Relax, I’m not dumping on you, well not really bad things. I’m just posting what I have been thinking about other than bicycles. Yes I do think about things other than bicycles from time to time. One of the things that has been occupying my non-bicycle brainspace has been the “other tenants” here at Casa de El Poeta. Currently we are renting rooms to a transgender couple and a crazy lady. The TG couple were a couple before they started to transition and swapped genders, and I think I have possibly mentioned the other person from time to time in this blog. Anyway these people live here in addition to Mrs. the Poet, and Brian the cat. Anyway Mrs. the Poet has decreed that the motel at Casa de El Poeta will be closed soon and asked me to pick a date for all the tenants to be gone. Being the kind, gentle, and non-confrontational person I am IRL I set the date as 2015/04/30 so that every one had time to find permanent lodgings and nobody was in panic mode. Did I mention that I make a terrible “bad cop”?
One of the other things occupying my non-bicycle brainspace has been the new Chase for the Sprint Cup format. We are now in the second round of the elimination format, with 12 drivers starting even at 3000 points following the elimination of 4 drivers from the previous round of the Chase. This really jumbles things up especially with the last race for this round coming at ‘Dega, which is always a fuster cluck. And with the repaving at Kansas giving so much grip that they are running wide open around the track at nearly 200 MPH it is looking like today’s race will be almost as bad as ‘Dega.
Another thing running around my non-bicycle brainspace has been the Sprint T, especially now that I have an actual body to measure from for the frame. And I have been doing a lot of measuring lately.
The inside showing the mounting flange for the floor/frame.
The bottom of the body with a real good view of the mounting flange.
Speaking of measuring things that mounting flange measures 34″ wide outside to outside at the rear opening of the floor, 33″ at the back part of that jog between the firewall and the dash, and 27″ at the firewall. This complicates the frame design to say the least. With the need to have the rear hoop of the roll cage very close to the outside edge of the passenger compartment at 47″ this means I have to do some really fancy design work at the back of the frame to meet the SCCA requirement of the rear hoop mating to the frame rail. Since I was planning on using the rear hoop as the kickup of the rear frame with two frame rails, one above the rear axle and one below the axle, getting that securely mounted is a must. With the trunk wall acting as a diaphragm between the two rails and the front wall of the trunk acting as another diaphragm across the back of the axle cell the back of the frame will have adequate torsional stiffness. I’m still trying to figure out how to go from the 35″ or so at the back of the body to the 47″ outside to outside width (44″ inside to inside) of the rear hoop. Maybe some angle iron welded to the floor pan to mount the body? Getting the diagonal brace from the rear hoop to the frame means some really tricky fabrication and design work because that diagonal is the only part of the frame that is inside the body. That means it is the only part of the frame that will be bolted in as part of final assembly, rather than welded on in initial fabrication. Or, I could split the body down the center and bolt it together from each side of the frame? That is harder to seal up against water and exhaust gas intrusion, but makes building the frame much easier. Changing one thing changes a thousand other things…
Speaking of changing one thing and other things being affected, I’m nursing a bruised knee from hitting the handlebars on Francis/es after changing the seat for something that doesn’t leave me with a numb but that sometimes bleeds from the abrasions because it didn’t fit. Well the new seat fits in that I don’t get any of the backside issues I had with the old seat, but it moved me closer to the handlebars enough that right turns and crosswinds caused my longer femur to put my kneecap into the back of the handlebars. Result, bruise, and a small hole under the right kneecap. So I remounted the handlebars to move them forward again, which rotates my torso forward and makes me rotate my head back farther. Then I didn’t get the binder bolt on the stem tight enough with all the grease to prevent the wedge nut from corroding solid with the steer tube, and the handlebars came adrift in heavy traffic this week, eek! They weren’t loose, just not pointing in the right direction which made riding scary. Well scarier than usual, that particular area is always scary even with a perfectly functioning bicycle… 3 lanes in each direction that narrows down to 2 each way on the other side of the intersection. I still had steering but the bars were pointed sharply to the left from hitting the steering stop during one of Francis/es “NO, I wanna go that way” starts and trying to make Francis/es go the way I wanted to go.
Back in Kansas, things have Not Gone Well for most of the remaining 12 chasers, to say the least, with about half of them having right front tire issues or getting caught up in other people’s wrecks. Junior and Jimmy are many laps off the pace and others are mired near the back of the pack from damages accrued from wrecks. Joey Logano won (again) making the third Penske team victory in 4 Chase races. I’m thinking we may have a Penske entry as the first Chaser over the line in Homestead.
Yesterday getting to and from the RPG group was the worst part of the day, as we were back out past the last stop on the Green Line for the site where we met. Flash Drive, my character, was in rare form for the game, managing to prevent the villains from securing their prizes while using the two groups to disrupt each other’s operations and keep civilian casualties to a minimum. When pursuit of the bad guys got caught in rush hour traffic my speedster used his abilities to head off any combat and prevented any possible civilian casualties while preventing escape until LEO showed up to take control of the situation. While investigating the attempted kidnapping and robbery across the street from our secret headquarters we discovered an operation that was way above our pay grades, so we called in the government agency in charge of super-crime to take over. What we found was evidence of human cloning and genetic engineering, along with illegal memory manipulation, possibly including one of our team members. When the Feds completed their investigation they found that our wolf/man was the result of commercial continuations of Nazi genetic experiments and implanted memories from someone else’s life that got interrupted when someone blew up the lab and stole as much as they could cart off (us playing villain characters back several months ago). Because we called the Feds in we managed to get our character moved from legal-as-super to legal-as-human, taking him from only legal in his Hero identity to able to vote and live wherever he wanted (and can afford).
And it is getting late so I’m going to go to bed.
PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet
Witch on a Bicycle 