So, what’s going on lately with the Talon? There’s a small list of things that I need to do that are general maintenance items, along with some other enhancements that I’m working on. They follow in no particular order:

I ordered and received a new Trans Brake solenoid for the Powerglide. The existing solenoid works okay, but seems to weep fluid from it, and I’m not quite sure why it did that. So, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is replace the whole thing. That should fix that problem ;-)

I also ordered a new brake discs for one of the front brakes. The car had a slight shimmy on the top end slowing down, and throwing a dial indicator on my discs showed that my left front was about .015 from being completely straight. The new one is .005″, which is about the same as all the other discs on the car. Now, I just have to remember to drive it around a little bit before making a run to season that one up a bit.

I have also been working on a somewhat ridiculous project – data acquisition. Oh sure, I could have gone out and purchased a complete system, but I feel that existing systems have ridiculous price to performance ratios. Most systems cost somewhere in the 600-800 range and end up having severely limited inputs. (under 5 analog inputs, and only one or two digital inputs) and I just couldn’t have that. Or, you end up spending in the $2000+ range to have some actually adequate inputs. So, I’ve created my own hardware, and am in the middle of writing software for it. The system will sport four thermocouple inputs, Driveshaft and Tachometer RPM, four digital inputs and 12 analog inputs with a full 0-5V range on them. I will be able to log lots of stuff with them. And, I have multiple inputs – four of them to be exact. The total cost for all four units will be less than the cost of the lowest end data acquisition systems I could find. Of course, this just reinforces what kind of geek I am. a cheap one!

Time to get back to working on the datalogger…