NJ rally event needs owners! [Archive]

hobbit

06-15-2007, 12:26 AM

Here's a sort of hobbit-centric redux of last weekend. There
is a better general rundown and some background info at
http://www.autoauditorium.com/TdS_Reports_2007 ... but nobody
has posted any pictures yet, and I *didn't* have a camera with
me on this run.
.
I stopped at Mike's house the previous day and loaded some more
demo stuff into my car -- the crankable Prius transmission guts,
the cutaway coolant thermos, the exploded battery. Mike spun up
a quick handle for the parking actuator so someone could "be the
parking pawl" and feel the output torque from the 60:1 reduction
drive inside. I already had my inverter guts and "Katrina" ECUs.
Then drove down that Friday, and before heading for the Burlington
County Institute of Technology site, swung by about ten miles away
to find the house my dad grew up in. Yay GPS; led me right to it.
Sat across the street in the car and described it in the fathers
day card I was writing, and finally headed off in search of a
mailbox and eventually showed up at BCIT right on time at 3pm to
help set up.
.
There actually wasn't much to do. Slung some traffic cones around,
that was about it. But I got to hang out in the training shop and
see what they've got there. The place is huge and has many cabinets
full of disassembled demo parts -- brake mechanisms, steering boxes,
EGR valves, cutaway lawnmower engines and torque converters. They've
got some really nicely-built demo boards for ABS and showing how
alternators work, and a couple of engines on stands that were
constructed so similarly to the one Mike's been working on that I
had to call him later to find out if he'd modeled his on these.
Answer: no, completely independent design. I definitely regretted
not bringing a camera at this point, and I'm hoping someone else
got some shots around the shop area.
.
Finally the big group of folks war-storying in the training office
decided it was time to move the whole gathering to Ollie Perry's
house several miles south of there, so off we went. It was going
to be a campout in Ollie's backyard, which had a positively palacial
camp-trailer all set up with its parts pulled out, all ostensibly
to save everyone some motel costs but really, it became a party
atmosphere with lots of discussion, with my silly random-prius-pix
slideshow running in the background. His place is pleasant; middle
of flatland south Jersey but a nice neighborhood with trees and a
reasonably quiet street. Still, waaay out in the middle of bumfuk
nowhere with dump trucks tearing up and down rt. 206 at 70 mph once
we headed out from his house the next morning.
.
My gas gauge started blinking about 15 miles from the school, so
I stopped to tank up. NJ, of course, is that idiot state that
tries to not let you pump your own gas... but I gave the guy the
whole bladder schpiel and he started it on the slow setting and
basically handed the whole game to me to finish. The only upside
to this is that they take money and make change right there, so
I don't have to make two trips in for prepay and then change.
But I'd still rather do the whole job myself. Anyways, so I
took down the odo and reset the "B" [means "bladder"] tripmeter
and continued on.
.
At the school there was a bit of running around as I tried to
determine if they were going to give me a passenger or not; the
decision was finally to take one of the Philly kids to help
lighten the load in their chase-van, and then swap in another one
at the lunch stop on the run. So I had to zip over to the other
side of the school and offload the transmission and table and
other cargo, all of which probably equals about a person's worth
of mass anyways, and between that and trying to figure out the
right time to force-charge for the run it was somewhat confusing.
So that and a couple of extra power-ups sucked a little bit of
accumulated MPG, which I figured would just get reset away and
wouldn't count for the run. Hold that thought...
.
Finally we all got clocked out and started off. The Tour (http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/pix/ttts.gif) to the
Shore was hot but fairly entertaining. Long way south on Route
9, which largely bypasses the Parkway and took us past lots of
little tourist-trappy places and the occasional town having a
carnival which made for interesting pedestrian-crossing delays.
It turned out there was some road-closing construction near the
Lakehurst blimp hangar and we had to alter into a short bypass
from the original planned route. When we did that, my GPS
totally wigged out, recalculated many times and eventually tried
to send me by the straightest possible route over to Route 9
as we were nearing it -- causing me to take about a mile of
detour as my navigator rechecked the directions list and we
realized that I *should* have gone straight back at that
intersection where we'd had the conversation with the other
Prius driver who insisted that he was going the right way...
Eventually we got back on route, with the possible advantage
that we got clear of a small bunch of participants that had
formed in the meantime. It was weird to have an Insight
trailing me for quite a while...
.
The downside of this run was the speed limits; 50 or 55 much of
the way and over some fairly rough pavement. Evidently many of
these roads used to be concrete-slab and later blacktopped over,
but badly such that there are some serious *ridges* that have
heaved up at the ex-joints and nobody seems interested in fixing
them properly. So there was a lot of ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump
ka-WHAM! ba-dump ba-dump... I'm at a loss as to why I've got a
front end left on this car at all sometimes, let alone aligned...
with that and the speeds, though, not a lot of engine-off time,
but the roads are usually razor-straight and flat and I could at
least do a fair job of predicting lights from far out and getting
into a nice half-mile warp-stealth glide to them if things worked
out. But it really felt like the car was just slogging a lot of
the time -- pegged on 1700 RPM mile after mile and not actually
gaining any more speed until a slight downslope. We arrived
at the far-end lunch stop showing 73.6 mpg on my FCD, and I knew
just from the wind direction that everyone was going to get
totally *hammered* by headwinds on the return trip. But the
stop waaay out in the tidal flats at Oyster Creek was fun, and
once fortified with a tasty lunch we all got back on the road.
.
Neither of my passengers really seemed interested in driving
techniques or the stuff I was watching in the car. [What I
*really* wanted, which did not manifest itself, was for someone
from the PRESS to go along so I could give 'em the blow-by-blow
rundown on everything I was watching and timing fore and aft..]
My first rider all but fell asleep somewhere around Manahawkin,
and the second one showed the most enthusiasm when we stopped
at the gate into Batsto Village with the cute attendant. I
managed to BS my way in without forking up $5 by telling her
[quite honestly] I had to just look at the visitor center and
we weren't actually going to *park*. As we pulled away, my
shotgunner referred to her as, uh, "fine" ... sure, whatever.
I guess these guys are way more about speed and sexy lines
than efficiency and precision timing.
.
One entertaining feature of the return leg was Chatsworth, NJ.
I grew up in north Jersey, and every time I looked at a NJ map
I could see this big area down south with NOTHING in it except
a couple of long, straight roads that cross in a little town
called Chatsworth. I always wondered what was there. Well,
ironically enough I had never actually *gone* there, until last
Saturday! Well, what Chatsworth is about, of course, is the
endless surrounding square miles of cranberry bogs. Not just
random swampy areas -- these are engineered holding tanks, big
earth berms surrounding the bogs with all kinds of plumbing
and drainage weirs along the periphery. Puts the ones I saw
on Cape Cod last year totally to shame. So the town is doing
pretty well as the cranberry capital of the universe, I suppose.
.
The numbers battle had started raging several miles back; my
comfy well-into-the-seventies average started dropping as we
continued the rough-pavement and headwind 50+ mph slog. I was
down in the high sixties somewhere before Chatsworth and most
of the remaining distance; only when we got back near the more
populated areas did a few stretches of 40 PSL or under show
up, and I was able to just *barely* squeak it back up to
70.1 by the time I coasted into the finish line at the Valero
station near the school. From what I'd heard mentioned by other
people about the interim numbers they were running, I figured
I'd still do okay. So I tanked up, deciphered the other numbers
my passengers had logged in fairly nonstandard places on the
clipboard and neatened up all the info for the guy scoring,
and handed it off. With a big note pointing out the odo where
I'd actually filled, along with the odo when I'd started the
run, and the 2.7something gallons I'd put in. Well, despite
what everything had said about using the car's onboard FCDs, he
somehow came up with like 53 for my MPG, and of course I'd gotten
slightly lost but not as badly as one of the Insight drivers who
apparently did about an extra ten miles up and down the Parkway
looking for exits! I was mighty glad for the GPS... anyway,
obviously "theoretical trip miles" over "gallons pumped" does
in no way match the car's concept of running MPG, especially
when my extra 15 miles of getting there and fooling around
aren't taken into account. My "consolation prize" is one of
the nice rugged Snap-on drop lights they had been donated.
Fluorescent instead of LED, but nice and bright and probably
better than wrangling a bare ice-cream-cone CF lamp under the
car for those late-evening investigations.
.
No biggie, though. We all headed back to the school where they'd
been doing tech-testing on the student EVs most of the day, and
they were finishing up the autocross stuff. Apparently the SCCA
who runs all the official autocross events had bailed out on
helping and the NESEA folks had to sit down and design a course
and time it, but it was working. So with nobody else lined up,
I figured what the heck, and gave it a whirl. The first time I
was actually trying to turn in a decent time, and kept the Prius
in "B" for more instant response and to keep the engine running.
I very rarely "performance" drive, so I figured I'd still be lousy
at this, but apparently *smoothness* has much to do with successful
autocross runs and where many other cars were screeching their way
around the turns, I just bent through them without any audible
complaints from the tires. 32.7 seconds, on par with the Lorax
and the "Quiet Revolution" pickup, and no cones hit. For my
second run, though, I figured I'd hypermile it, and do it all on
battery. Punched the EV switch and then gently took off for the
first turn, gaining just enough speed to loop around it with no
brakes. Loafed through the long straightaway with plenty of
momentum to waft me through the subsequent twisties and the final
turn, and just popped into Neutral to bump across the timing hose
at the end. 57.9 seconds, without question the slowest time on the
charts that day. I figured at the very least the folks running
autocross could use the comic relief.
.
The rest of the evening held dinner and the awards/speeching in
the firefighter training building nearby; it went on for a very
long time, between all the student presentations and Nancy Hazard's
belated "closure" speech. Ollie has been dubbed the world's oldest
cheerleader. One important piece of info we needed was where to go
the next morning, and when, to be part of this Earth-fest thing in
the nearby Smithville Park which seems to have some historical
significance. Finally pried directions out of those who knew,
and headed for the motel. I had been signed up for a room and at
this point wasn't slated to share it with anyone, and it was like
11pm at night ... and I could have just gone back to Ollie's house.
But it was way too late to cancel the reservation so I just took
it, and it was actually good to shower, relax, and hop on their
somewhat flakey wireless to check mail. And they had breakfast
the next day.
.
The Earth-fest people had given Ollie a small parking lot down at
one end of the park near the river, which on the map looked like
total hinterlands where we'd get no exposure but apparently at the
other end where the lot drops *into* the river, they were going to
give canoe rides so this held some promise that people would go
through the area. I got there nice and early and set up my canopy (http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/pix/woodie/)
and window-dressing and demo pieces, and before I was even done with
that several people had stopped by to ask questions. Long story
short, it was another successful show environment, pretty much
hopping all day with people grabbing flyers and encouraging me to
be Toyota's lowest-paid salesman as usual. Apparently Toyota was
also there but in some other spot farther up the hill; a couple of
people who stopped by me said they'd been up there and couldn't get
their questions answered, posed them to me, and got accurate info
and web references in return. I said "how 'bout sending those
Toyota guys down *here* for their education" ... which would have
included the "Feel the power of REGEN!" demo to heat the toaster-
wires, poking the IGBT-die potting goop in the inverter rack (http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/ginv/i2compon.html), and
the whole rundown on throttle-control algorithms and coolant storage.
.
The day ended with dinner at a nearby diner [yay NJ diners!], and
I decided while half falling asleep over it that I would be better
off taking Ollie up on his offer of another night of crash space. I
arrived back at his place and had a long and interesting conversation
with him and his wife about all kinds of things, and we finally all
got to sleep. I took a nice leisurely wandering route up a long
portion of rt. 206 through Princeton the next morning before hitting
the interstates, which pulled the 43.x MPG average left over from a
fresh tank and the autocrossing and short trips back up toward 60
where it belongs.
.
_H*

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