Performance Driving

Have you ever wanted to do serious work on your car, but found yourself overwhelmed with details? Imagine restoring your car or perhaps customizing it for track use. The myriad of details, projects, equipment, and purchases can cause a migraine headache, and then trying to accurately figure out how long all this will eventually cost...not to mention take you to finish is like playing blind-man’s bluff!

Well, there’s a new tool available that can help you organize your car project once and for all. Don Hills and his company Xun (Sun) Performance Systems has some software out called Rod-Plan, and this is a serious project-planning system that anyone can use. Don is an interesting guy…an admitted computer nerd, and also a big Hot-Rod fan. Sitting in his garage is a 1961 Ford Falcon with a mirror-finish black paint job and 600hp on tap! Not your ordinary Falcon, as you can imagine! While Don was building his hot rod, he found himself endlessly leafing through parts catalogs while away on business trips and struggled to keep track of everything he needed to order. As a software programmer, he soon started to develop something that would help him organize his work. The finished product…Rod-Plan!

Rod-Plan is simple in appearance, but long on details. It’s divided into two basic segments: Material List and Project Plan. The Material List shows physical things that you will be buying, and the Project List is filled with activities that you will be doing to your car. Materials are organized into Assemblies and then further into Components. An Assembly might be “Engine”, under which you would have listed all the Components you will need to buy to make your engine the way you want it to be. One component might be a Bosch .022 Distributor. If we then go to Project Plan, you will find it subdivided into “Phases” and “Activities”. Phases are relatively large projects consisting of multiple activities. So, using our earlier examples, under Project List, you might have “Engine Tune-Up”, under which you would enter “Install Distributor”, and you would link the aforementioned Bosch .022 distributor, along with its cost, the date you wanted to begin and end the activity, and how many hours of labor it will involve. By dividing your work into Materials and Projects, you have already achieved a far higher level of project organization than you had before, but there’s much more available!

One great feature that I really like about Rod-Plan is that you can import images of your project and attach them to the Material List. This means that you can have a visual reference to guide you when ordering parts or contemplating how much work a project will take. This is especially valuable for enthusiasts doing restorations, where a lot of the work involves just staring at the car and figuring out what needs to be done! What a great activity for those long winter months, where you don’t feel like working on the car in the cold garage. Now it becomes possible to do “virtual work” on the car, organizing and planning your work for the coming year!

The Rod-Plan Timeline is a real highlight of the software. A complete bar-graph schedule of your project would be just to the right of this image. The Timeline keeps you aware of what you need to do next, and how long you should take!

Rod-Plan offers an amazing timeline as well. It pulls data from the Project List section and displays each Phase of your project, each Activity, your projected timeframe, and finally how long it will take to complete the work! This is a great tool that can help keep your project on-track by giving you a schedule to work from. So many long-term car projects become ignored because the owner simply lost track of what he was doing and what he needed to do next. Rod-Plan will help you avoid feeling “overwhelmed” by graphically dividing your project into manageable segments, therefore keeping you on-task and on-schedule, but there’s far more that Rod-Plan can do...the more you investigate, the more you find! Suffice it to say that ALL aspects of your car project are interlinked with one another to keep the big picture clear and manageable! Did I mention that you can also manage multiple cars? You can! So if you have several cars that you are working on, you can keep them all straight…if not in your head then at least in Rod-Plan! When you’re all done, print out all the lists and timelines to show to your insurance company, thereby making sure you get the full value of your car protected, or use the lists to answer questions at the next car show!

Rod-Plan breaks your project down into Materials and Projects.

Rod-Plan is downloadable in demo form from www.XunPerfromance.com. Don has also intelligently set things up so that if you try the demo for a week, and wish to buy the software, you don’t need to start all over from scratch. The purchase of Rod-Plan buys you a serial number that you use to unlock your demo, so it’s yours forever. Other software companies should take notice of this elegant solution. No Internet connection? Contact Xun Performance at (207) 741-2835…they’re in South Portland, so you’ll be buying from fellow Mainers!

This is Rod-Plan's Project list....here's where you list all your activities. Time requirements and needed parts are all cross-referenced in Rod-Plan.

Be forewarned, using Rod-Plan to its fullest will involve a substantial commitment on your part, because you will be entering all the information required to finish your car. However, you should also seriously consider how much time, money, effort, and frustration you will save by having your project organized from start to finish, with photos, projects, materials, suppliers, costs, and schedules all available for you to reference and use. In lieu of an instruction manual for Rod-Plan, Don had included a complete demo-car project for you to investigate and mimic if necessary. Make no mistake; Rod-Plan is serious project management software, and the screenshots shown here do not do the product justice! Motorcycle or Boat enthusiasts could also be advised to investigate Rod-Plan. Large companies use planning software like this all the time to manage their work! For a reasonable cost ($29.95), you can have the same kind of organizational horsepower at your fingertips. Visit www.XunPerformance.com, download the Rod-Plan demo for free, and take it for a spin. You’ll probably never think the same way about working on your car again!

Gain control of your car project through organization!