Austin Healey Engine removal

Christmas break, for most, is the time when college students visit home and get to see their families and eat some home cooked meals. Christmas break for me is all that and some classic car repair! Last spring my dad bought a 1965 Austin Healey Sprite to restore. Its a tiny British  roadster that rolled out of the same factory as the MG midget.

Not my picture but this is the car

Being away at school meant Im not much involved with the car but this winter while myself and my brother were back from school we decided to pull the engine and transmission to further move along the teardown. It took a few hours to disconnect the bumper subframe, remove the radiator, headers, carbs and distributor and also to label every single hose, wire and cable going to the engine and transmission. After that we disconnected all the cables and hoses and started working out the engine mounts. Its luckily a small 1.1L engine with a good sized engine bay so there was plenty of room to work with. Once the engine mounts and transmission mounts were out we disconnected the shift linkage and positioned the engine hoist. It took a couple tries to get the chain position on the engine just right because it would need to first tilt the engine and transmission ~30 degrees upward then move upward and out of the engine bay. After a slow removal we had the engine free and could unbolt the tranny, remove the clutch and starter motor then call it a day and unthaw our hands. 

Using a gopro I time-lapsed the removal process:

Lessons Learned: Planning is everything! Labeling everything was a tedious task because I was sure I would remember where everything went but now, just a month later, I know I would be very lost had I not done that. Also we overlooked the speedometer cable that was hooked up to the transmission and accidentally broke it during the removal so it will have to be replaced. The connection was in a hard to reach spot so we planned on getting the engine a small ways out of the bay and then disconnecting the cable because it would be much easier to reach. This got forgotten about until it was too late. So I learned to be constantly double checking what I was doing.

 

Disc Projectile Testing!

Part of an a task assigned on Coop was to improve the performance of a disc launcher product used in a produc. I was told that the current performance was unacceptable and in order to keep customers happy it must perform as well as an existing product.

I decided to use the highspeed camera I had access to in order to measure the "muzzle velocity" of both the batwing and current toy in order to compare them. I would then make modifications to the new toy based on my observations and record the results. Hopefully I could change the shooting in some manufacturable way to get results close to the existing product.

Using the high speed footage and the known framerate of the camera, I could solve the speed the discs were launching out at by counting the frames it takes for a disc to cross the 6" scale I had made. My results from the testing were as follows:

I tested two different Disc sizes and a number of different modifications that were thought of by myself and another engineer during a brainstorm. They ranged from changing the thickness of the launcher clip, to changing the clip geometry to adding support walls to help stiffen the clip. Each of them improved performance slightly and when two of them were used in combination (Extended arm + Back) it resulted in an average muzzle velocity of 15.41 ft/s which exceeded the goal of 15.0 ft/s. 

Disc Launch from 4ft at 15 degrees

Graphically it is easy to see the predicted performance gains from my modifications. 

Lessons Learned:  I struggled a lot in the beginning because many of the past attempts to make the mechanism more efficient would result in the toy misfiring or stalling. This was obviously a problem and I had to be very precise with my modifications to make sure they were as accurate as possible and represented the "ideal" case of a molded part. I also learned that documenting my results consistently was a very efficient way of comparing. Because of random variation, some mechanisms would get good results every once in a while others would perform poorly randomly. Had i just examined a small sample and not kept track of all the testing of each I could easily have been misinformed about which results were which