Barracuda?

[CAT3K]

Can anyone tell anything about this charger? It came with a car I bought. It looks a decent quality old charger. I seem to remember Barracuda from the early 90's, but something to do with race timing. I just can't remember.

Also there are a lot of outputs from the charger, one is a temp sensor, the other are inputs and outputs for power, but there are 2 wires going to the thing on the left, but what it is, I have no idea.



Underneath.

[DerbyDan]

I'm afraid I cannot help you with the charger, apart from that I can seem to remember these being used by racers going along way back!

I do actually have a Barracuda lap counting system somewhere in the loft at my parents house, the club that I raced at (& ended up running for a short while) inherited it from the Rockingham Buggy Club, who raced on the outskirts of Corby. It replaced the homemade wooden box with LCD counters & a traffic light starter that we previously used. We still manually counted the laps (although I believe AMB transponders could be connected) but it at least gave us a split time for each driver & printed out results!

[CAT3K]

Thanks Dan

Our race timing back in the day consisted of a BBC micro and 2 people to operate it. 1 shouting the numbers of the cars as they wizzed past, the other entering manually entering race on the keypad. That's one thing I don't reminisce about the old days

[terry.sc]

Barracuda Smart Charger, a real legend amongst chargers. While most were still using timer chargers and suicide cords the Barracuda was so much ahead of its time. Sold in the mid to late 80s. It can charge, discharge and cycle cells, and could monitor voltage and capacity during discharge, the results shown on the tiny display but more usefully it could print the results out as a chart. Peak detect charge, temperature charge which was popular with the cells of the time. Cost £200 in the 80s, so equivalent of around £500 these days. Built 10 miles away from me, there were plenty of them around here with all the local top racers at the time who could afford it were using them.

The add on part is a pair of resistors on a heatsink to discharge the cells.

[V12]

Has this anything to do with the Pro-Trak BMS later? Found the Pro-trak mentioned in RRC in 1993 but not sure if introduced maybe earlier.

[terry.sc]

The Pro-Trak isn't connected with the Barracuda.

The Barracuda was built by Ian Spashett of Intronics, who I also raced with at the time. His young son David seemed to be getting the hang of racing back then as well, Intronics concentrated on their own range of ESCs and then went to become the Corally importers.

[CAT3K]

Thanks for that Terry, just a shame I have no instructions for it. Although it works, I don't think I'll be using it for much.

Oh and I think David is still a pretty handy driver these days too

[Lonestar]

Brilliant info Terry, thanks

[DerbyDan]

The Pro-Trak isn't connected with the Barracuda.

The Barracuda was built by Ian Spashett of Intronics, who I also raced with at the time. His young son David seemed to be getting the hang of racing back then as well, Intronics concentrated on their own range of ESCs and then went to become the Corally importers.

Well I didn't know that!!

[bill]

Hi CAT3K.

I came accross this forum ( a great resource ) when Googling for some up-to date info on a pile of RC cars and equipment etc. left in my loft, belonging to my sons who used to race them over 20 years ago.

In answer to your query re. Barracuda charger, we also have one, I have a copy of the instructions ( about 8 pages ) which is now a bit tatty.

When I get a free moment I'll type them up and post them on here if that's OK with admin.

I'll also post a picture of our Barracuda which, at the time, was bought second hand.

One great function of the charger they used to advantage all those years ago was that it helped to determine which was the best pack to use for various types of races, the charger would give the battery capacity in kj, monitoring a pack from new would enable them to determine that there was a possibility of a pack / cell failing.

Though not of much use for modern racing, LiPo's etc it's great for retro-racing with the old NiCads.

By the way, the terminal ports on the side of the charger are as follows:

Black and Red, positive and negative input from a 12v car battery.

The grey one is a temperature probe.

The two yellow ones are to connect to an external resistor to discharge the pack.

As well as being a simple charger it can also discharge and cycle, charge/discharge, packs to keep them healthy and keep the dready NiCad disease, memory effect, at bay.

Hope this is a bit of a help.

I'll pop back on the forum when I get a chance, it looks like the "flleet" is going to be restored, grandchildren have seen them.

The main part of the fleet is two ProCats, two Cougars, two Mardave Marauders ( with gummed up engines ) and their first ever cars two Mardave Meteors.