Going for a walk tonight

It’s supposed to rain in a bit and then get cooler, so I thought I would go for a walk after the rain. And after I get back I’m going to do that stick aided design thing with the bucket shell. I was looking at the pictures after I did the post and decided that I don’t need to fix the “divot” from the dashboard because it won’t even be part of the mold. I just have to continue the top molding from the cockpit past where the dash interrupts it and make the flat top like the cockpit. Not that big a deal especially with the contour existing on either side. Of course that’s easy to write while I’m listening to “Seven Nation Army” on my music app. I mean most people could tackle just about anything while listening to that, it’s very uplifting and empowering.

Right now the rains have come as forecast, as Mrs. the Poet says “in buckets”, and Clyde came in, grabbed a bite, and immediately went back out into the rain. That’s Mrs. the Poet’s cat and as she says there’s something “not right” about him. I’m thinking the thing is he’s a bit more feral than Clint and doesn’t like the indoors even when things are yucky outside. And Clint just spent the last 20 minutes keeping me from typing by sprawling across my lap and demanding I pet him, that’s how “not-feral” he is, laying on his back with all four paws in the air begging for a belly rub.

Getting back to the car, I’m having a minor issue with the spindle not fitting the axle boss, being just a touch too short between the ears. I mean seriously there is like 0.02″ interference with the thrust bearings in place. Now I know why those spindles were in the Garage Sale section of the Speedway site. Again this is not insurmountable, I have an angle grinder and if I take the excess material off the thrust bearing side I don’t even need to be too careful about keeping the surface flat. I mean yes as close to flat as I can keep it, but I don’t need to make it super flat and true like I would the other side, the thrust bearing can cover a lot of imperfections, and the mill file can remove the worst of them. The top only gets paper-thin shims between the axle boss and the spindle, so it has to be flat and true to keep from messing up the shims and binding the steering.

I’m going to go for my walk in a few minutes, then go do the stick aided design and take lots of pictures while I’m doing it, then make another blog post with the pictures.

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Mostly running in circles instead of making progress

The headline tell most of the story lately. I have been trying to make some kind of progress on something, anything, and most of what I’m doing seems to be chasing my tail, metaphorically speaking. I don’t actually have a tail to chase and I’m not running in circles or otherwise, but that doesn’t keep me from going over the same old thing over and over, and accomplishing nothing in the process. And yes the new meds are not very effective against the depressing political climate, which is all I’m going to say about it.

I have been doing the stick-aided design thing with the bucket body shell trying to visualize the shape of the TGS2 and also trying to figure out how I’m going to build the plug to pull the mold from. The biggest problem I’m having is the seam between the existing bucket shell and whatever I’ll be using to build the rest of the plug from. That will also be the transition around the cowl that I won’t be using on the TGS2 that I’m still trying to figure out. There is a molding around the top of the cockpit that I want to continue all the way to the nose molding, but the cowl on the bucket gets in the way of just molding straight from the body and carrying that molding to the nose.

As you can see the cowl has a major pinch that I want to turn into a smooth curve all the way to the nose but the dashboard just barely hangs into the transition and there is that interruption of the molding at the top of the cockpit I was mentioning. I might be able to fill in the divot in the mold after it gets pulled from the plug, but I’m not sanguine about my prospects of getting it right on both molds. Plus there is the matter of that molding around the cockpit going all the way to the nose.that I have some confidence in getting right if for no other reason than I can use a template gauge to match the profile to a carving tool I can whittle from sheet stock.

Well I need to stick some sticks on the body and think about the shape again.