I couldn’t sleep last night from all the nervous excitement of doing my first dyno session. I even skipped breakfast. As I drove out the ~30 minutes to Devoted Auto Works my stomach was in knots: would it sound good, would the car hold up, did I schedule enough time, do I have the right gear.
Upon arrival, though, many of my concerns quickly turned to excitement. Seeing the car on rollers was fun, and placing microphones got me focusing my attention on something other than nervousness. Matt and David from Angled Lines also showed up to capture what I’m sure is great footage from the session.
My friend Jason also came to give a hand and take the still photos you see, and I’m glad he did.
We started off by doing the long sweeps at high load, as the air was coolest and that would be the most stressful part of the session. We would be able to get about 2 sweeps in before having to let the car sit for ~10 minutes to cool.
From there, we did the on-load static RPMs. We moved in 500RPM increments, and were able to go from idle to 4500 in one shot before needing to cool. We quickly did 5000 to redline in a second shot.
After that we waited for the groundskeeper to finish mowing the lawn. Jason and the Angled Lines guys left. We just had some start- and stop-type engine sounds left to capture so we waited for things to quiet down.
The whole session went without a hitch and the sounds I got sound great. I budgeted myself for 4 hours and that was just about on the money given setup time and all the cooling breaks.
I have for you an audio preview. This is from the sweeps. We wanted a single, fast accelerative sweep so this was performed in 2nd gear under load. You can listen to each mic individually, or the last track is the stereo mix I had from the DR-680.
Check out the flickr album for the rest of the pics!
Next I need to go through the editing process, which I hope to get a screencap video to share with you so you can see what is done there. I also still need to get the Foley session completed.
I owe a huge, gigantic thank you to everyone who helped make this kickstarter happen. I can’t even put into words how awesome this experience has been, and I owe it all to you. Thank you.
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