Doc Diaries: Tunnel Vision (part 1)

I love to travel. But not like most people do.

One of my favorite things about traveling, and especially by airplane, is the actual experience of being on the plane. Watching the world through a window. Trying to notice how even familiar places and things look somewhat distant and alien through an airplane window. I try to look out the window and take pictures that will somehow explain the thoughts and feelings and curiosities and perspectives that are hiding within myself.

The sequence of images from a flight is as much a record of the changing environment around the plane, as it is a memorial to the way that my attention sometimes flutters from one subject to another, noticing commonalities and differences this time around that I had somehow missed before.

Break. Fix. Repeat. (Rhythm of Racing, Part 4)

(Note: this post follows "Stop and Go, Mostly Go" in the Rhythm of Racing series.)

First, it breaks…

The last post discussed the idea of a clean race, where everything goes perfectly, nothing breaks, the car never goes off track, and so on. That mostly doesn't happen. What's more likely is that you'll be racing along, and then suddenly you see a cloud of steam as the temperature gauge shoots for the moon. Time to pull off-track and wait for a tow.

Maybe you're in the groove heading toward turn 8, when BANG! Suddenly you have a see-through engine. The giant puff of smoke makes it seem like a magic trick, sometimes, but the punchline is always sad. And if you don't have a spare, then that's how the story ends. First with a bang, and then a whimper.

Sometimes your wheel comes off. Maybe a bump or jostle earlier in the race had a delayed effect. Maybe the driver went off-track, the wheel got sucked into a mud puddle, and the rest of the car kept going. Maybe the part was poorly-designed, or had a manufacturing defect. Whatever the reason, it's not fun, but it's generally fixable.

First it breaks, then ya fix it…

I love endurance races in part because the teams have time to encounter problems, fix them, and get back on their way. Things can go wrong and then go right in the same race, and there's always some light at the end of the tunnel.

In this case, the Prototype Development Group #4 car (the same one that was rebuilt after bursting into flames during the prior year's race) ran into a situation where an errant bolt caused the unexpected disassembly of their clutch plate. In the photo, the team examines the deconstructed clutch, as well as a damaged spare, which showed evidence of the same kind of problem.

In the spirit of endurance racing, the team threw the spare in, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best.

The Twini — a twin-engine Mini Cooper — had a recurring issue where oil would get past some gaskets and end up in the spark plug wells of the front engine. In the photo, a team-member uses a hammer and an upside-down socket to re-install one of the spark plug wells after another a teammate had coated the bottom end in silicone gasket-maker. This wasn't the last time the team would pore over one of their engines, and they would end the race many laps down on their competitors, but still managed to roll across the finish.

The #17 Davidson Racing Eagle, sister car of the winning #16, had no such luck. After multiple paddock stops for recurring electrical issues, and hours of discussions and diagnostics, the team retired the car and focused their efforts on the #16.

…Then ya get back out there

Every team has a routine for getting back on track, and they're also interesting to watch. The switch from the exploratory "diagnostics and repair" mode to the "get back on track" process is somewhat similar to a musician transitioning from an improvised solo back to the sheet music.

At first, the teams are improvising left and right as they try to fix whatever needs fixing. Then you start to see inklings of pre-planned order, even before the resolution is complete. The driver gets back in the car (if they ever got out); the engine starts; the car is dropped back on the ground. Strewn tools are moved to make a path. A crew member stands next to any removed bodywork, waiting for a signal.

With an engine problem, the bodywork is always last. For the JFC Racing #52 car in the photograph, the bodywork pieces attach with small spring-clips, which are fastened into place with a screwdriver, and the reattachment itself is a frequently-rehearsed procedure. The more automatic each step in the transition becomes, the easier it is to move that step around in the resolution process.

For a street-style car with a hinged hood, like this Grip Racing #95 BMW 330i, the hood closes and then is fastened using hood pins (red) with a flip-up actuator lever (black, attached to the hood).

As the final bodywork is still being installed, a team member runs out to block traffic. Having the driver back into something or someone would be a disaster, and the faster they can get out of the paddock space, the faster they can get back on track.

And finally, away! The resolution is complete.

The full Rhythm of Racing sequence:

• Part 1: Morning
• Part 2: On-Track Prep
• Part 3: Stop and Go, Mostly Go
• Part 4: Break. Fix. Repeat.
• Part 5: Disaster
• Part 6: Reunion

This Is My Outlet

It so happens that the first outlet I ever wired was on a big truck. It is attached to the first breaker panel I ever wired. It was a GFCI, and I wired it right the first time, but it didn't work. I replaced it temporarily with a standard outlet, which worked fine, and then I put the GFCI back, at which point I discovered that I just didn't push the RESET button hard enough. *phew* The lights on the outlet tester show that the neutral and ground wires are wired correctly, and that the hot and neutral wires aren't flipped (otherwise the red light would illuminate).

This outlet will help make the speakers go boom.

This is all to say that The Spirit of Perry Windsor is nearing her long voyage to Black Rock City. A bittersweet trip, for certain.

To Revive the M35

Over the past couple months, I've been working with some folks on what will hopefully become a Burning Man art car. The base vehicle is an M35 "deuce-and-a-half" 2.5-ton-capacity military truck which currently sits at the NIMBY workspace in Oakland, CA. The truck was parked there after transmission issues left it immobile a few years back, and there it has sat until Casey, our fearless leader, came a-lookin'.

Well, technically, it's continued to sit since then, but we're getting mighty close to having her rollin' again. During this past weekend, Casey fired up the engine and it ran well and sounded pretty healthy. At this point, we're generally working our way through the drivetrain, starting at the powerplant and getting all the way to the wheels at some indeterminate moment in the future.

I spent the majority of my own time under the truck, hammering away at one thing or another (at times literally). Consequently, most of the photos are from that vantage point. Enjoy!

Denise (left) and Sean (right) work on cleaning the truck. Denise spent the day combing over the undercarriage with a screwdriver and air blower, removing what loads of dust and other muck had accumulated over untold years. Sean used a hammer and another screwdriver trying to fight his way through the truck's military-spec 3-layer paint job in order to make the frame-stamped VIN legible once more.

Matt wrangles with the instrument cluster after it became apparent during the startup that the tachometer was non-functional.

Casey sprays some Liquid Wrench on a pair of nuts and bolts that I would then spend the following 2 hours removing. I don't entirely understand how a 5/8" nut could provide as much resistance to a 1.5ft breaker bar as it did, for as long as it did, but I finally got the best of it.

In this case, the bolt holds a short strut that serves as the attachment point between a cabin-accessible lever and the transfer case, which is the part that distributes torque from the transmission (green, top-left) to whichever drive wheels are selected, possibly with a gear reduction. Given that we had previously replaced the transmission wholesale, the transfer case was the next step away from the engine.

And speaking of the transfer case, this is not how you want your gear oil to look. First off, the caked-on green formerly-dust shows that the drain plug had been leaking for a long while, and the wet appearance all around the area shows that it was still actively leaking when I got to it.

Even better, the dark olive color means that the oil had been gathering contaminants — the natural color is lighter and more translucent — and the color striations mean that the lubricant had started to break down into an emulsion, likely due in part to water intrusion. Really, the only good thing was that I didn't see any bits of metal coming out as well.

But it's all in a day's work, I suppose. And though there'll surely be plenty more work in the weeks and months to come, there's still something satisfying about making demonstrable progress, stopping to admire the clash of industry and natural beauty that is a NIMBY sunset, and then heading on home.

Sears Pointless 2012: What's the point?

The annual Sears Pointless race happened about two weeks ago. The race itself was a weekend affair, with a monumental downpour on Saturday and springtime weather by the time I showed up on Sunday.

This year I basically tromped around the paddock, chatting it up, watching people battle against their cheap cars, and lending a hand here and there. Likewise, this post will be a chronological sequence of unrelated vignettes about the wonders and dangers of racing $500 cars.

A case of the Sundays… There are times when racecars aren't awesome; instead, they're just frustrating. Maddening. Like a never-ending spiral of yak-shaving just so you can see if your car will actually start when it's all said and done.

The #74 car had some kind of engine malady, the nature of which I've since forgotten. But to get at the engine, they had to disconnect the exhaust. To disconnect the exhaust, they had to wait until it was cool enough to touch, only to discover that the bolts on it were frozen stiff. Just one of those days…

Fatigue is the mind-killer Endurance races often aren't about going fast so much as they're about not making mistakes. But fatigue is the mind-killer, and it can take its toll in the pits as well as out on the track.

This team had an oil pump failure. Since they had custom-mounted a Ford V8 into their BMW E30 M3 with barely any room to spare, they had to pull the entire engine and transmission out just to get at the oil pan and replace the pump. Nearly five hours after the car broke, the team finally buttoned everything back together and sent the car back out…

Only for it to be towed back in, six laps later. Why? Because somewhere in there, the oil plug didn't get tightened down properly.

Just turn laps… Bad things happen when you run out of brake pad material. The #173 car pulled into the pits, and when one of the team members pulled a front wheel off, a cloud of brake dust emerged. The heat of running metal-on-metal had lightly welded the braking pad backing plates to the calipers. and had also damaged the calipers to the point where the brake pistons wouldn't retract at all, let alone far enough to fit the new brake pads.

After 15 or 20 minutes with no progress, someone made the executive decision to slap the metal backing plates back in there and send the car back out on the track. "Just turn laps…" were the instructions for the driver. In the first few laps after the stop, the car lost 40 seconds per lap from its original pace, but by the closing laps of the race, they got down to the +10sec range.

The other kind of ford… After walking around the paddock for awhile, I started exploring some tunnels (typically used to get to different parts of the racecourse). One of the tunnels had flooded after Saturday's deluge, and some boys found the tunnel before their chaperone found them. "By the time I got here, they were already soaking wet," she said.

That's a LeMons moment… 24 Hours of LeMons founder John "Jay" Lamm (2nd from right) looks on as team Idiotarod pulls their spark plugs in preparation for another attempt to start their 2-stroke snowmobile-engined Miata. After a couple start attempts, the cylinders would flood with fuel, after which point the team would pull the three spark plugs, turn the engine a couple times to pump the excess fuel out, and then try again.

When the engine finally coughed to life, after the spark plugs had been pulled twice already, Lamm had a chuckle at the LeMony nature of the car's startup procedure.

Party time… One of the great successes in the 24 Hours of LeMons race is simply taking the checkered flag. The race is in part a war of attrition — a number of teams don't make it that far (or, in the case of our car Saab Story, perhaps they don't even make it past the green flag…) So any time your car pulls in after the checker is occasion to celebrate.

In this case, the Clueless Party Viking team got the party started after a 12th-place overall finish (out of 171 cars that started the race). True to form, the first celebration was emptying a 1-pint can of Coors Light onto the hood of the car, after which the driver got one to drink.

A happier Saab story… People race all kinds of old cars at LeMons, and there's pretty much something for everyone. Here, friend, teammate, and resident Saab guy Jerrit cracks a smile while helping to push a 1973 Saab Sonnett (the first ever in LeMons history, according to the organizers) back to its pit. This chapter of the Sonnett story ended up being a short one, though, as the car reached the four-tow limit by the time it had completed 23 laps.

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