First Year team - To buy a complete motorbike???

[JD]

Just wondering if its worth buying a wrecked bike for miscellaneous bits and pieces, and a back-up engine.

What are your thoughts??

Cheers, JD
Auckland

[JD]

Just wondering if its worth buying a wrecked bike for miscellaneous bits and pieces, and a back-up engine.

What are your thoughts??

Cheers, JD
Auckland

[Charlie]

I think that you should buy it if you need an engine, but don't spend any extra for the rest. The amount of stock bike parts that you can use on a FSAE car is pretty limited. You might find a caliper, rotor, tach, or something nice off of it but I wouldn't bet on it.

-Charlie Ping

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

[Dan Deussen @ Weber Motor]

Definitely get a backup engine! ! !

It would be a shame to do all that work for 9 months and then not being able to compete just because your engine decided to die just before or during the competition.

Daniel Deussen
www.walbro-italy.com (http://www.walbro-italy.com)

[Big Bird]

Buying a complete wreck isn't too bad an option. If you are getting a late model 600 there is a bit of a market for odd parts with 600 Supersport racers. Especially wheels, brake discs, gauges, etc. Can take a while to get rid of all the bits though.


Cheers

Geoff Pearson
RMIT FSAE 2003

Design it. Build it. Write it off two weeks before the event.

[fsae_alum]

In 01, we bought an F4i right off the showroom floor as there were none in the yards yet. By getting a complete bike, we were able to get it out of a bike and into our car over the process of a weekend with VERY few problems. IMO, it's much easier to take bike that is already running and transfer everything over and start bypassing the items one at a time to get rid of the stuff you don't need. That just seems soooo much easier than just starting with a bare engine and trying to figure out what it will take to make it run. At least it's running right? We sold off all the extra stuff and took about a 1k loss on it that way.....but we didn't HAVE to do ANY dyno tuning at all by going that route. It's all a trade off!!

In spite of...

[Dan Deussen @ Weber Motor]

Fsae_Alumn: How did moving the engine from the bike to your car save you the dyno testing? The original Honda calibration is made for the unrestricted 4 buttefly throttle body assembly. From a design objective standpoint, using the stock calibration with your restricted engine is a poor decision, in my oppinion.

Daniel Deussen
www.walbro-italy.com (http://www.walbro-italy.com)

[fsae_alum]

We use the stock throttle bodies but took the butterflies out. What's interesting is that as I mentioned earlier "we didn't HAVE to do ANY dyno tuning at all"...but we did http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif. We did our dyno tuning at Southwest Research Institute on their $50k+ full chassis dyno (they have 4 chassis dyno's and I'd say probably 2 dozen test stand dyno's) with a $10k+ ultra-high precision O2 sensor. They specialize in exhaust analysis testing for major auto manufacturers. With the Institute engineers looking over our shoulders, we ALL discovered that with our intake design, the base Honda maps we're not that far off and only required very, very mild tweaking. The SWRI engineers even suggested that for the endurance event we could run the base Honda map as that offered better fuel economy than the "power" map. BTW...we were using the Power Commander. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif I personally feel that our route was far easier than that of our neighbors up the road at A&M that went with a standalone system and spent TONS of hours dyno testing.

Oh yeah...poor design decision or not..it ran, which if you're spending all your time poiking around with a stand alone system and can never get it running...well...who's driving and who's not? (don't mean that offensive in any way) Take it for what it's worth!! For a team that's behind schedule, it a potential way to catch up. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

In spite of...

[RagingGrandpa]

Backup engine is a definate must, but I have a hard time seeing you use nearly ANYTHING else off the stock bike. Brake rotors? Opps there aren't enough. Frame? Useless. Controls? Wrong positions. It's been easy enough for our team, and I'm assuming for most other teams, to find engine-only packages out of the plethora of wrecked bikes. Seek and ye shall find.

"...with powershifts and tiresmoke for all"

[D. Knight]

fsae_alum,

I'm curious to know how your were able to get the stock maps off the ECU. Does the Power Commander have an option for this? I'm not familar with that ECU.

Also, from what I hear it may over a week to "by-pass" all the safety features of the stock ECU, but like everything else just depends on who's doing it, and how many beers they have http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

"Just Do It" ~ nike

[fsae_alum]

Here's what we use off the bike:

Engine (of course)
Main engine harness
ECU
Relay pack
Transistor pack
Bank Angle Sensor
Fuel Pump
Ignition switch
Fuel Injectors
Throttle Bodies
Battery
Gauge cluster

That is how we had it installed in the car!!

You don't have to buy a complete bike, but back in Jan 01, there were no F4i's in the salvage yards as they were too new. To get our backup engine for the following year, we bought a wrecked bike and used that. We sold off all the parts we didn't need and came out ok. There are people out there looking for good bikes minus the engine so that they can drop a bigger engine in them and have a sleeper. That's what they did with our original one!!

By using the stock fuel pump we were able to bolt it right on and plug it right in. We knew that it was sized correctly for that size engine. Also, by using the stock puel pump in conjunction with the ECU and the gauge cluster, we were able to utilize the factory "low fuel" light. The big thing was that with the ECU and the gauge cluster used in combination, we could use the fuel injection diagnostic light to troubleshoot the engine via the factory service manual. If something wasn't right...just follw the manual. Easy to do. We touted all that as selling features of the car to the design judges. In our eyes, for a weekend autocrosser (remember that's who it's suppossed to be marketed to), easy troubleshooting and being able to walk into any Honda dealer and get replacement parts was a big selling point. The design judges would much rather us build everything from scratch though. BTW, our car would start almost every time on the first turn of the key and purred like a little kitten. It NEVER exhibited signs of "hunting" (the BRRAPPPP....BRRAPPP....BRRAPPP sound so familiar)like so many FSAE cars did back then in 01. It was more a sound of Prrrrrrr..... The downsides were that it was heavy (really only the ignition switch since it had a theft deterent on it) and as mentioned, the design judges frowned down on it since it wasn't home-made.

As for the maps, with the Power Commander, we were able to pull out the stock maps from the ECU and look at it with no problems.

Hope that helps!!

In spite of...

[This message was edited by fsae_alum on February 13, 2004 at 10:58 AM.]