Author Archives: Will@FluxAuto

How Anodizing Works

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Chances are if you’ve bought a nice aftermarket part for your car that was made from aluminum, it was anodized. Anodizing is used to create a tough finish that doesn’t add a layer of thickness to an otherwise precision machined aluminum pieces like paint or powder coat. This is accomplished by purposely oxidizing, aka rusting, the aluminum. Unlike steel, when the surface of aluminum oxidizes it becomes very hard and it seals the rest of the aluminum from oxygen. Anodizing runs electricity through the aluminum to grow an extra thick layer of aluminum oxide while sealing in dyes to give your aluminum parts a good lucking durable finish. Check out this video by The Engineer Guy explaining the titanium and aluminum anodizing process.


Source: The Engineer Guy

Night Lap With The Audi E-Tron Quattro

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Ride along with Tom Kristensen as he pilots the Audi R18 E-Tron Quattro for a night time qualifying lap for this year’s 24 hours of Le Mans. Two things of note: first is how crazy fast he’s going. Imagine having to concentrate hard enough to maintain that pace for hours at a time. Second, you can clearly hear the electric motors wind down the front wheel speed in the heavy braking zones. That energy is then stored by spinning up a magnetic flywheel that sits in the passenger seart. It’s the same system that Porsche has been running in their 911 GT3 RS Hybrid endurance car with a couple of upgrades. The flywheel housing is now carbon fiber to save weight. The housing’s job is to hold a vacuum so the flywheels can spin without air resistance which would have been significant at 40,000 rpm. The car in the video qualified fourth overall, but the other E-Tron Quattro was the first ever hybrid to take pole at Le Mans.


Source: MT89MotorsportMedia via Autoblog

The Nissan DeltaWing Takes to the Track at Le Mans 2012

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Nissan Europe released this video to give a behind the scenes look at the development of the Nissan DeltaWing. The premise of the car is that it has half the weight and aerodynamic drag of a traditional race car and thus requires half the power and fuel consumption. The car’s center of gravity is very near the rear axle which is why the front tires are so skinny. The car was originally submitted for consideration to be the new chassis for Indy car racing but was passed over for something more traditional. New sponsors picked up the design to run as an exhibition vehicle in this year’s 24 hours of Le Mans. Nissan decided to back a large portion of the project by providing a 1.6 liter turbocharged I4 engine related to the one found in the Nissan Juke. After 3.5 years of development, the team and the car arrived at Le Mans and took their first shakedown laps.


Source: Nissan Europe

RUF Yellowbird and CTR 3

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Car and Driver pay a visit to performance car builder RUF in Germany to tour their factory and to see what they’re up to. Apparently RUF will let people test drive the car that put them on the map: The CTR Yellowbird. The car in the video is the same one used by RUF for development and stars in a Nurburgring drift video. There’s no need to look up the drift video because they’ve included a few shots in case you haven’t seen it. The tour ends with taking a spin in RUF’a newest CTR 3 on the Autobahn. RUF is an interesting company in that they sort of piggyback engineering development with Porsche. They basically use the front half of Porsche’s cars for the crash test structures, suspension and interior and then develop their own back half of the chassis to put their tuned engines in. It’s actual a pretty clever business model for a small aftermarket tuning company.


Source: Car and Driver

Build The Enterprise

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A website launched last month called “Build the Enterprise.” It isn’t some cheesy fan fiction site or else I wouldn’t be posting about it here. The curator of the site claims that he’s an experienced electrical engineer from a Fortune 500 company and he legitimately thinks that if mankind pooled its resources, we could actually build a starship in the next 20 years. The plans for his Enterprise use the same basic shape as the ship from Gene Rodenberry’s science fiction show because it’s actually quite functional once you move a couple of things around. This “Gen 1 Enterprise” would house 1000 people, be run on a nuclear reactor and have ion propulsion. It’s really quite well thought out and planned to the point of having schedules and projected budgets. Check it out for yourself.

Sources: Build the Enterprise via IO9