Racing customers from all over Europe seek out Hastech in the motor city of Hedemora, Dalarna. Lars-Erik Hases combines his own passionate interest in engines with a background as an electrical engineer. For valuable help in development and testing, he now has a state-of-the-art oscilloscope from Testpower.

With a growling Porsche engine in operation during a test drive on the brake bench in the workshop, Dalmasen Lars-Erik Hases is at his best. He has no employees, but a new electronic “assistant” in the form of an eight-channel oscilloscope. It helps him to be at the forefront of his specific niche, development of control systems for racing engines.

This device (model DLM4000 mixed signal oscilloscope) helps me test and troubleshoot better than my competitors can today. A big advantage when developing new products. The new electronic measuring instrument will be the workhorse in the electronics lab here.

Extremely niche business

Lars-Erik’s business is extremely niche and involves optimizing racing engines, mainly for historic racing. There are a lot of Porsche 911s, mainly from the 70s, and also Ford Escorts of older vintage. The newest ones he tackles are from the 80s.

It is fully contested in historic racing around Europe. My customers are out driving and talking to other drivers. This is how new customers find me here in Hedemora. I get a lot of requests from Italy, England and Germany, among others.

Competing alone is not Lars-Erik’s tune. No, he is an engineer through and through and interested in technology, focused on making the engine work optimally.

– I connect the various engineering elements: First construction drawing on the computer. Then prototypes and new production, for example an improved variant of the cylinder head. And finally assembly and test run on the brake bench.

The engineering art at Hastech is crowned by an in-house developed electronic control system for racing engines. But during the work to develop a new and updated version, Lars-Erik came across patrol, a fundamental error in the control system.

– After a month of troubleshooting, the situation was urgent. The new control system was coming, but I couldn’t find the fault. And the smallest error is noticeable.

Lars-Erik realized that his old two-channel measuring instrument was not enough. He had to be able to measure and log several channels at the same time, the large amount of signals that control the different cylinders in the engine.

It must be right from the start

Searches on the Internet and contacts led to Johan Waldelius at Testpower, retailer of high-quality measuring instruments.

– Johan has been great to work with. Really good as a springboard into the specific things that come up. He was also quick to come here to Hedemora so that I could test drive the new oscilloscope in sharp mode. When it’s this complex stuff, you first want to test that it works, and not buy the pig in the sack.

The new eight-channel oscilloscope helped Lars-Erik in troubleshooting and thus getting the control system fixed and ready. He will continue to benefit greatly from the advanced measuring instrument.

It simplifies and improves quality assurance and testing of the products. In addition, the device is robust, which is good in this environment. Plus also for the big screen, says Lars-Erik contentedly.