After more than 6 weeks of work we
finally started the Hayabusa motor! We only ran it for
about 2 seconds since it was late at night and we haven't filled the water
box yet and the exhaust system isn't done yet. But let me start at
the beginning of the week...
Last week Mark left the car with us in
our garage. With work, school and other things I only managed
to put in a few hours durring the week on the electrical system (the last
big thing remaining before we could start the engine). Saturday morning,
Mark came by to work on the car and with all of us working we wanted more
space than just the garage. Some of you know that my garage
door is nailed shut (we bought the house that way) but we can still get
the race car in and out through a small panel.
With the car under the car-port there is lots of room to work and the light is better. I worked on the electrical system and James & Mark worked on many of the other little items that need to be done before running the car at the next meet (Sept 16th at El Mirage Lake). One of the projects is the parachute. If the current record in you class is more than 160 Mph, you need a parachute. The record for our 750cc engine (JG/L class) was 158MPH so we were cool but the new motor's class record (HG/L) is about 180MPH. Several years ago, James & I saw a very cool parachute deployment system It used compressed air to hold the chute in. Additionally, the system had a pressure switch for the ignition. Any loss of pressure would deploy the chute and turn off the motor. Plastic air hose was run around areas prone to fire which would melt the air line. The driver's first indication of a fire is the motor shutting down (and the fuel pump) and the chute coming out. The driver can deploy the chute by pressing a button on the steering wheel. Any way lots of work to get it all put together.
I sorted out the last of the electrical
system and chopped off everything we didn't need attached to the motorincluding
dashboard and headlight wires. Then I started attaching them to our
electrical panel (we use a standardized panel so that we can just plug
in any of our engines with out any extra wiring). This took me until
Monday morning. Mark stopped by with his family to see if it would
start before heading back to San Diego. Well it wouldn't start and
we had an idea that the computerized ignition wasn't happy with something.
Fortunately the dashboard will tell you what the computer doesn't like
but that meant attaching a lot more wires. I finished about 5 PM
and turned on the power..... C-42 the computer said. This is
an "Ignition Error" according to the book. James and I spent many
hours ringing out wires and doing tests trying to find the error.
to make a very long story short. We guessed that the original motorcycle
had an anti-hotwire circuit that's not in the shop manual (don't
want thieves to know about it) and guessed how it could be tricked in to
working. SUCCESS! C-00 No Errors! So at about 10PM
Monday night we turned it over and it lit right up.
Until next week....