Thur Oct 23 - Scrutineering

Up early and take a small crew of three, Ellie, Roxy and Kirsty and I go out to the track to get the car ready for scrutineering. We remove the tape from the battery boxes and I remove the charging wires from the batteries. The drivers arrive minus Doug to practice ingress and egress. The boys easily manage to get in and out in the 15 sec allowed, this includes fastening the seat belt. Car goes in the trailer and off we go to Foskey pavilion at the show grounds.

We are the second car for the day, I get the team organised and signed on then we bring the car in. Stickers on and photo taken, next the weigh in. 310kg, heavier than I thought, but their weighing method is not precise as they only have two scales and can only weigh half the car at a time.

Next ingress and egress but we have to wait for Cambridge University, They struggle to demonstrate that they can get in and out in 15 seconds. We do it easily. Next a mechanical check. No problems, now NT licensing, they suggest we cover some of the brake lines with duct where they pass through the Ayres composite panel, that's an easy fix.

Now electrical, it seems I should have read more into that rule affecting the charging wires coming out of the batteries. It also means that we need to have the batteries isolated at the battery box and no "live" wires can come from the battery. This will cause us quite some work and we may struggle to find the parts needed in Darwin. Doug I will end up spending some hours talking through the problem and a particularly helpful guy, Denis at Delta electronics helps us work through it and sends us to where we can get some appropriate circuit breakers. Our solution will be a mechanical one with pull wires to the outside of the car and to the driver.

Next we go to battery scrutineering and we are done.

Back to the track and work on the car.

We don't quite get the batteries finished, we head back to camp. The team except for my self heads to Mindle beach markets. I get some washing done and watched the News, ABC TV cameras visited our car today and took quite a bit of footage, There was nothing on the news. By the time the team gets back from the markets I am ready for bed.

Friday get car finished do some laps start preparing for the journey South.

Stay tuned.

John Beattie
Leeming SHS
Solar Car Team.