Service race cars without turning on the vehicle electrical system

Last summer, day two of testing at the race track. Something became disconnected in the last test pass.

Dark, hot night

People are checking, fixing and repairing before the car can go out again.

The lighting in the pits wasn’t great. some LEDs from under the RV awning and a work light pointed toward the car. Some guys had flashlights. But wherever someone was trying to work, there always seemed to be a shadow. When the master kill switch is off, so are the vehicle’s lights.

One of the pit crew was using a Milwaukee flashlight when he had an idea. What if we mounted service lights somewhere on the vehicle (maybe the roll cage?) and powered them with the same Milwaukee batteries we already had in the pits?

The car could stay powered down. The lights can be installed where they are actually needed. When it was time to work on something, plug in a battery and turn them on. Totally hands-free!

That idea became Night Owl Illuminate.

Very bright lights

The folks involved with Steel Sasquatch have been building, wiring, repairing and racing performance vehicles for years.

There are different skills in the group. Wiring. Engine building. Electrical. Tuning. Over hundreds of projects, that has meant solving a lot of problems that don’t have a good off-the-shelf answer.

Sometimes that means modifying an existing product. Sometimes it means making something from scratch. And sometimes it ends with someone saying, “Someone should make that!”

There have been a lot of those ideas over the years. Steel Sasquatch gives us a place to do something with them.

From a light to Night Owl

We started playing with the service light idea. Lights, switches, circuit boards, wiring and 3D-printed parts moved around the bench a bit like Lego.

As we worked on it, the basic idea became bigger than the lights:

Work on the vehicle without depending on the vehicle for power.

Illuminate uses permanently installed service lights powered by a Milwaukee M12 or M18 battery. We started with Milwaukee because M12 and M18 batteries are already common in the shops, trailers and pits around us.

The vehicle’s main power can stay off while someone works on it. There’s no flashlight to hold and no work light to keep moving around.

Then we started talking about the idea with other racers.

One of the stories that came up was about running fans and water pumps between passes. Generally guys come back into the pits, start cooling things down and that draw power from the same battery you’re going to rely on to start the car for the next pass.

Sometimes that doesn’t end well. Yup, dead at the starting line.

That led to Night Owl Cool. The same basic idea, but this time the tool battery runs the cooling equipment in the pits. The race-car battery is powered off.

Then the conversation moved into the shop.

There are plenty of times when you want to test one component without powering the whole vehicle. The wiring isn’t finished yet. Maybe you’re testing a returned part on the bench to see what the issue is. Sometimes you just want to make sure a fan, window motor or other accessory works before you install it.

That became Night Owl Test.

Three different uses. One fairly simple idea.

Now we’re testing them

Night Owl products have been in a handful of race cars at the track for about a month now.

That’s where we want them. With each pass they get jostled around in real race cars, and we want to see if they stay put.

We’re testing them in the conditions they were made for and getting feedback from the people using them. We’re making changes where they make sense. There are still things we’re working through before everything is ready for sale.

Night Owl is also only the start.

There are more ideas on the bench and a lot more conversations happening around them. Some come from problems we’ve run into ourselves. Others come from racers, builders and shop owners telling us about something they’ve been working around for years.

If that sounds interesting, you can follow Steel Sasquatch or sign up for our newsletter. We’ll use it to share what we’re working on, ask for feedback and look for testers when we have products ready to put into more vehicles.

And if you’ve got one of those “someone should make this” ideas, we’d like to hear about that too.