I have been in excessively firm contact with the ground too often the past two weeks

First of all, nothing is broken except the integrity of my dermis. Blood has been shed but not in any great quantity. I have bruises and things don’t work well at the moment but really, I’m fine. The swelling is mostly gone and I can type again.

As I wrote in my last post, I got tangled in the top tube of my new bike and fell over and injured my left shoulder which is still recovering. but last week on the way to the Lab Rat Keeper I was in a rush to get to the C-store to break a $10 bill by buying a lottery ticket. Well in my rush I allowed my center of gravity to get too far forward and when I tried to stop (to open the door to the C-store) I bounced off the door and hit the concrete in front of the store. I bruised a lot of stuff, scraped my knuckles and my elbow, bled profusely, and scared the nurses at the doctor’s office coming in covered in drying blood. They insisted on cleaning and putting band aids on my wounds before letting me leave.

The thing that worries me is the problem I had is indicative of a worsening of my brain damage, similar to Parkinson’s but without the muscle tremors. If this is what’s happening then there is also a much higher chance that I will develop dementia as time goes on, and that scares me. I caught myself doing this a couple of times before I fell but I as able to get my feet back under my body and get slowed down without falling. What happens is I start leaning forward and then lose control over how far I’m leaning until I’m almost running trying to not fall on my face and unable to stand up straight and stop. This condition is usually associated with Parkinson’s but is also indicative of brain damage, and to say I’m none too happy about the situation is an understatement. The good part is the best treatment for the condition is riding a bike. The bad part is riding a bike slows the progression of the disease, it doesn’t cure it. So I can stave off losing my mind and my mobility but I can’t prevent either.

And on that joyful note, I’ll let you go.

PSA, Opus

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Good news and bad news

Let’s take care of the good news first. Yesterday Plano Cycle gave me a practically new RANS Zenetik Tour bike with 3 X 9 SRAM drivetrain and Shimano 105 dual pivot brakes and 700c-28 wheels/tires. It rolls like a dream.

Now the bad news. The first time I tried to ride it I got my right foot tangled in the frame trying to get off and fell heavily on my left shoulder hard enough to dislocate my clavicle. It popped back in as soon as I rolled off my side and on my back, but I can only raise my left arm as high as the keyboard on my laptop now. It has been so long since I have had a bike that I can ride that my hips have gotten too tight to swing my leg over the seat when I get off the bike and my right foot got tangled in the top tube as I was trying to put it back down for another swing over the seat, and I went down, hard.

Back to the good news, I rode 0.4 miles from the bus stop to Casa de El Poeta without a problem holding my head up to see where I was riding. The seat needs to be lowered a skoshi bit because I was using my toes too much to pedal, but everything else seems to be good. The brakes are phenomenal, I didn’t need to shift on the level street between the bus stop and my house, and the bike just barely fits the bike racks on the front of DART buses, but it does fit.

The reason Plano Cycle said they gave me the bike is it was a trade-in that they had sold originally and then couldn’t sell for anything like what it was worth. So rather than take a loss on it they wrote the whole value off as a “charitable donation” and gave it to their favorite poverty-stricken cyclist, me. I don’t like being a “charity case”, but I will accept it, since the alternative is not riding a bike.

PSA, Opus

I spent most of yesterday unconscious, also a large chunk of today

There is something out there that is trying to kill me, and not even aware of what it’s doing. Some tree, weed or grass is attempting to reproduce and in the process is making me miserable. I have burning eyes, a nasty post-nasal drip, and a hacking cough from the post-nasal drip. I have a treatment for it, but that treatment is also the same thing I use to go to sleep at night, and the known dose for treating allergies is twice what I use as a sleep aid at night. So I have a choice between awake and miserable, or asleep and not feeling like I’m stuck underneath a stampede of small cattle. That caught under the stampede feeling is because the intercostals in my chest are exhausted by all the coughing caused by the runny nose/post-nasal drip.

On the Mini Sprint-T front I have almost determined the length I need to cut the rear axle tube so that the rear tires track is the same as the front. The stock for the rear axle tube protrudes exactly 0.125″ inside the hub, and the brake disk has to be 0.1428″ from the front of the wheel mounting surface for a scale caliper to fit between the hub and the disk. Subtract the .0675″ thickness from the front of the mounting surface to the back of the hub as received and the back of the hub needs to have .0753″ of added material for the mount for the brake disk. That means the front axle will have (2 * .1428) + 1.92 inches or 2.2056″ between the mounting flanges, and the rear axle tube would be 2.056 – (2 * .0675) + .250 or 2.3206″ long, leaving .68″ for making the standoffs for the front hubs which would be the same 0.200″ as the rear hubs. Yay! for having more than enough raw stock on hand. I’m still pondering the choice of material for sculpturing the back side of the hub for mounting the disk.

Off on another tangent, I madecollected $6 this weekend from that game app on my phone that pays me to play it. So Yay! money from playing on my phone like it was a job. This is the same source of funds that I used to buy the rice cooker/vegetable steamer back in July, so perseverance and patience will get me good stuff. I have also used these funds to purchase most of the things I am using to make the Mini Sprint-T. The kits I bought for inspiration and as a source for making the body, the engine for the SBC version, the tires for the street version, and all the raw stock for making the frames, were all sourced through Amazon. The water pump and front engine mount, the LS7 engine and the 700r4 transmission for the SBC engine were sourced through VCG Resins, while the wheels, hubs, rotors, and rear axles were sourced through Ron Coon Resins . Those items were bought with money from other side gigs.

And that’s pretty much all I had to say today.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Unkillable Badass Poet

I live, I die, I LIVE AGAIN!

OK if that sounds familiar it’s a quote from Mad Max Fury Road. And it’s perfect for the day I started composing this post, because 15 years ago I died. Not that I try to keep that a secret. But yeah, one more year and I can drive again.

Now, I promised that my next post would have pictures of the new wheels and rear axle for the Mini Sprint-T.

First up, what fell out of the bag after I broke the seal.

Wheels and hubs and the brake rotors in a small plastic bag.

The rear axles, center sections and axle tubes. The 1/1 scale center sections are stout but light.

The brake rotor on the hubs as delivered does not leave room for a caliper.
If you look carefully you can see the hub resting against the rotor. Not good.

Wheel outer half, hub, and rotor sitting separately.

The hub in the wheel.

The axle tube will become the standoff for the rotor so there is room for a brake caliper between the hub and the rotor.

The hub on the tube with the rotor.

Now you can see how the standoff is supposed to work.

And you can see the problem with the wheels and tires as a team.

You can see how far the whole wheel sticks out past the tire.

As you can see I have a bit of work to do to make these fit the models, all the hubs need to be fitted with the standoffs and the axle tubes trimmed to the right width for the car, the standoffs need to be slightly sculpted to match the 1/1 hubs so I will be buying some Sculpy to bridge the gap between the hub and rotor. But this car build is moving along.

The next issue to take care of is the differences between Henry’s Tin and Speedway’s Fiberglass. As I was laying out the frame I noticed the body wasn’t lining up properly, so I did a bit of measuring on the model body and the Speedway body and a bit of research on the Internet I found out that the kit body was pretty close to the 1925 car it was modeled on, and the Speedway body had been “stretched” a bit to fit “late model” humans in width. With the cowl problems I already noticed that means I need to do a lot to make the kit body fit my frame. So what I decided to do is a 3 step process to go from the AMT kit body to the Mini Sprint-T body.

Step one is filling all the holes in the AMT body with plastic Goop-ed in place and pulling a mold off that. Then I can remove the fill pieces and use the kit body as intended for the kit. Using this mold I cast a hard resin plug to use for stage one of the body mods, work the plug over to correct the contours of the cowl and back but don’t widen it yet.

Step two is taking the cleaned up plug and pulling another mold from it, then pulling a vacuformed body from that mold. The vacuformed body is then corrected for the width issue, filled with resin and cleaned up to make another plug for another mold that I can use to vacuform the final body. If I like the way the final body turns out I might do a run of bodies until that final mold wears out. If there is enough interest I can then use the final plug to make another mold and the process continues until I get tired of it or people get tired of buying the body. Step 3: Profit! 😀

And a little late posting, but here we are.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Unkillable Badass Poet