do any of the road racers on here that run R tires use the infrared, or laser pointed meters?? need your feedback, you like them? hate them? and reasons why?? please, only guys that have had experience, none of this "i heard", or "i read". thanks.

 

theyre no good because they only measure the surface temperature, and there is also an issue of calibration.

the goal of taking a tires temperature is a measure of how hard that area of the tire patch worked. measuring just the surface gives false and misguiding information because the surface cools much quicker, where the true temperature is hidden underneath the surface. and yes, it does make a difference. so youre wasting your time because youre getting inaccurate measurements.

sorry, forgot to address the issue of calibration. the problem is that IR pyrometer senses the amount of heat given off the surface by infra-red projections. but, different materials and colors also give different amounts of IR just from the reflection of the sun or whatever. these baseline IR reflections need to be taken account of and calibrated. with a metal probe, thats not an issue.


Modified by Tyson at 1:03 AM 5/28/2003

 

What he said.
Probe type is the shizzy.

 

Any models better than others? ..you would recommend.

This has been on my shopping list for some time.

 

I was thinking about making a CCD infrared sensor for autoX. Is there that big a difference between the surface and inner tire temperatures? I was theorizing that I should be able to see if the edges are hotter than the center, or if there is a relatively even distribution very quickly. It might be possible to retrofit a cheap CCD webcam for this purpose by removing filters.

It would make comparisons between runs much easier, as well, as the data could quickly be sampled and stored.

Most good pyrometers I've seen are probe-type though.