Roehrig History

 Look for a history of Kurt Roehrig and Roehrig Engineering in the coming months!

excerpt from the paper / book / story:

 Kurt Roehrig and Ken Anderson worked together to build the first commercially available shock dyno. A machine that a person could buy. Ken produced the software package, and it was written for and operated on DOS (yikes). It was written by Chris Wallach. Kurt worked on the mechanicals of the machine. Factories and manufactures had machines, of course, but they were large, expensive and not for transport of any kind. Kurt realized that he needed a way to test a damper, and it had to be a reasonable size and cost so that he could better understand and tune the dampers on the cars he was engineering. Necessity is the mother of invention and measuring the components of the race car led to the need for testing. I understand that his first prototype was built in 1989.

         The software was called Quantum, and it operated on a DOS platform. You had to use a separate program called PZP to print a graph and they were black and white if I remember correctly. Kurt would buy a copy, license, from Ken and put it to use on his dyno. For his part, Ken built his own shock dyno, and he was located in Indiana, amongst the Indy Car world. Chris Andrews worked for Ken at this time.

         On a side note, Kurt first met Chris Wallach (and I would guess so did Ken Anderson) in the mid-80’s. Chris had developed a data acquisition system, MRG, for race cars. Kurt used one of Chris’s systems to begin doing race car engineering with data. The basis of this system, collecting signals vs time, was used for the first shock dyno software.  This is a very historic moment for the racing industry. Chris had built 5 systems (?) and Kurt was using one to do track data and engineering to various race teams in the Detroit area. Jack Roush was one of those customers. So put that down as a note in time, data acquisition on race cars in the mid to late 80’s. A system that a person could buy and use.