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Forum > General Discussion
2014 Isle of Man TT zero
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Brick:
I love reading the progress am am behind you all the way!
Brick
Buckeye56:
May 29
Today was a busy and long day for Buckeye Current. Work continued on getting the battery pack in top operating condition. The electrical team had the bike for most of the day starting once the morning meeting and breakfast was over, the mechanical team was off duty until balancing was completed.
I should explain what balancing the batteries means, I will start off by saying that I don't fully understand it but basically you want all of the cells to be as close to the same voltage level as possible. This will vary do to production differences, age of the cells, number of charging cycles, etc. This is a gross over simplification but that is the essence of it.
Lee and Sally Helwich, our hosts, and his family have been real troopers in sharing their home with us. Lee, whose job schedule is flexible, has been very kind in driving us around Douglas so we can get all the bits and pieces that we forgot to pack in the crate. We were in need of a variety so screws so he took me to a builder's supply house to get them. I had gone to a local home improvement store that day before but struck out. I was glad he offered as driving here stresses me out! It's really not all that hard to get used to right hand drive but since we are borrowing Sally's car I was happy to be chauffeured!
It was late afternoon by the time the electrical guys where satisfied with balancing, now we could begin the final tightening and safety wiring of RW2.x and affixing the sponsor decals to the bodywork. Before that happened, Tm Monahan, a software engineer from Mission Motors, stopped by to check out our bike. They supply the motor and motor controller for Mugen and he is here to assist with any issues that crop up. He seemed very interested in the bike and spent a long time talking to the team. Thanks to Colin Whittamore of Mugen Europe for sending him our way. While I always like to see interest in RW2.x, it is especially nice when folks in the business are impressed with what we have accomplished. Once he left we pulled the wheels to have a new set of Dunlop D212GP tires that Rob prefers.
Since Rob's paddock is so crowded, we ended up working in shifts starting with the decals. Those of us on the race prep side hiked back to the house, had dinner and waited for the call to return to the paddock. By midnight we had completed checking all of the fasteners and safety wiring where needed. Tomorrow is our first practice at 20:30 (8:30pm), tech inspection is approximately 2 hours before that. It will be a relief to get the bike on the track to see how it performs. With any luck, all we will need to do is tweak the gearing to give Rob as much speed as we can without over discharging the pack on race day. Oh yeah, it would be nice if there were no more "surprises'!
Buckeye56:
Just a quick update. Yesterday's practice started off really well. At one point Rob was averaging better than 97 MPH. But battery issues ended up slowing us to 89. We have not yet come up with a plan of battle as how to best address this latest problem. I will keep you posted.
Buckeye56:
We have decided to reconfigure the battery pack where the batteries failed in Fridays practice to improve cooling flow through that section of the pack. We did pack spares in the crate with the bike so the biggest issue is getting them charged up so we can bring the final balancing for the race. We skipped yesterday's practice as the bike is in pieces in the paddock. So there may not be much more news in the next few days. Oh and the power switch on the main battery charger has failed! Fortunately one of the other bike teams let us use their charger and since we use a different piece of equipment to do the balancing so we are OK assuming nothing else goes wrong!
Rob had a rough SuperBike race yesterday. He had chunked the rear slick in the Friday practice and was not happy about it. In the race, the tire chunked again but the bigger problem was the chain failed tearing up the sprocket, wheel and rear tail of the bike. It looks like it came real close to hitting him too which would have been much worse!
DirtFlier:
Michael Dunlop, the Superbike race winner, averaged over 130 mph which I find totally amazing.
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