Tips and Techniques for building race cars and working in the shop.
New Omron Nitrous Switch Mount
One of the things I really wanted to fix on the car is a problem that occurred far too often, and cost me several rounds of racing. It's those little cheap carb microswitches for nitrous activation, which seem to act up at the worst possible time. I've fought those things far too much with issues like vibration, loose connections, or intermittent contacts. So while we've got the car all apart I made a new mount to use a Omron D4C1620 Limit Switch - this is the same switch most chassis builders sell for clutch cars as a clutch switch. Very heavy duty, potted and sealed cable, nice heavy duty roller arm - in other words about as bullet proof as you can get. You can buy these from places like Bickle, but you'll find them a lot cheaper if you watch ebay for them as the are an industrial part and show up often in industrial surplus. I've got $45 in this one, about half what the chassis shops sell them for.
In order to mount the switch, I had to figure out a way to locate it that's not going to be moving around. I came up with this setup which is made out of 3/8" .058" Wall CM Tubing with some light gauge mild steel for the switch to screw to. You can't see it in this picture, but I drilled a series of mounting holes for the switch in the flat plate for adjustment - plus you can rotate the arm 360 degrees for adjustment as well. This is all setup to work with the Smith Racecraft manual throttle pedal I put in the car a couple years ago.
After welding to the firewall, it seems to be quite stiff, and everything lined up real good. The only problem I ran into was I built a throttle stop into the mount, but I wasn't happy with how that worked. With the hard stop on there, both the throttle pedal mount and the firewall flex some when you're pushing hard, so I'm going to abandon that idea and put an adjustable stop directly below the throttle pedal itself in the floorboard.
That's about it for recent updates, haven't made a whole lot of progress due to more important things but a couple weeks ago I did finish up the right side airbox block off and I finished up the work on the new door handles I made. The "to-do" list is slowly getting items checked off!
In order to mount the switch, I had to figure out a way to locate it that's not going to be moving around. I came up with this setup which is made out of 3/8" .058" Wall CM Tubing with some light gauge mild steel for the switch to screw to. You can't see it in this picture, but I drilled a series of mounting holes for the switch in the flat plate for adjustment - plus you can rotate the arm 360 degrees for adjustment as well. This is all setup to work with the Smith Racecraft manual throttle pedal I put in the car a couple years ago.
After welding to the firewall, it seems to be quite stiff, and everything lined up real good. The only problem I ran into was I built a throttle stop into the mount, but I wasn't happy with how that worked. With the hard stop on there, both the throttle pedal mount and the firewall flex some when you're pushing hard, so I'm going to abandon that idea and put an adjustable stop directly below the throttle pedal itself in the floorboard.
That's about it for recent updates, haven't made a whole lot of progress due to more important things but a couple weeks ago I did finish up the right side airbox block off and I finished up the work on the new door handles I made. The "to-do" list is slowly getting items checked off!
