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Been an owner now for just over 6 months, time for a review of my ownership experience so far. First off I would say as a new owner and new to kit cars, joining the club has been invaluable and anyone reading this, that is not a member I would recommend you join. Why you may say? Firstly there is a wealth of experience and information on the technical and build pages built up over years, invaluable for a new owner that wants to maintain their car to a high standard, and gain understanding of how the cars go together. Then there are the people, I have already met some good people, enjoyed runs out, went to the Malvern kit car show, and enjoy the monthly area meets. It has rekindled my interest in car's, and getting out and about with new people. My intention was to get a few track days a year in, having only managed one at Curbrough, with the Warwickshire group so far (great day out), mainly due to issues I found with my car once I had purchased it, delaying me having the confidence it would survive a trackday. I am Now planning track days in late July, Aug, Sept 🤞 The car i bought, as said at the beginning of this thread, was a factory built car and with a folder full of receipts, the car presenting and seemingly driving well I jumped in. Upon getting the car home i started discovering a plethora of issues poor maintenance and bodged fixes, some detailed else where on this forum, some giving me an excuse to upgrade🤩. I suppose the learning from this is go through any potential purchase with a fine tooth comb, more than you would with a normal vehicle purchase. However the problems I found post purchase would not put me off buying this particular car, as everything was fixable. They would have just been used to leverage the purchase price. Being i also wanted the car to "mess" with the issues I found allowed me to get a good understanding of how the cars go together, and I have to say they are quite easy to work on with most parts being easily accesible. I would therefore summarise by encouraging anyone sitting on the fence about buying one of these cars to jump in with your eyes open, enjoy the experience, be prepared to put a little work in and enjoy getting back to what motoring used to be like 👍 As purchased As it is now

Wee run today over to the Isle of Gigha in the Inner Hebrides. Thought i was doing well at 300+ mls, but Obersalzburg trumps me 😄

Spotted by my local contact near The Eagles Nest. Not surprising as there are some great roads there.

Guilty as charged, great roads and the views from the eagle nest were amazing.

Day 2. Brimham Rocks Fountain Abbey plus maintenance for damage from bad roads. Our cars have taken a bit of underside whacks today bit a lot of spirited driving. Drove through cow pat outside base carrot. Day 3 tomorrow plans are cold cuts quarry, malham waterfalls , wensleydale cheese and ribble valley viaduct. More in depth details in next magazine.

Nice sunny evening last night and there were some very cool cars

It's an old omex500, so the K6plus gives me more features, nicer mapping (well I know the software better anyway) , adaptive (self learning) fuelling, and future proofing it for the next round of tuning upgrades. Plus I'm an emerald dealer so it doesn't seem fair to have my cars on anything else. my road westy is on MBE so that will get changed over at some point too.

Took the westy for a shakedown run today, so fingers crossed after spanner checks this week I'll be able to join you 😁😁😁

That's what you call extreme kit car weight saving!

And even better is that Emerald have their own rolling road..and even better is that they are not far from me!

There's certainly esoteric ecus out there, but I always maintain that at *our level* it's the mapper more than the kit that you need to target. I don't really think there's any such thing as a bad ecu these days. You might want to choose the mapper first and go with whatever they feel is best for your engine and any future upgrades. If you wanted to go for high end stuff for an endurance racer or Paris-Dakar or just have money to burn then look to the old favourites eg Motec, Life Racing, Haltech etc .. at the other end is things like speeduino, megasquirt (in it's lower specs, ms3 is feature packed) etc. There's not a best ecu for kits as such, kits tend to have entry level ecus by default and all the low to mid price ecus will do what 99 percent of us need. I'm an emerald fanboy because I like the adaptive mapping, the triple separate maps, the boys and girls at emerald are fab, and the fact i've never had a genuine faulty ecu in 2 decades of using them. Don't overlook the quality of any aftermarket looms either, a good loom is crucial for reliability. Because of that I would prefer to purchase, have installed or the loom made, and mapped all by the same place. then there's only one person to blame if it doesn't work well, and one person to praise if it does! many mappers turn away home installed megasquirts for example because they just know the job is going to cause them sleepless nights ... ive seen ecus installed with scotchlock looms .. But as I say, choose a good known mapper first (be prepared to travel) , and then tell them what your current spec is and any future upgrades you're thinking of, and let them guide you what ecu to go with.

No, worries, it's not like we only see you once a year. Be still great to see you if you make it etc.

Now corrected, happy for you to use it in the magazines.

Great write up Mark, it would make a nice article for the magazine. Oh, and a minor correction, it was the Warwickshire Area Curbrough track day!

metering out my omex loom in the sunshine ready for the swap over to emerald k6plus

Fingers crossed the weather forecast stays dry, this should be a good gathering, hoping it stays nice enough to have a run out afterwards too.

Awe brilliant, was there last year 👍 Are you going to Salzburg too? If so I'd recommend the Red Bull Hangar 7, some amazing machines in there. I also visited the Castle where they filmed 'Where Eagles Dare' a personal highlight for me.

Monthly gathering of all things automotive on Tuesday at the British Motor Museum https://www.britishmotormuseum.co.uk/whats-on/gaydon-gathering-june Weather looks ok, last month had a huge attendance from all types of vehicles

Been there, you have my sympathy. Take it easy.

Can also be referred as "buzzing out", many DMM's have a built in buzzer.

I may come along if I get a chance, but probably just for the meet, if I do.

Who's joining me for this?

Just the chat and tyre kicking for us!

tracing each circuit wiring (using AVO meter) so i can do an adaptor loom to mate the emerald to the existing omex plug, saves me making a complete new loom.

Fab, are you dining or just socialising/kicking tyres? I'm eating at home.

We will make the run over this evening. See you there Ian!

Here's the economic problem with "green" hydrogen.... (from here) - by economic, I mean, why going down this path won't bring cheap energy. "How much overbuild of sun/wind generation capacity would be required to produce the “green” hydrogen? Truly breathtaking amounts of incremental solar panels and/or wind turbines would be required to make enough “green” hydrogen to become a meaningful factor in backing up a grid mainly powered by the sun and wind. The Seeking Alpha piece has calculations of how much nameplate solar panel capacity it would take to produce enough “green” hydrogen to power just one small size (288 MW) GE turbine generator. The answer is, the solar nameplate capacity to do the job would be close to ten times the capacity of the plant that would use the hydrogen: “Consider the widely deployed GE 9F.04 gas turbine, which produces 288 MW of power. With 100% hydrogen fuel, GE states that this turbine would use about 9.3 million CF or 22,400 kg of hydrogen per hour. With an 80% efficient electrolysis energy cost of 49.3 kWh/kg, producing that one hour supply of hydrogen would require 1,104 MWh of power for electrolysis. To generate the hydrogen to run the turbine for 12 hours (~ dusk to dawn) would require 12 x 1,104 MWh, or 13.2 GWh. Given a typical 20% solar capacity factor, that would require about 2.6 GW of solar nameplate capacity dedicated to generating the hydrogen to fuel this 288 MW generator overnight.” Given the tremendous losses in the process of making the hydrogen and then converting it back into electricity, it is almost impossible to conceive that this process could ever be cost competitive with just burning natural gas." Just to give an idea of how big a 2.6GW solar farm would be - I found this: At that rate we'll run out of land....

I used to be optimistic about hydrogen as an energy carrier. Less so now. Yes, it has high energy density by mass, but low by volume (1/4 that of petrol for example). That doesn’t necessarily matter too much depending on what it’s being used for, but we’ve seen what it means for cars, and that doesn’t work well with current technology, leading to short lifespans for storage vessels and a range of practical issues. Hydrogen is very difficult to contain. There were some promising ideas around binding hydrogen in solid substrates like hydrides, but like so many promising ideas, it is yet to materialise in any practical scalable form. But worst of all is the sheer inefficiency of using it. People cry we don’t have the grid capacity for 100% BEVs. True, but it isn’t impossibly short, around 40-50% more. Hydrogen production at scale means adding the round trip costs, which are significant. 1 ton of hydrogen needs about 50MWh to electrolyse, and contains around 30MWh of energy…..assuming 100% conversion efficiency. Current fuel cells are around 60% so overall, we’d need to at least double grid capacity. And then we have transportation to consider. Another fixable issue, of course, but it still needs doing. Hydrogen will have a place, and if we ever manage to get fusion to work then we should have lots of cheap power to make it practical, but there are huge hurdles in the way. Finite resources isn’t just a problem for batteries. I’d argue we’ve already gone too far on the population front. But, all the negatives aside, I hope smart people are working on it, because we really can’t carry on the way we are.

Exactly what the BBC article covered today and there was little fault to be found in the argument, and at the same time little comfort either. I appreciate the issues with hydrogen are getting it unstuck from whatever it is attached to and then storing it so it doesn't go boom (bit like petrol really...). My simple view is that almost everything used for energy production and energy use, especially rare earth metals and minerals, is finite. Hydrogen is for all intents and purposes, limitless and fantastically energy dense, like almost 3 times more energy dense than petrol. It MUST happen... Singing from the same hymn sheet

Hi All, Just under 2 weeks now to go before the tour! Is everyone ready? I have just created the tour Whatsapp group chat so we can all keep tabs on who is lost where 🤣 Ive added the folks who's mobile I know and emailed the rest with a link to join the Whatsapp group. Anybody who has not received please PM me to sort 👍 Marcus

Arrived at base carrot in pateley bridge Yorkshire. The road in was bumpy lol

Kit Car Event at The Motorist on Saturday 9th August. https://www.facebook.com/share/1EnzVy2LQE/

Hi Ian. I doubt if I will be able to make it. Really busy with work and this means deadlines for me to make products and get them dispatched. The pre booked lakes and dales trip certainly doesn’t help as it has reduced the time available to achieve this. If things change I’ll drop you a note. If I don’t see you, have a good time and keep safe.