Holy Cow Tractor Pulling Team

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Ohio Motorsports Expo
Seven pulling vehicles present at the Ohio Motorsports Expo at the state fairgrounds in Columbus, OH. NTPA Grand National vehicles, Larry Piekarski's Holy Cow modified and Harry Keeran's Black Dragon mini-rod. OSTPA's newcomer Karr's Hyper Harvester super stock was the only "true" tractor present. Also were present were 4 good looking garden tractors.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Ohio Motorsports Expo
Join us this weekend at the Ohio Motorsports Expo in Columbus, Ohio. This is a fund raiser for Make-A-Wish. for a $2 donation you can see a large variety of race cars, as well as our tractor and SAMSON monster truck. There is also indoor quarter midget racing going on at the same time. We are honored to be representing the sport of Pulling and hope everyone will come out and support this important cause.

Freightliner for Sale
My crew Edd is selling his freightliner. See my for sale page for details. Edd uses this truck to haul RVs out of the Elkhart, IN area. This is a nice truck, but he is tired or driving and wants to sell it to get out of the business.

Weighing the Tractor
Last night I took the tractor up to the Grain Elevator in Russiaville. You figure a scale used in commerce is probably calibrated pretty often. The scale read -140 empty. I jumped on and it is showed my weight minus 140. I then parked the tractor on the scale with myself and full fuel tanks and no weights and the display read 7300. So, if the elevator is calibrated and ignoring the -140, then it corresponds very closely to the scales at Louisville. If the -140 offset is applied through out the entire range, then the tractor really weighs 7440, which I don't believe. So, I think I was weighed fairly at Louisville, it just seemed like I carried more weight than that during the season.

Friday, February 18, 2005

National Farm Machinery Show
Oops. Not the showing we had hoped for. But let's start at the top. We get everything loaded up Tuesday night. It was a beautiful day in Kokomo with temps around 65. Even at 10:00PM at night, it was still in the 40's with a light rain. They were calling for snow, but it was hard to believe it would come. In the middle of the night, I woke to a weird noise. At first I thought it was our cat Levi playing with a plastic bag, but I realized it was sleet or ice hitting the sliding glass door in the bedroom. We wake up at 4:30 and find about an inch of wet, heavy snow on the deck outside. As soon as we turned some lights on, the phone rings. It is our neighbor across the street. Her husband delivers papers and she called to tell us that the roads are very slick. On his way to get his papers, he slid off the road, hit a power pole, and knocked out power. This happened about a mile east of us. I was concerned we wouldn't be able to get out of the driveway. But, that went well, maybe the extra weight of the hauler helped.

The next thing was that we were going to meet Mark at the gas station in Kokomo. I am buying some gasoline for the truck and he is watching and the pump handle just falls out of the tank and soaks him. We stopped at a truck stop south of Indy for breakfast and got him some new jeans. Other than that, the trip went smooth.

We drew #9 in a class of 15. The tractor was ready to go, so we didn't have much to do. We ran the valves since we didn't have a chance to check them at home with the engines at "room temperature". They were either hot from running or cold from the winter weather. The other concern was how much ballast weight we had to give up. I had to take more than 270 lbs off, leaving me with only 175 lbs. I talked with other drivers and they said the scales were dead on, so I don't know what happened. I don't know how the scale could weight heavy for just one tractor. Anyway, the problem is that I don't have enough nose weight and I am afraid of nose coming up way to high.

This was probably the best track I have seen. The two previous times I have pulled here, we were last class and the track starts to dry out towards the end, but this time we were the middle class and it looked great. One of the first tractors was Jeff Paulson, and he just pulled the nose up sky high and broke parts when it dropped back down. I dropped the hitch a little. I hooked to the sled and got the green flag. As I rolled on the throttle the cow came to life, but the engines never seemed to clean out and the front end never picked up. I finished at 207', which is the farthest I have ever pulled there, but the sled was much lighter this year with the middle of the pack at about 220. So, we ended up 12th and they towed me back to the trailer.

Here are the positives from this pull. We didn't break anything. Two engines had new crankshafts and this was the first time they had every been over 3000 rpm. There were lots of new parts and freshed parts scattered over all 4 engines that also were pressed into service for the first time. I have never had an engine break because I made a mistake putting it together, but that fear always lingers in the back of your mind. I also tried some experiments on several of the engines and the initial look at the data says all those changes were a success as well. I will look more in depth at that over the next couple weeks. Finally, for the first time in quite a few runs, we didn't break a blower belt, so all the work we did there was a success.

So, what went wrong? This year at the PRI show, we toyed with a different strategy for engine management. A bounced ideas off most of the leaders in the industry and we planned a new strategy that seemed promising. Well, that didn't work. I was in a slightly lower gear this year than in years past, but I simply didn't have the power to turn the gear I was in. The engines were rich because the blower weren't spinning fast enough to generate the boost and air flow I had tuned for. I think I was nose heavy because I simply could not turn the tires fast enough. On paper it seemed like a good idea. In practice it wasn't.

The good thing about Louisville is that it is a great place to pull. They treat you very well and it is a real honor to even be invited. If you do well, it pays very well. On the other hand, if you don't do well, last place also pays very well (for last place) and it doesn't hurt you in points. So, it is a great place to experiment.

I know I had a lot of fans there. During driver introductions I heard cheers coming from all sides of the area and I am sorry to not have placed better, for you guys. If I had a second chance and a few hours to make changes, I know we would have placed much better. But, from my standpoint, I leaned so incredibly much in that short 10 second run, it will make the Grand National and HSTPA season so much better.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Ready to go!
Mark and I did the final tuning yesterday, and everything looks and sounds good. I just have a few cosmetic things to take care of and it is ready to load in the trailer.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Tractor Progress Update for Louisville
With the warm temperatures, Sunday provided an excellent opportunity to make some major progress in preparations for Louisville. We got all 4 motors mounted and test fired. I still have some tuning to do and some finishing touches, but I could be ready tonight, if necessary.

Return from Paris
For the third time in about a year, I spent a week in Paris, France presenting our design for review to the parent company of our French-owned client. Traveling to Paris has almost become routine and "magic" of being in Paris has worn off. There is little I would like to see, and since I am "in the office" from 9 to 6, nothing is open anyway. We all pretty much stayed withing a few blocks of our hotel, and only left the 19th once to go to Hard Rock Cafe for dinner.

Overall, it was a non-eventful trip. All four flights were smooth. The only downside was the flight from Paris to Newark was full so you didn't have room to stretch out of lay down. But, the couple I was sitting next to was nice and we did talk some. They lived in Paris and were coming to the US for a Caribbean Cruise. Since we just went there in November, they were very interested in my experiences.

My other three flights were all only about 1/2 full so I was able to have a whole row of seats to myself.

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