Yesterday I made a 3.25 mile walk to measure an oil filter at Auto Zone so I can scale this picture and find out how much engine or transmission is going to hang out past the body.
That oil filter is 3.8″+/- a few thousandths in diameter, so the assembly is 36.25″ wide. ?WTF? It… almost fits inside the body. I could widen the body by 2″ at the back, and just fit everything inside the body. I won’t, because in order to get the engine balanced it has to be offset a bit so that one end or the other will stick out, but the rear of the frame doesn’t need to be widened to catch the left and right engine mounts. Well, maybe a bit, but nothing like what I was anticipating.
So, anyway I was going to talk about the walk. I stopped on the way back to buy a lottery ticket (I didn’t win) and took the back way from the parts store away from the 50 MPH speed limit (actual traffic 60) main road/state highway the parts store sits next to and through a residential neighborhood or 2 to get home. Naturally this added to the length of the return trip but not by much in spite of the added turns. Maybe a quarter of a mile extra? Something like that. Anyway for my metric readers that was just a few meters over 5km round trip. The weather could hardly have been any better with 78°F (25.5C) and sunny with a nice breeze that never quite managed to blow my hat off. It was a nice walk except for the length, which was a little much for a zombie like me. Back when I was younger, like last year, that would not have been that big a challenge. Sure I would complain about it, because I always have to complain about something, but not a challenge, more like an annoyance.
Moving on to really random crap, I was thinking about a Flugtag craft for the next time the Flugtag comes to town, because I was in bed and couldn’t get my brain to shut up and let me sleep, again. What I was thinking most about was adding a pedal-powered propeller and how to use a standard bike chain to drive the prop. What I came up with was a crown gear to mesh with the drive chain on the propeller shaft, and instead of a standard sprocket a grooved pulley for the chain to ride on and an idler pulley to both take out the slack from the chain and to make sure no more than 2 teeth from the crown gear engage so the chain isn’t tweaked sideways. The prop would mostly be a glide extender rather than actually flying the plane. The plane would be based on the canard version of the Icarus 2 biplane hang glider from the ’70s, because it was light and had a lot of wing area to fly slow. The canard version was made to get more pitch authority to allow for pilots that were too light or too heavy for the standard Icarus 2.
Witch on a Bicycle 