Weather doesn’t stop to enquire about your plans before happening

Well, plans were to wrap my workout around getting my toes done down the street, but the weather has other ideas. There has been a line of thundershowers going over since shortly after noon, when I got to sleep about 0600 after putting the previous blog post to bed about 0430. That post took extra long because I would write a little bit, go crawl around in the bucket body for a while, run some numbers on the calculator, crawl around the body again, run some more numbers on the calculator, write a bit, rinse and repeat. I spent about 3 times as much time with a tape measure inside the body as I did sitting at the keyboard. And I still need to get my toes done, the nails are getting a bit on the long side, while it is still raining with occasional lightning and thunder over Casa de El Poeta preventing my walk.

On the TGS2, the mind kept going after the post was put to bed. I considered saddle tanks as well as wrap-around tanks with luggage space on top of the tank. I genuinely think the best option would be putting the Jaz Products 892-032-01 32 gallon bare cell on edge so that it would be 17″ tall, 14″ wide, and 33″ across, behind the seat and using the space beside the seat for carrying things. Unfortunately nobody I have contacted sells them, so I might have to get it directly from Jaz, which makes the price a mystery. But it is possible to interpolate a price by comparing the costs of bare cells that I can get to the costs with cap and fittings for the same size cell, then applying that difference to the 32 gallon cell with cap and fittings. I think I’m looking at $143 plus shipping. Compared to a custom tank that’s cheap. I would still need to fabricate a firewall and fuel filler, but that would be true for any tank inside the bucket body. Jaz even makes a fuel gauge sending unit to fit this configuration.

On the bike-riding front, I’m still not riding. I do the PT that is supposed to make my neck more flexible but all it seems to be doing is keeping me from getting any worse. It doesn’t hurt to hold my head back or turn to the right, it just doesn’t go back or to the right. And I’m still getting the pain and tingling in my neck and shoulder, especially after I do my exercises. It’s almost like they never took Chris Christie off of my neck, except I have a little more range of motion especially tilting my head back. I still notice it there, and the improvement without a useless lump of fat on my neck. Every few days I check the tires on the bikes to see if they need pumping and once in a while I pump them up.

And now I think I’ll have dessert and a big cup of covefefe (CO-vay-Fay-fay). If Trump can make up words, I can make up the pronunciations.

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Well, dang, that doesn’t look like it will work

Two posts ago I speculated on moving the seat forward and putting the gas tank behind the seat. Well without making a custom tank or severely cutting the body, or both it won’t work. I just spent an hour climbing in and out of the bare body with the steering wheel. If I put the steering wheel inside the passenger compartment on the normal side of the dashboard even with the steering wheel in my chest there’s no room for a commercial fuel cell between my butt and the back of the car, except the 3 gallon tank , which would be great for racing, but pretty crappy for driving to and from the races. Especially with E85 which isn’t common. There is room for a big tank behind the driver’s seat, but it would have to be built custom for the space. I roughly estimated that a 30 gallon tank would fit with room to spare. If I got really crazy it would be over 40 gallons, but that would require basically making the inside of the body part of the gas tank, which like I wrote, would be really crazy.

Another alternative is to make a race-car like cockpit like this Lotus 49.
Basically the cowl would be cut away where the windshield is on the Lotus in the picture, and my head will be just back of the original location of the dash. There’s lots of room to play with out front once the gas tank(s) is(are) gone, but almost none behind the body because of the engine and its systems. The bad part of this would be my feet would be right up against the radiator. The good part would be there would be room for a 32 gallon fuel cell behind me which would mean 700 miles between highway fill ups with some cushion for crossing Wyoming or west TX running E85. How often I would be doing that is unknown. The only thing I could think of would be the Goodguys Shootout for the year-end champion in autocross held in AZ.

Well I have about run out of words but not ideas which continue to run through my brain but not in a complete enough form that I can post them to this blog.