[Flieger]

We took the carb apart on the Honda 70. The float bowl had some old dried gasoline varnish in it and the idle jet had one hole plugged up. We did not have any carb cleaner but we told her that when she gets a chance she should get some carb cleaner and soak all the stuff and clean it out with compressed air. We put it back together today and it ran for a bit then died.

In other news we assembled the car and did get some driving in today but we will have to do the skidpad tests tomorrow.

The unfortunate thing is that the chain tensioner broke before she could drive it. Basically one wasn't designed despite the fact that the powertrain was a senior project last year so at the last minute someone stuck a bolt with some delrin on it in there. It works for an hour or two before the delrin wears but it is mainly the crappy motor controllers that causes it to fail. Last time the bolt sheared but this time not that bad. When the motor controllers go into regenerative braking mode the tension on the chain reverses and puts a lot of force on the "tensioner". The reason the motor controllers are crappy is that we are telling (software) the controller that regens not to regen but it still does. To try to even it out we set full regen on the other side but it does not regen... They are made in China. One also does not put out as much power as the other so we have a torque bias.

We will be getting new ones for this year's car.

I did get some seat time, however. One interesting thing is that if you let off the throttle the one motor that is regening immediately locks up and that is bad for the tires and for stability. I was able to overcome this by left foot braking. Well, you have to left foot brake all the time but with this car you can't let off the throttle so you just hit the brake and reduce power in order to stop smoothly. Sort of like staying on the boost. I got pretty good at it.