Tag - Nitrous

Bottle Heater Safety Switch

New Nitrous Bottle Water Heater

After many years of loading and unloading my homemade Igloo Nitrous Bottle Water Heater from the truck bed at the track, I finally decided to make a new one that mounts permanently in the trailer. I didn't have enough room for the bigger igloo setup so this narrower aluminum one will be really nice to have. While I was at it, I added a new secondary thermostat that will kill the power if the primary one fails and the tank overheats. Sure it's a rare situation, but I like having the additional peace of mind for safety's sake. Kurt Riffle from Riffle Motorsports had an old tank he had laying around since he used to run Nitrous and I talked him into modifying it a little for what I was wanting to do. He added some additional drain bungs, and a pad to mount a snap action safety temperature switch to the side. That safety switch is something I've been wanting after witnessing a controller malfunction due to a bad sensor and stay on causing the bath to get too hot, obviously that would be a very bad situation with nitrous bottles that we want to avoid. Here's a list of the controls I'm using on this new setup if anyone is interested -
  • PN# TG1153L - 1500 watt 120 volt water heater element from Grainger. This is a 4 bolt hole, 2 1/2" dia bolt circle flange mount style.
  • Johnson Controls PN# A419ABC-1C 120 volt includes Johnson Controls A99BA-200C Sensor with 6.5' leads.
  • Johnson Controls Immersion Well PN# WEL11A-601R.
  • 104° F Thermal Switch Normally Closed PN# KSD301 *
  • Unknown brand small pond pump to circulate water within the tank.
bottle-heaterHere's how we mounted the Thermal Switch on the Nitrous Bottle Water Tank. I also used thermal paste to help transfer heat better to the switch. That's the same kind of stuff you get for mounting computer processors to their heatsinks. *Update - The KSD301 Switch I bought worked great, it tripped at 102° but, it failed to reset. Apparently some of these switches are "one shot" and do not automatically reset. So, make sure you are getting the one that self-resets (or manual reset), not the "one-shot". The switches are not marked as to which ones they are. bottleheater Here's the new heater all installed in the trailer. I mounted the control up on the wall to make it easier to see. The first test run seemed to work great, so looks like this project is finished, on to the next!   Previous article on my Igloo Nitrous Bottle Heater Controller Retrofit.
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Omron D4C1620 throttle switch

New Omron Nitrous Switch Mount

One of the things I really wanted to fix on the car is a problem that occurred far too often, and cost me several rounds of racing. It's those little cheap carb microswitches for nitrous activation, which seem to act up at the worst possible time. I've fought those things far too much with issues like vibration, loose connections, or intermittent contacts. So while we've got the car all apart I made a new mount to use a Omron D4C1620 Limit Switch - this is the same switch most chassis builders sell for clutch cars as a clutch switch. Very heavy duty, potted and sealed cable, nice heavy duty roller arm - in other words about as bullet proof as you can get. You can buy these from places like Bickle, but you'll find them a lot cheaper if you watch ebay for them as the are an industrial part and show up often in industrial surplus. I've got $45 in this one, about half what the chassis shops sell them for.
throttleswitchmount1In order to mount the switch, I had to figure out a way to locate it that's not going to be moving around. I came up with this setup which is made out of 3/8" .058" Wall CM Tubing with some light gauge mild steel for the switch to screw to. You can't see it in this picture, but I drilled a series of mounting holes for the switch in the flat plate for adjustment - plus you can rotate the arm 360 degrees for adjustment as well. This is all setup to work with the Smith Racecraft manual throttle pedal I put in the car a couple years ago.
throttleswitchmount2After welding to the firewall, it seems to be quite stiff, and everything lined up real good. The only problem I ran into was I built a throttle stop into the mount, but I wasn't happy with how that worked. With the hard stop on there, both the throttle pedal mount and the firewall flex some when you're pushing hard, so I'm going to abandon that idea and put an adjustable stop directly below the throttle pedal itself in the floorboard.
That's about it for recent updates, haven't made a whole lot of progress due to more important things but a couple weeks ago I did finish up the right side airbox block off and I finished up the work on the new door handles I made. The "to-do" list is slowly getting items checked off!
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