FF NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP

[johnd]

Mike:

Thanks for clearing up the bit about solder connections. I was feeling a bit guilty. Glad that someone replaced them all with crimped on pieces.


John D.

[Art Smith]

if you have time, patience, and the ability to tie a square knot, there is an alternative to professionally made cable harnesses, connectors, and terminal blocks. the enclosed picture shows a partially complete wiring installation on the dash of the Viking I'm rebuilding. lacing individual wires into a cable bundle and securing the bundle with clamps is old school aerospace for weight and reliability driven applications. everything is crimped (NO solder) and color coded with shrink tubing. there are quite a few more switches than normal because the car is being rebuilt in an all electric configuration including a battery isolation power contactor and electrical fire system for improved safety; de facto standard AIM steering wheel mounted dash. lace is available at Aircraft Spruce or other aircraft parts suppliers.

cable ties are for mock-up only of the two main AIM harnesses.

Art
artesmith@earthlink.net

ps: heavily loaded wires should be sized one AWG size larger in cable bundles that carry quite a bit of power because of the higher resulting temperature in the bundle. derating design guidelines should be available on the web.

[jim morgan]

All the technical stuff aside. Heartbreak for Treadway after dominating in Q. Tremendous CLEAN racing throughout the entire field. Glad I stayed an extra day.

[Brad Ellingson]

All the technical stuff aside. Heartbreak for Treadway after dominating in Q. Tremendous CLEAN racing throughout the entire field. Glad I stayed an extra day.

Me too dad...me too...

-The Good Son...

[Lee Stohr]

There are probably several ways that could fail, the most obvious to me is someone accidentally catching the wire and bending the terminal up, then pushing it back down and thinking it isn't worth mentioning. Thin aluminum ring terminals always scare me. Sometimes I use steel. Nothing is wrong with soldering if you strain relief the wire with a couple overlapping layers of heat shrink. I've done it on many cars. Not so necessary anymore with the heat shrink that has the adhesive inside. Use that and the wire can never come out. But like Art and Richard said, if you nailed down the wires about 1.5" from the terminal strip, tyrap them to a cable tie mount or something, then no accidents or vibration could get to the terminals. McMaster Carr has plenty of cable accessories.
Of course just for the Runoffs you could cover the whole terminal strip in silicon and worry about getting it off later. Or better yet, I think there are only 2 wires needed to keep a FF running, why not double them up for the Runoffs?
Great race anyway, much better than DSR