Guys, as those of you who attended will know, we never got any races run after a difficult-to-trace electrical short shut the track down. Up to that point we had the recent regular attendees comprising myself, Steve, O'Brie and Keith, along with Luke and someone who hasn't been at FRC for quite a while, Alex! It was great to have him there where he managed to try at least one no-magnet car, getting in several laps before the powerbase suddenly got a power overload.
We tried all the standard things we'd normally do to fix the issue - a visual check of the rails and slots, cleaning by running the Inox track applicator guide flag along the lanes, blowing out the slots with compressed air, then vacuuming the slots - none of which worked. I then retrieved my powerbase from storage in the back yard shed (we've been using Jaf's for quite some time now), unsoldered Jaf's to detach it from the track and soldered mine, but to no avail. We then started disabling various connectors under the track with O'Brie using a multimeter to check current flow, but still couldn't stop the powerbase overload.
We then moved on to the track itself, eliminating the pits and isolating sections starting from the start line, going backwards to the first section join. Some of you may not be aware that we had soldered together the undersides of the individual track rails into five major sections a few of years ago in order to get the best possible electrical connections. These sections were then joined using cables connected to under-table jumpers. The individual track pieces were joined using guide flag braid soldered to the rails. Well, we went through these sections testing each by driving a car in the reverse direction (anti-clockwise), but still came up with no overload on the powerbase. The only section we had not checked was the pit lane and we all looked at each other thinking "could it be that simple?".
Well, on lifting the pit track pieces, we found that the second pit entrance piece which we had exchanged places with because its lane changer had stopped working and which had initially had been soldered to the piece it connected to, had the unsoldered ends of the braid somehow touch one another, causing the overload.
Needless to say, although it was good to finally locate the cause, we were pretty annoyed to have gone through all of the above and because of how long it all took, we were unable to race. In fact, the track is still in unraceable form, as a lot of things that were disconnected or disabled now have to be re-setup. We're planning to spend a few hours this coming Saturday getting everything going again. Here are some pics taken by Luke:
Testing cars before the problem surfaced:
Short video of Alex having his first FRC magless experience:
Table balancing act in progress after doing some close-up inspection of the infield track areas:
Disconnecting the powerbase with all my cars in the paddock awaiting track reopening:
Powerbase partially disconnected with cables still to be desoldered:
O'Brie and I doing under-table checks:
We did get a little driving done before packing up, but with a somewhat handicapped track with no lane-changers or kill-switches and with some humps where the under-track wires were not reinserted into their holes and were creating raised areas.
I'll post an update after we get everything working properly again this Saturday.
See you on the circuit...
Gordon
