irokin

Have you heard that Schedule J (cages) changes come into effect soon?

Alright later this week I'll write something. Definitely get into it but without knowing your skill level (and I hope I'm not being condescending) I would say go to queensland raceway first. I know the paperclip looks like a mind numbingly boring circuit but with lakeside, if you f@$kup you'll probably bin the car. I've seen the kink on the straight eat at least 3 cars in one afternoon. With QR there's lovely big gravel traps and is generally more forgiving. Lakeside is an amazing circuit but, it's got everything you could want. I still can't believe I held it flat through the kink with the speedo off the clock (180kmph+) on street tyres, pre surface repairs too :|. Easy way to catch up with lard arse GTRs :P I go to Paul Ruzic's time attack days (http://www.timeattack.com.au/), next QR one is September 7. Let me know if you're gonna go and I'll come out for a look. You end up with more track time with fewer cars to ruin your hotlaps and the atmospheres generally more friendly than the circuit organised sprints in my opinion. Downside(?) is the QR days are in the middle of the week so you've gotta take the day off.

I got sick of writing my essay so I decided listening to the 10 hour nyan cat video was more interesting... I think I may need help to stop...

Syntrax? Got a feeling I should just make a rides thread for the dirty nissan...

Unfortunately I'm pushing the reliability limits of the gearbox as it is. Even once I grow the balls to spend some money on an aftermarket gearset I'll still be running well on the safe side. $4000-9000 a gearset is not a cost I want to wear frequently. Similarly the lifters pretty much dictate I use 15w40, at least that's what I've found to work best. With the turbo I can live with some power losses. Its nice just being able to aim for a power figure and generally be able to achieve it. Moar booost!

Did the offset (and thus scrub radius), rolling diameter or tyre type change? Gotta consider all the variables together, its probably a function of all of these and more.

Moving the control arm alone wont do anything. The invisible geometry (line between outer and inner pivot points of the control arm) is exactly the same and all you've achieved is changing the angle of the control arm. You might solve bump steer doing this but the roll center wont change. You need to move the pivot itself further away vertically. Most of the Toyota RCA blocks work perfectly fine. The problem is with the Nissans because you can't just insert a block. The steering knuckle and spindle are one unit, so you need to increase the shaft length of the balljoint. Exhibit A: The first 2 are exactly the same, you're just moving the control arm away and the pivot stays in the same spot. #3 might have a slight shaft length increase but #4 is the only one that's going to work properly. Alternatively you can get radical, cutting and welding the knuckle itself. Bit iffy in my mind though. I'm not a suspension engineer but that's the way I understand it.

I absolutely think there's always some level of psychological effect. I remember hearing stories from a suspension engineer that they'd get drivers to come in, make some magic adjustment aka NOTHING and suddenly the cars faster. I also remember a doco on a Le Mans team (Creation Auto) where their hired driver spent all day buggerising around with the suspension setup and at the end of the practice session they put the setup back to where they started and suddenly the car was brilliant and everything was fixed and the lap times tumbled. There's a whole industry of crap products that do nothing and work only on a psychological level. Fuel 'catalysts' and swirly intakes anybody? Or topic related, garbage 'roll center adjusters' that don't change the pivot and just push the control arm away.

Made by BBS for Nissan, somewhere around 9-10kg :D Interestingly the 18 inch R34 GTR rims (also made by BBS) are about a kilo lighter again. I've got GTR slotted rotors to replace them. Don't really want to cross drill as they always seem to start cracks. They've got a reduced number of cooling vanes so should be slightly less weight. Unfortunately I don't have a scale that goes high enough to compare the weights. Here's a good page I came across and completely forgot to post, has some interesting data or caliper and disk weights: http://www.hotwheels.com.sg/products/tarox/brake%20weights.htm

I had (still have) a Predator/PWR cooler and radiator setup that pulled everything inboard but the thing was cumbersome to make work for something sold as "bolt on". I got tired of trying to make it work with my cooling system so I went back to a conventional setup but with a smaller and lighter intercooler. It'd have to be half the weight of the old one which had cast aluminium pipes coming off the intercooler so at least something was achieved. Predator setup looks like this: Probably suit a drag car better with the radiator/cooler sizes. Just ended up going in the "bad idea" pile. Just found a shot of my front setup and helped me confirm my choice of 235/45s. Can you imagine how far 255/40s would stick out... Old photos, still got Cusco "suspension" :blinks:

lol I was waiting for that :P and I agree... but... Part of the enjoyment I get out of this is the challenge of thinking about how different things affect the car, regardless of whether I actually act on the thought. I accept that my knowledge and skills aren't ever going to come close to a professional race engineer but neither do the skills of most golfers (to professional golfers, not race engineers :P). That doesn't stop them fiddling with their clubs or balls or whatever because they enjoy it. Does it actually improve their performance for their skill level? Probably not and I accept the same for my situation. Doesn't take the fun out of it though. Thanks for the reply Chris. Teddy's explained your weight reduction ethos to me before and I love it :P I had to replace the battery and free up some space so I've got a odyssey dry cell that's going in the rear passenger footwell. It's only about 1-2kg lighter but moving 10kg from in front of the axle to behind is pretty good I thought.

For driveability I would say that thermostats are more important for carby cars over EFI. You've got the fuel injectors spraying somewhere very close to the valve so you get atomised fuel even when the engines cold. You also have the ECU which will compensate for the cold start and the car will happily drive around on that map all day, albeit using more fuel. For engine wear its is more important for modern engines because of the closer tolerances.

I've got R33 GTSt brakes on the front currently and yes the disks are ridiculously heavy but the stopping power is fantastic. I can drop about 1.6kg out of them with 2 piece rotors but at $1500 a set, yea I'll pass for now. I run R33 GTR rims which are forged and relatively light and I've got Bilstein inverted monotubes on the front. I guess for the front, unless someone starts making billet alloy steering knuckles, the only two places I can take substantial weight out of now are the caliper and rotor. I just weighed my spare R32 GTR calipers at 3.13kg (dunno why that guy lists them as cast iron) which is surprising as they appear to be slightly bigger than the GTSt brakes. I can have the steel pistons replaced taking that weight down to something like 2.74kg which is why I'm wondering what kind of weights matter.

Not really, as its unsprung weight thus has considerably more effect on the cars handling. IIRC for sprung weight its worth something like 0.5hp per 10kg removed equivalence. For unsprung weight removing 10kg would be an absolutely massive improvement to handling. The way I understand it, the reason it has such an effect is because it increases the momentum that the shock absorbers and springs have to handle when you hit a bump etc. Reducing the unsprung mass means they can keep the tyre in contact with the road more of the time. Remember I drive on the joke that is Queensland Raceway. Apparently they're going to resurface it this year, but they said they would do it last year... and the year before that.... and.......... yea you're probably safe putting your money on 'its not gonna happen'.

This is in the Silvia so I've got IRS and all that good stuff. The cars an unregistered track only car now so it's missing large portions of interior (but I've kept the electric windows :rolls:). The car was 1190kg and I've been aiming for 1100kg but I seriously doubt I've removed even half of that. I haven't gone silly with carbon fiber bonnet, doors and boot and polycarbonate windows yet, I just don't think that's worth the cost ($3000+) at the moment. I've just concentrated on removing useless shit that I don't need to be taking for a free ride around the track. I'm fiddling with my brake setup at the moment and I have the opportunity to save some weight in the calipers. There are other benefits but increased braking force isn't one of them. Its essentially the same type of caliper just lighter. I'm just not convinced that the other benefits make it cost effective, so I'm trying to figure if the weight difference will play into the decision. I just feel like I might be splitting hairs. The biggest gain I'm going to see is from the tyres which should give me something like 2-3 seconds a lap, that and MOAR POWAH!! Whats another tenth of a second on top of that?

I know reducing unsprung weight can be a very good thing in motorsport but at what kind of threshold are you going to notice an improvement? 50g? 1kg? 5kg? I know the threshold for benefit is much lower when it comes to unsprung weight, but just how low is it? Save weight where at all possible whatever the cost? There is some background but I'll save it till some people reply so I don't taint your response with extra considerations. Talking about weight only at the moment.

IIRC the switch is in the lever, inside or just under the cabin. There's two connectors on the passenger side of the lever that are definitely inside, check that they're not loose.

I don't think that's it. Sounds more like carby icing to me. Trailing throttle, low dewpoint, high humidity; all prime conditions for carby icing. Here's a nice graphic from the ATSB: http://www.atsb.gov.au/media/47763/carb_icing.pdf For example, on Saturday (23/7/11) at 7am, 12degC, 6degC dewpoint, 6degC dewpoint depression, 61% humidity puts you in the 'serious icing - any power' region. Later in the day, 12pm, 20degC, 5degC DP, 15degC DPD, 37% humidity; puts you in serious icing - descent power (trailing throttle ;)) Naturally the graphs a bit more aggressive than reality because its for aviation but I still think there's a fair chance its icing.

For sure

The protester or the arrest?

Sorry guys, busy week...as usual :rolls: Have a read of this: http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/53296-dude-wheres-my-donations-link/

So a few people have asked the question recently about donations and I thought I'd post this just to let the wide community know what the deal is. First, I feel I should explain why I took the donations link down. It would have happened around September last year, when I did a major software update and didn't restore it. A few years ago (2007ish) Rollaclub was less than 1/4 the size it is now. We used very little hosting resources and thus the cost was very low. The few donations we received covered the costs comfortably. A year later we had doubled in size and so had the hosting costs. I think this is roughly when I started running with some advertising trying to bridge the gap between donations, some funds from stickers and what I was paying personally each month. To be honest, Google Adsense payouts are pretty shit. The advertisers certainly were doing better out of it than we ever did. Then in mid 2009 I was contacted by Sean from go2space. What they were offering compared to Google was a giant slayer. I was a bit skeptical to be honest, but they were good to their word. In April of 2010 we had enough funding to move off the slow crappy shared hosting we had been on and move to much faster rented equipment (sprinter.rollaclub.com) that the sites currently running on. There was still a bit of a gap in the funds, occasionally donations filled the gap and otherwise I just threw my own cash in the gap. Late in 2010 we had enough for a second offshore server to take some of the load off sprinter (ceres.rollaclub.com, yes Ceres is a Corolla model ;)). Ceres basically handles all the heavily cachable stuff, its hosted in the US. Just a quick word on go2space. I would throw your full support behind these guys where you can or feel comfortable doing so. These guys have done more for Australian forums in 2-3 years than ANYONE has ever done in the past 10 or so years that automotive forums have existed. I don't think they've ever said 'no' when I've asked for something. They were more than happy to support COTY last year and I can only imagine they will again this year. These guys are genuinely passionate about cars and they know the forum and advertising world. They've made big business sit up and take notice and we (Rollaclub and big business) benefit mutually. Now I'm not saying support them by using every single thing that's advertised here, but if they're running competitions and so forth get involved. Free stuff goddamnit!! So advertising versus donations. Why have we gone down the advertising route. Ultimately for me it comes down to stability. Donations were too sporadic to cover costs sustainable. That's not to say I don't appreciate every single donation we ever received. Some nights when I see a whole bunch of gold names in the 'online' list it makes me really proud of the community. At first I felt like advertising was a necessary evil. I've always been conscious of not wanting the site to look like a tarted up whore of a site like the way some other forums have gone. These days I don't feel so against advertising, many of these companies have chosen to target you guys specifically. You're a valuable market to them and you should feel as though you've been given some power by them. Would I like to see Rollaclub without advertising again? Maybe, I think there's pros and cons with both ways. The funding we're getting from advertising will hopefully allow us to do some very cool things in the next 12 months, but I'll get to this later. So where are we heading? Well with hosting, I'm currently gearing up for a move onto our own hardware. Last month I bought a Dell Poweredge 1950 III (2x Xeon E5435, 8GB RAM, 2x 300GB 15k RPM SAS drives). Some of you might remember I also bought a HP DL140 G3 a bit over a year ago. I wasn't comfortable with the redundancy that the HP offered. If a hard drive failed, the website would be down while I rebuild the redundant disk array. It's got a single power supply and no remote access if I accidentally lock myself out of SSH (haven't ever done it yet, but I will one day). The Dell has redundant and hot swappable (change them while the servers still running) drives and power supplies along with an out-of-band management card (this means I can control the server even while its switched off ;)). In about the next month or two the Dell (named Trueno) and the HP (named Allex, its a corolla model I swear!) will both be going into a Brisbane datacenter. We'll then be entirely on hardware owned by us and the speeds should be staggering (fastest forum in Australia? lol) along with providing us with plenty of space to expand. We're currently at about 75% disk capacity with our current server so its time to make the move before we run out (not to mention some other frustrations I'm having with the company). tl;dr skip to here So where does that leave us with donations? Well, I'm not comfortable taking donations that I don't need. Advertising is covering our hosting costs and then some. BUT that doesn't mean there isn't other things you can donate to and I certainly don't want to turn people away who want to help out Rollaclub in one way or another. Some of you may have heard about the Shitbox Rally? We're looking to enter at least one team for the 2012 event. The event raises money for the Cancer Council which is a very worthy cause. Now part of entering the event is a requirement to raise $4000 per team, can you see where I'm going with this? What I'm proposing is that instead of donating toward Rollaclub's costs, you donate towards the Rollaclub Shitbox Rally 2012 teams fundrasing. Currently its looking like RC Team 1 will be Teddy and 7shades. I hear they're planning some epic stuff already ;). We'll see how we go for fundraising and whether we can support extra teams. Donation page here: http://rollaclub.com/sbr2012.php

Now that's taking chassis tub a little bit too literally.

New xkcd comic today:

Be very afraid! The birds have learnt the toss bombing technique!