everything in the engine bay, also making those new coils a little bit more accessible
to work on.
We were having some problems with the previous style of coil on plug coil which is
an R35 GTR style coil, we we're hoping, and it certainly seems to be so far that this
new coil has solved some of our ignition problems.
While we were at it, we also took the opportunity to move some of the engine
breathers as well.
So you can see here, this is one of the old aftermarket breathers that we had
and actually you can see it's a little bit out of focus here but this was one of the
original breathers for the original SR20 engine.
So what we did, while we were there, we took the opportunity to clean up a
little bit of that stuff, we essentially ended up deleting this breather here, that was
already blocked off but we took the opportunity just to smooth it off to
get rid of some of the clutter in there.
And now that we have removed the top of this rocker cover here to put the
ignition coils, we took the opportunity to clean up the 2 external breathers.
So before we had, this is one of the external breathers that went off to the dry sump tank
there and we had another one somewhere in this region here on the other side here.
Basically we took the opportunity to get rid of both of those and now we have mounted
both of them, one here and one here in the side here.
So that really just keeps it much more low profile solution, everything sort of sits
much lower in the engine, you don't have as many hoses up high where they
can have to sit around and can get tangled in the bonnet and stuff like that.
So here is the outcome of that solution, we don't quite have everything fitted in here,
we can see we've got the injectors out of the engine at the moment, we've got this
little rag sitting in there but you can see what I'm talking about, that's one of the breather
hoses, this is just sitting here at the moment, it isn't actually connected up, that's why you
can see so much thread in this area here but you can see just slightly out of focus is
the other one there so you can see how those breather hoses sit a lot nicer
and a lot tidier in the engine bay and this is what I was describing before about the
coils sitting on top.
You can see with these stumpy little plug leads.
What we actually did is we got factory style SR20 plug leads, cut the ends off them and
recrimped these 90° ends on there, the reason for that, and it's a little bit hard to see from
this angle but you can just make it out here is it means that we keep the boots that sit
down on top of the rocker cover, that's not always absolutely necessary but it is quite
a nice thing if you end up with any fluid, particularly water or anything there,
if you go and steam clean the engine bay after being at a race event, it's really
easy to end up with water down those plug holes and obviously if you have that,
you're always going to have a shorting issue where that high tension voltage is
going to end up jumping through the water into the cylinder head, rather than jumping
across the plug gap.
So it is actually quite a nice idea to be able to use OEM style plug leads where they
have that nice seal to sit down hard on top of the rocker cover.
I think that's a nice little advantage we've got by going with this system.
What else have we got going on here?
Let's have a look, sorry let me jump across to this again.
The other thing that's been going on is we've been continuing on with our ducting
for our oil coolers.
So we've had a couple of different iterations with this, this is the latest iteration that we're
going through so what we're actually looking at here, we're looking from the front right
corner of the car, so this is looking from the front right corner here.
You can see that's the right front brake assembly.
So just, a little bit hard to see with it being so dark here but this is the outline of
the transmission core, so that's an air to oil cooler that we've got sitting in the right front
corner of the car.
This is the inlet duct here that takes air from the front air dam of the bumper and
this is the outlet duct that the guys have been working on.
So you can see it's actually got a little bit of a shape to it there where it actually,
in this area here is where it is clearing the wheel when it's all mounted there,
so there's actually, it's a pretty tightly packaged space there between where the oil cooler's
mounted and the outlet duct and everything there to be able to squeeze between the wheel
but also being big enough to get the flow we need to evacuate the air out of the back
of that oil cooler.
So this one, what we're actually looking at here is actually a tool or a foam, so it's built
out of foam and it's built up with a bit of body filler on top to keep everything smooth
there, so that actually makes it a really nice smooth transition to get the air out
of that oil cooler and exhaust it in front of one of the front wheels there.
And we've got the symmetrical thing, we've got one on each side as well.
So this is just the tool, this isn't the actual part but this is the tool that we use to make
the part from.
So what we're also going to have eventually once they're permanently
installed on the car is essentially a little gurney that sits on the front there.
The idea behind that gurney is that you end up creating a low pressure area
behind that gurney and the advantage in creating that low pressure area there while
you do end up adding a little bit of drag to the system by adding a gurney there,
that low pressure area ends up helping to draw air out of the duct out here so the idea
here is that behind this face here we've got low pressure area that we've created with
the gurney with high dynamic pressure on the front of it and then it just helps to draw
the air out.
Essentially the whole thing, anything with ducting or heat exchangers in general,
what we're looking to make is a pressure difference, we're looking to have a higher
pressure on the front and a lower pressure on the back.
Any time you've got a pressure difference, that's what we need in order to be able to
drive a flow through that cooler.
And obviously when you're trying to maximise the cooling through a cooler,
you want to maximise the airflow through it.
Got a couple of other pictures of the project there.
This is one of the ducts that's, as the carbon is being laid on top if it.
So the tool is made from just a really simple off the shelf foam material, then
it's covered in body filler to get the exact shape and all the dimensions we want,
then the guys go ahead and make the real part out of carbon fibre, so this is at the stage
when the carbon's all just being laid up there on the tool but you can see it's a
relatively complex geometry going from this square shape around as bit of a corner here
and then exiting out in front of the wheel.
There's a fair bit going on there.
This is one of the details, in fact I'll come back to that in a second.
I'll just show you, this is one of the final parts.
So again you can see this is the area here where we connect to the back side of each
of the coolers and out here is the outlet where the air flows out in front of the wheel.
You can see here there's a couple of little features where this little tab sits on top
of, sort of slides on top of the cooler and helps seal to the back of the cooler.
And you've got a little bit of foam tape here that's sealing to the top and the bottom
of the back of the cooler face.
Now it's a little bit difficult to see but you can see a couple of little rivets here and
this is one of the places we've got 4 points of this around the duct where this attaches
to the actual oil cooler and that's what I want to come back and talk about here in this
previous picture, is we're using these little captured nuts, these are really common,
you'll see these in lots of motorsport applications.
Essentially any time you've got a thin panel that needs to be attached to something,
you could use to use a simple nut on the back of this with a bolt and nut.
This is what we call the captured but or a nut plate, this is something you'll see all
over the place in lots of really high end race cars and the reason is because it just makes it
really convenient, it means you don't have to have a spanner or anything on the other side
of that thin panel in order to be able to undo this thing.
All you need to be able to do is get access to one side of it and it means the
nut is automatically held from the back.
There's another aspect of these that makes them really nice, is that you can't see it very clearly
in this picture here but that steel nut plate is actually slightly crimped over and
that's intentionally crimped to make that hole not completely round and that's intentional
as it gives you essentially a mechanical locking effect.
So in a similar way to what you get with something like a nylock nut where you've
got a nylon sleeve inside the nut to stop that nut coming loose due to vibration.
It's a similar thing but it's essentially crimped down a very specific amount in order to stop
the bolt vibrating out.
What that means is when you wind that bolt in, it's actually a little bit tougher to wind in,
it means you can't actually wind them in by hand, they need to be wound in with a hex
tool or something like that depending on the style of bolt that you're using.
But the idea being is it stops it vibrating loose.
These are really really widely used in the aviation industry and over time they've become
much more commonly used in the motorsport industry as a result.
Obviously there's a lot of similarities between aviation and motorsport as far as wanting
lightweight high performance good serviceability, stuff like this.
So you can get these nut plates in lots of different styles, it's something that we
use quite extensively in our cars just because it does raise the level of
convenience.
They're also really easy to get hold of, any motorsports supply place will be able
to supply them, whether you want imperial or metric or anything like that.
Anyway, it's just a little detail I wanted to touch on because it is something we make
quite a lot of use of in our cars and I do think it makes them a little bit more
serviceable as a result.
So the next thing I want to talk about is looking at one of our most recent forum
posts, so as normal we've had quite a bit of action on the forums with lots of our
members asking lots of really great questions.
This one was from a wee whole ago but I thought it was a good question that I should
maybe bring up to talk about with everyone.
So the question here is about using toe strings when you're doing your own wheel
alignment and a little bit about the height when you have, how to set the height of
those strings when you don't have an equal height wheel front and rear.
So I'm just going to jump across to the overhead here and sketch up exactly
what I mean.
So looking from the overhead of the car, a lot of you guys that have already taken
our wheel alignment, motorsport wheel alignment fundamentals course will
already be familiar with this technique but I'll just go through a little bit of how that
works here.
So if we're looking from top view here of the car and that's the front of the car,
we've got each one of our wheels sticking out at each corner of the car here and one
of the techniques we use as a reference to be able to set the toe angles of each
corner of the car is to use a string based wheel alignment setup and this is used
at all sorts of, lots of really high end racing, it sounds a bit basic but it is very
very effective, it's also cheap and easy to transport around so there's a lot of
good reasons for using it but essentially the idea here is that you have a bar at
the front and the rear of the car and the idea behind these bars is, the really
important thing about them is that they've got some form of slot or locating place for
some string to go at each side of them and the most important thing is that
this distance here between these 2 slot or however you're going to secure your
strings, the imperative thing is that these 2 slots on the front and rear bars
are the same distance apart, that's the most important thing.
At that point you know that if you're going to run strings down between them, like this,
then you know because these are the same two distances apart then you know that
you've got these 2 strings parallel to each other and that's really one of the
cruxes, one of the most important things to understand about a string wheel
alignment based system.
So after that all you're doing is, there's more details here about how to
centre this on the car but long story short, all you're really doing is taking the
measurement between the front of the wheel and the string line and the rear of the wheel
and the string line and if there's any angle on that wheel you're going to get a difference
in measurement front to back and that's going to give you your toe angle which
you can then calculate, sorry you're going to measure a toe distance and you can then
go ahead and calculate a toe angle if you need to.
Now that's the overhead view but it's really the side view that this forum
question's about and that's thinking about how we set the string height.
So if we're looking at the ground plane there and let's say we've got, in this particular case
the question is how to set these strings when you've got 2 different wheel or tyre
sizes that are really different from each other which is definitely possible in some
situations and I'm going to really exaggerate it there just to make it really obvious.
So what we normally do when we set these strings up, so we're looking at the side view
here obviously, we were looking at a top view before, is that what we normally
want to do is set the strings parallel to the ground but also running through the
centreline of the wheels.
The idea here, by running through the centreline of the wheels is that we can
make our measurements front and rear and as a result we can get an accurate
toe measurement.
Now the question here was what if I've got really different sized wheels front and
rear, so in this particular situation he was asking do we have these strings still
parallel to the ground or do I actually run the string lines, because then we go a little
bit further here, so if we've got our ride height bars here and here which is what
I was talking about at front and rear of the car, if we've got them sitting here
and here, we've usually got the ability, whether we're sitting these on jack stands
or whether you've got a fixture to do this a little bit more properly, you've got the
ability to adjust the height of these up and down to get the string sitting in the
right position for you.
The question was whether you run the string through the centreline of both which
would then mean the string would be not parallel to the ground or should you
end up running it parallel to the ground?
Now the reality is with both of these setups, there's actually inaccuracies in
both, but I think the best compromise, my suggestion along that was to still keep
the string parallel to the ground but run it at a height that's basically half way
between your two wheel positions.
So we'll just draw a fresh one there to make that a little more obvious up here.
So I would still, if this is the centre point of both your wheels, I would essentially
put the string line somewhere, it's not a very good one, through there,
something like that in order to, essentially split the difference in your 2 wheel sizes.
Unless the thing's really crazy and you're dealing with like a tractor then even though
you might have quite a big split between your front and rear tyre sizes, it's still not
going to be enough to mess with your toe measurements too much and it's
probably more important to keep that toe reference line parallel to the ground
level, certainly if you're running something maybe like a 15" in the front and even a
17" in the rear or maybe it's just really different tyre sizes, it's still not going to
be enough to really cause a problem to your wheel alignment measurements as far as
measuring your toe.
So I thought that was a really good question from one of our members James and that's
how I basically told him, I thought how he should deal with it and you can go through and read
some of the details in that post if you're interested in digging into that a little bit
further as well.
So guys as always, we've always got more courses coming up.
We've got our Race Driver Fundamentals course which is slated for release very soon.
We've also got a suspension fundamentals course that's going to be coming out
really soon, that's something I'm working on at the moment that we're in production for
which is really going to be a 101 on everything about suspension, everything from suspension
kinematics, springs, dampers, anti roll bars, suspension geometry, everything in there
that's going to be really packed full of really useful information for a lot of our
RaceCraft members so if you're interested in either of those courses, keep an eye out
for what's going to be coming out soon.
So guys that's the end of the pre show, I'll be back in a second and we will get
right into the actual meat of today's webinar, all about the VBOX.
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