TACH'S

May be another simple answer here. What are you guys doing with these? Don't need a fancy play back job.......just something that tells the shoe at what rpm he is staged at. Just a simple tach should work, 10-11K RPM. With all the data loggers out there this seems like a no brainer. Did I miss something here? Oil gauge, fuel pressure and a basic tack and shift lite sounds like the ticket. Do you put the fuel and oil pressure gauges somewhere so the crew can see them also? I have seen an oil pressure gauge mounted in front of the engine so the crew can lite the motor after the oil pressure hit so many lbs.....sounds reasonable. 2 Oil pressure gauges. Thanks Brownman

 

How about an oil pressure gauge and a 3 stage shift light. Electronic tachs are unreliable at best, they don't last very long and if it's electrical, it WILL break. Put the oil gauge where a crew guy can see it after he pulls you up to the beam and you can see it during stage. Forget the fuel pressure gauge. You won't have time to look at gauges after you stab the throttle anyway. After enough runs in the car, you won't need the shift light.

 

The gauges we have in our car are blower boost, oil pressure, tachometer, and a shift light. If you don’t want to run an electrical tachometer because of the reliability, run a mechanical, that's what we're putting in our new TAFC, along with the LED shift light.

I find it nice to have the shift light now, I drove my entire first season without one in our TAD and found myself to be short-shifting a lot of the time, having it now makes that no longer a problem, also it makes your shift points a lot more consistent from run to run...at least that is what I have found with myself. Just make sure you put it somewhere that you don't have to look for it, ours is pointed right at my face so there's no way you could miss it there.

The reason we run a boost gauge is only because we don't have an in-car computer, otherwise we most likely wouldn't bother having it in the car.

Everyone has their own personal preference as to what they want to see though, just make sure you/your driver is comfortable and can see everything easily that needs to be seen.

 

Hello Guys, Just a small thing to add has any one else thought that an air pressure gauge in the cluster to allow the driver to see that he has air in the bottle before the stage, We are running air boost and oil along with the tach. Our driver thought of this as an extra check after the crew (ME) forgot to turn the air on,Oop's.

 

just a trick for monitoring the air bottle..I don't put on my right glove until I'm showed the firebottle flags and confirmed air on. the crew knows if I'm waving my glove to confirm both to me.

 

Will.....do you mean to mount the tach outside the drivers compartment and on the rear of the hat? Brownman

 

He means mount it on the dash of your tow vehicle. One good tire shake kills the best of them in a funny car so you might as well get used to not having one...unless you'd like to keep an inventory in stock with quick disconnects for quick between rounds swaps.

Daniel Oliver drives his super comp/super "E" dragster and doubles as our clutch guy. He's never sat in our car while it's running although he's been with us in TA/FC since 1990. Yesterday I was trimming up some new spools for our barrel valve and needed someone to do the honors so I had him jump in the car and give it his best shot at hitting 6,200 on the jackstands while we did a computer dump. First try out of the box he held it at about 6,000, then he bumped it up. He commented on the tug feel of the clutch pedal and the heavy/light feel of different throttle position during stage RPM and felt that after a couple shots at it he could get it very close.

Bottom line is, practice makes perfect. Anything beyond a shift light and oil pressure gauge is dead weight.

When Marc White drove my car at Pomona we had some issues with the fuel system. Even with problems, he was like a machine hitting the correct stage RPM every time without a tach. "I'm just lucky" he said.

Yea, right.

[ February 01, 2004, 11:32 PM: Message edited by: Randy G. ]

 

Randy, you hit the nail on the head. Judge, your crew will only do this once.