ignatz

I came across this the other week

http://www.rhworkshop.com/products/ir-blue-dm

and bought one.

Here is a photo of one of my tires after a hot autoX lap



Haven't figured out how to convert color to temperature yet, but just the notional display of red hot, blue cool and where looks pretty useful.

The upper left hand corner shows the whole temp range.

froggy47

Makes me wonder if we all should just water the outermost area.

??

w00tw00t

pretty cool!

Bill Dearborn

Is the 136.4 a temp reading from some place on the tire? I think the variation in colors shows you may not have a high enough air pressure, enough negative camber or both so the whole tire isn't working for you. You want an even distribution of temps all the way across the tire for best performance. How long after you finished the run did you take your tire temps? An IR scanner may not be able to show what the actual profile of the heat distribution is unless you make the measurement just as you pull off the course. Just driving to a parking spot can screw up the surface temp of the tire.

Bill

lefrog

I have always heard that surface heat readings was only accurate when aimed at tire while on track and recording to an onboard data logger. That's why tire pyrometers use a probe.
Your temp readings seem really low. After hot laps, I would expect the temps to be in the 180+ range.
If the relative temps are reliable enough that could give you a quick reading of your tire pressure and camber settings. For the price, I think a real tire pyrometer is still cheaper and will give you more accurate readings.

Solofast

Looks like the left side of the tire is the inboard side and that is hotter than the outboard side. You need less negative camber or lower pressure if that was a good reading.

Problem is temperatures that you get from an autocross lap only reflect the last couple of corners and that can be very misleading if for instance the last two corners were right hand corners, the temperatures on the left side of the car would be good and the temps on the other side would be meaningless.

Best to do tire temps on a skidpad as opposed to an autocross course. Do one side at a time and don't worry about the other side, and just run the pad for a couple of laps and bring the car to a stop right on the pad and dive in and get the temperatures of the outside tires quickly, after 20 seconds or so the temps all start to blend together.

You don't want to do most of your setup on the skidpad, if you do you will end up way loose compared to what is a proper setup, but it's a good place to check your camber and get that dialed in. Note too that for the front camber, the speed of the pad is an issue. The tighter the pad the more steering angle you are using, and the more steering angle, the more caster effects the front tire camber, so it is good to use probably three diameters and see what the fronts are doing at different speeds.

Bill Dearborn

Bill

RX-Ben

If that sensor array could somehow work with a lipstick camera I'd be all over it. Anyone know of such a thing?

FruiTay

I know someone who just bought one of those cameras and noticed moisture in his ceiling above a light where without the camera, there was no visual evidence to expose an issue. The camera paid for itself in a sense that without it, they would have had to pay a lot more money if the roof had been allowed to coninue and cause more wrot.

ignatz

Main point of this post was just a heads up on something new that is available. I've found it to be a real pain to always have to tag a buddy to take readings in the middle of an event. And in the time it takes to take the readings the tires have changed temps. This is quick and can't be that far off from what's going on.

Hat_Trick_Hokie

You mean like this

RX-Ben

Yes, but lopping off a few zeroes from the price tag.

mgarfias

Or could be toe-out scrubbing the inside of the tire.

ignatz

This is a rear tire on a C3. Toe is set to zero with the expection that the outside tire moves to a slight toe-in position under load, based on the angle of my half shafts.

This is getting away from the point. I posted mainly to alert anybody who's interested. And I loved the F1 video.

Ir-Blue is open source and maybe there are some takers who want to hack the code and mount their iPhone in the wheel well! Or redesign the camera!

passons

Good job.