Ants, snakes and all the evils of electronics..
Ok so with time drawing close to the KSOS on Friday we managed to run a small working bee last night at the Drag Strip with the goal of cleaning up the timing gear, and I thought I would post a small update for anyone keep track.
For anyone who has ever had anything to do with cabling, electrical, or electronic work you will be aware that ants, snakes and furry little creatures love to mess with anything and everything. The main aim of last night was to simply clean out all the break out boxes along the track, and re-terminate all the joins. These boxes are located at every spot where there is a light beam, use to record your times and mph.
So we have one at the start line, 60’, 330’, two located at 1/8 mile or 660’, one at 1000’, and two at the full ¼ mile or 1320’.
The extra ones at the 660’ & 1320’ are the MPH’s. The timing system uses these to calculate you MPH when you pass both boxes at each length. Eg, it calculates your MPH off the time it takes to go from the MPH to the ET box at 1/8 mile, and then again at 1/4 mile. So that’s 8 boxes on each side of the track, or 16 in total.
To give you an idea of what we found opening the boxes up last night, I took a photo of the first box.
This is what a lot of them looked like. Ants had decided to move in and set up shop. And judging by the size of the dwelling, I would say they opened a hotel for visitor too. As you can see on this next photo the ants have been eating the gel fill from the cable.
The cabling is a standard underground communications cable, and believe me this is a common problem. Eventually the ants would have started to eat through the plastic shielding around each pair of the cable.
Also we have a “friendly” snake that loves to take up residence in one of the final boxes on lane 2. Being as I’m not a fan of snakes, I decided to pass on taking a photo. But that’s a story left for another day.
Not long left to go now.
Cheers
D
