RC Dyno ideas revisited...
 

Folks, I was poking around with my other hobby (experimental aircraft) and found an interesting homebuilt dyno for measuring torque at various RPM on an aircraft engine. I think a scaled down and slightly modified version of this would work pretty well.

All it needs are:

1) Something to apply load to the engine. Although they used a ground adjustable prop to "hold" rpm, the same thing could be done with a "squirrel cage" fan like used in air conditioners (to take most of the load) and brakes (to allow adjustment.) Use a regular buggy/truggy clutch and spur gear, and additional gears to get the fan RPM into the range where it is actually applying most of the load without being TOO much load.

2) An accurate scale, like a postal scale.

3) An engine mount that allows the engine to rotate around the crankshaft axis.

4) A tach to read the RPM of the fan, or another part of the gear train.

Torque is measured by an arm attached to the rotating engine mount, applying force to the scale. This will give you a torque reading at a given RPM (which the load is varied to control the RPM) Then it is simple math. No heavy, dangerous flywheels... no computers to mess with...

Thoughts?

This is a very good engine dyno...

http://www.nitrodynesystems.com/

Yup... it should be... "Current X-Dyno retail price: $5495

:lol:

I am pretty sure one built the way I am describing could be built for about 5% of that cost... and give equally accurate test results. But... It's bling, yo!

and $6,000

all i need is the soft wear, sensors and dyna mite box, i can build the rest, just finding the box thats programed for this application is tuff.

I beleive the datamite box is already setup with the needed programming... I have talked with them and it seems pretty straight forward to do... They have alot of advice on sizing of the flywheel and gearing requirements....... I would love to have a dyno to play with but spending 6K is more then I can stomach for my hobby.... Datamite has some new blackbox options that are priced very good, which would make a simple dyno really affordable to build.....

Here is a link to the datamite packages

http://www.performancetrends.com/DataMitePricesOnly.htm