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Torrance, Calif. — Oct. 3, 2014 — Ed Pink has been building racing engines since 1946, and Ed Pink Racing Engines — the company he founded in 1958 — has enjoyed success in nearly every form of motor sports over the past 56 years.
From developing winning engines for top teams such as Ford, Pontiac, Toyota, and Infiniti in IndyCar, NASCAR, and Formula 5000 races, to providing specialized motors for dragsters, sprint cars, Funny Cars, midgets, and vintage race cars, the company’s engines have accumulated over 100 victories and more than a dozen national championships, powering legends like Don Prudhomme and Tony Stewart to victory.
Nicknamed “The Old Master,” Ed Pink built more than 5,000 engines during his 60-year career, mostly in his facility in an industrial area of Van Nuys, Calif. He sold the company six years ago to successful entrepreneur and vintage race car collector and racer Thomas Malloy.
The facility currently encompasses two buildings totaling about 12,000 square feet of floor space, where auto racing engines are built, rebuilt, tested, designed, and developed for local, national, and international customers.
When the time came to replace the outdated fluorescent lighting in the assembly and design areas, where an eclectic combination of state-of-the-art precision equipment and machinery is used, Ed Pink Racing Engines turned to LEDtronics. Not only did LED lights provide more and brighter illumination, but they did so with dramatically lower energy consumption and a fraction of the heat of fluorescents.
“The lighting is much better for our unique work environment,” said General Manager Frank Honsowetz, former director of racing for Nissan North America who joined Ed Pink in 2001. “We are saving about $900 a month from the conversion to LED lighting,” he noted. “At this rate, we will pay for the conversion in about 13 months.”
The company’s existing lighting system consisted of 17 high-output T12 and T8 fixtures of four tubes, each consuming 115 watts. With ballasts using 30W per fixture, the setup demanded over 8,330 watts of energy to operate.
“We replaced the older technology with 13 LED high-bay luminaires at 200 watts each, offering a brighter workshop illumination with almost 70 percent less energy consumption,” said Mark Jarel, LEDtronics product sales manager for Street & Outdoor Lighting and himself an avid sports car collector. “Using a total of only 2,600 watts, the LED lights saved the company 5,730 watts.”
RTM Lighting & Electronics oversaw the installation.
An unexpected additional benefit Honsowetz has encountered is the minimal heat LED lights produce compared to their fluorescent or incandescent counterparts — notorious for wasting energy in the form of heat.
“At our location here in Van Nuys we do experience outside temperatures over 100 degrees,” he said. “With LED lighting, the interior temperature on hot days is easier to control.” Van Nuys is a Los Angeles suburb in the middle of the heat-prone San Fernando Valley.
Even visiting regular customers and vendors have noticed the lighting change, Honsowetz said. In the coming months, the firm plans to upgrade other machine shop areas to LED lighting from LEDtronics.
The LEDtronics HBL003-200W-XPW-101WD high bay surface light is dimmable and operates with a wide input voltage range 100 to 277 VAC, offering a wide beam of 6000K white light. It replaces 600-watt MH/HPS luminaires as well as fluorescent tubes, is UL listed, and safety rated for wet locations.
Based in Torrance, Calif., LEDtronics, Inc., since 1983 has been a world leader in designing, manufacturing, and packaging solid state lighting products and state-of-the-art LEDs to meet the world’s constantly changing lighting needs.
