I've borrowed a FLIR camera to play with. I'm going to be doing things like looking at heat flow in radiators, tire heating and footwell temps. I have also confirmed that cats are actually the devil and that the FLIR reveals their true selves.
Devil cat.
Let's play "where is the turbo in the engine bay after driving?" You can also see the negative camber heating the inside of the tires on a street drive.
So, what good car-related uses can you come up with? What good frivolous uses?
You can now see people's farts- it is up to you whether to use your new power for good, or evil.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: You can now see people's farts- it is up to you whether to use your new power for good, or evil.
I think you mean "for good, or for awesome."
Car uses: looking for hot spots on an intake tract that could be better insulated, or a quick look at tire temps across the tread for alignment and pressure setup that takes less time than probes.
Frivolous? Well, there are a few thing a I can think of...
Less frivolous: looking at my house in the winter to see where the heat is escaping to better insulate.
Heat loss and areas of improvement for insulating a building.
Is it sensitive enough to pick up a dead cylinder from a manifold/header?
Definitely. It's a lot more effective than an IR thermometer, and I've used those for that purpose. I could see the joists in my house bleeding heat into the room last night. At the very least, this thing makes a good stud finder 
Heat in the footwell of the Exocet. If we put a pad of heat control material on part of that, it should be quite easy to tell what sort of difference it makes.
Well you mentioned footwell temps, which would be really awesome on the miata. Maybe checking for exhaust leaks?
How is the resolution? Would it be possible to use FLIR with something else while welding to make sure there's good heat transfer and such? Thinking touchy things like drastically different gauges of metal or cast iron.
FLIR is up there with high speed camera's for me. Something I dearly want, but would probably never use, like my night vision goggles.
Resolution on this consumer-grade FLIR ONE is 640x480. Max temp is only about 248F, so it wouldn't be all that useful for welding.
We are planning on doing video of a turbo car on the dyno just for the funsies. It'll probably turn into a glowing ball.
Definitely good enough to find a dead cylinder. I've done it with an IR gun aimed at the headers as well.
I've done it with my fingers. 
Actually, a really easy test is to just flick some water on to the primaries.
A time lapse of the heat soak on a turbo car during a dyno session would be neat. Can you hang it behind one of an exocet's wheels so you can get video of tire temperature real-time throughout a lap of a track?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: A time lapse of the heat soak on a turbo car during a dyno session would be neat. Can you hang it behind one of an exocet's wheels so you can get video of tire temperature real-time throughout a lap of a track?
The tire video is part of the plan. We're also going to be using it to test some new hubs.
Keith Tanner wrote: I've done it with my fingers.
Yeah, the fingers work to on an engine you just fired up from cold that has a blatant dead miss. Last time I did that I realized I had 2 adjacent dead cylinders. Shut it down, switched the plug wires and fired it back up. Hit on all 8 that time. 
We use them in lab for determining when our polyacrylamide gels are dry.
After running a sample, we remove the buffer, put the wet gel on filter paper, and stick it in a vacuum heater for about an hour. If it's dry, it'll be well-preserved when you remove it from vacuum. If not, the gel explodes and gets used as a cover image (results not typical).
Non-car use: take a look at the circuit breaker panel in your house, to make sure there are no poor connections heating up.
In reply to stuart in mn:
Oooh, to piggyback on this, you could point it at the starter while cranking to see heat in connections and the motor itself- maybe pick something that takes a long time to start.
I Own a Raython camera. I use it for Ir Scans for my business. Lots of fun!!!! Great for finding dead cylinders and things.
It will pick up a human at 2 miles. My friend keeps wanting to borough it for his hunting trips. I keep telling him no. I am sure that is not legal.
@ Keith
What wavelength is that unit? Also I hate to ask but what are they wanting for one of those these days?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: You can now see people's farts- it is up to you whether to use your new power for good, or evil.
FLIR FARTS!
dean1484 wrote: @ Keith What wavelength is that unit? Also I hate to ask but what are they wanting for one of those these days?
It's a FLIR ONE, one of the devices that takes advantage of that slab of silicon you carry around in your pocket. $250. Specs: http://www.flir.com/flirone/ios-android/. When you take a picture, it also saves the visible light version so you can compare.
More fun.
Idling Miata turbo engine. I was standing in front of the passenger headlight. The turbo is on the far side. You can see the warm coolant coming up the passenger's side of the engine as well as general heat in the block. You can also see how the heatshield around the air filter is reflecting heat.
Turbo at idle. Check out how well the heatshield works. That's the blocky part in the center of the picture, with turbo heat leaking out around the edges. The brake master reservoir is the circle at the bottom right, well protected.
Turbo startup. This is a cold engine, as you can see from the lack of variation at first. Look at how fast the turbo warms up!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/P5Tngm3H-Ss?rel=0
Exocet after a drive. The whole car is glowing because all the tubes are warm from the sun.
Oh sweet, I've been wondering how that mobile flir worked. I'd seen one video from backyardscientist on youtube, but that was it. Thought you were talking about one of the big fancy ones when I asked about welding.
That's pretty damn awesome though, especially how effective the heat shield is.
I might seriously consider one of these in another generation or two, for now, thats still awesome to see.
Experiment with best hood vent placement for max hot air draw.
WildScotsRacing wrote: Experiment with best hood vent placement for max hot air draw.
That's really a matter of air pressures. Time to crack out the magnehelic gauge! I'm actually going to be doing pressure mapping on front fenders this weekend.
But I suspect we'll be able to see heat shield effects on a hood at rest.
My uncle works on developing those. We played with one a couple years ago. Really neat stuff.
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