DMS Racing: Lemons MSR Houston May 2017

We are not Spartans: “Come back with your shield - or on it”
Come back safe! Car looks great!!

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Wow! The car looks awesome! I wish you success!

Brake pedal, gas pedal. If you ain’t mashing down on one of ‘em as hard as you can, you ain’t racin’ hard enough.

Think how much weight, unsprung weight, and system complexity, etc. could be saved if you got rid of brakes entirely. Same with mirrors - they are for what’s behind you you should be looking forward, they are extra weight and wind drag. Also motivates to be in lead - can’t rear end anybody if they are behind you.

Now you’d only have a clutch and gas pedal for your feet to play with.

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This guy gets it. :smiley:

Got about 2 hours of practice driving in with no issues today. Race day 1 is 7.5 hours tomorrow then 7 hours on Sunday. We are going to attempt driver stints of 1 hour 45 minutes to minimize pit stops and try to win.

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Turns out we failed to make the diff better when we did seals. Lost fluid and melted all the poly mounts after 2 hours in race.

Time to use an “I.V.” type of bag with a tube keeping the diff full while you race!

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I feel like I should steal that idea for the cruel bus

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What is higher, gear oil boiling point or polyurethane melting point?

Attempting to fabricate some solid mounts out of pipe and washers overnight. Soonest we can get pinion seal is 9am tomorrow (same time race starts back up)

If only we had a mini lathe…

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I’m surprised that you guys haven’t gone to solid bushings.

Melting your diff bushings is not a failure mode I would have expected, definitely need solid mounts in the future. The poly ones were 4x cheaper than buying off the shelf solid mounts.

randomly selected from the Interwebs:
boiling point of 80/90w gear oil: 218.30 °C / 424.9 °F@ 760.00 mmHg
Melting temperature of polyurethane: 227-260 °C (may not be the “right kind” of polyurethane…)

Hmm…
I’m thinking if you’re melting the mounts, you’re likely boiling the oil just before. Sounds like you need a cooler more than solid mounts, but I suppose solid mounts are easier to obtain…

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My current theory is that I failed to torque an exhaust flange which worked it’s way lose and caused exhaust gas to flow over diff which caused it to eventually overheat and both boil the fluid (lots of it got spewed out the breather hose) and melt the bushings.

On the plus side, the diff is directly under the plastic OE gas tank, at least the car didn’t burst into flames.

Here is where it was lose, under the driver’s seat.

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buying? DMS has a cnc plasma cutter, a Bridgeport, and a shit tonne of talent …

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Almost all back together to get back on track…

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Orielly failed on getting the pinion seal by 9am, but it turns out the seal on a fwd Xterra is exactly the same. Took a bit of time to drive and get it, but car is back together and on track with some custom ‘solid’ diff bushings out of stacks of washer, pipe, and silicone heat mat.

Currently on track trying to get to the checkered.

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Made it to the checkered flag

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Another great Lemons weekend in the books! Got to troubleshoot problems and learn from them, and all drivers got track time and delivered great performances! Best lap time was 1:58.8 (wohoo go Mike!), which shaved off some time from the last event. And we got to promote DMS! Would have been nice to win, but there’s always next time :slight_smile:

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