OK I took my med at about 0200 because that’s my natural unmedicated bedtime, and dropped off almost immediately into a sleep filled with psychedelic dreams I can’t describe because causality was not maintained, and didn’t wake up fully until about 1600.
Sometime while I was dreaming I solved the problem of getting the body installed without cutting it into a jigsaw puzzle first. That dream I remember fully, because it was similar to my precognitive dreams. The “trick” was to make the frame in two separate parts that bolted together after putting the body inside it. The tricky part will be getting all the bolt holes to line up after the frame is built. The top part will be the top tubes of the frame and will bolt on as one piece to the front and rear suspension pickups and the roll cage to make a fully triangulated structure in all 3 planes. The top structure will have plates that sandwich the roll cage hoops and tie the top into the rest of the frame. I saw two versions in the dream, one that had the top as a single unit that went on and off in one piece, and another that had the front and rear as separate components. The single piece was more rigid, but the separate front and rear sections made working on the engine easier as only the part over the engine had to be removed to get to the engine. I’ll have to weigh the options and make up my mind later. To give an idea of how unwieldy the single piece top was I was using the engine hoist to pick it up and carry it around in my dream. Or myself and a helper to unbolt it and pick it up from the ends, not because it was heavy but because it was so long, basically the same as the wheelbase plus a bit to go over the roll cage.
Another thing I saw in this dream was the top used much smaller tubes for triangulation because of the tubes being in the line of sight of the driver, 0.75″ diameter as opposed to the 1.5″ diameter of the rest of the frame members. I don’t know what the wall thickness was or how much using the smaller triangulation affected the overall stiffness of the frame, but I know using smaller triangulation is still miles stiffer than no triangulation at all where the driver’s line of sight may be impaired. I think I wasn’t fully finished with the design in the dream because the triangulation kept changing during the dream, particularly the front part which kept switching between X and V and inverted V during the dream. I think I was weighing the driver visibility of the various configurations to see which let me see out better. I think when it comes to over the road visibility the X from the top corners of the cage to the front suspension pickups would have the best forward visibility, especially with the smaller triangulation bits, with everything visible with just a slight head bob from side to side to get an eyeball around the intersection in front of the driver.
And I know how obsessive about this car this post makes me seem, but I have been thinking about owning a T-bucket since I saw The Lively Set on Tee Vee back in 1968. That’s over 49 years for my math-impaired readers. I think a half-century of desire qualifies for an obsession, or as an obsession.
I have been learning a new CAD program that lets me output drawings in *.jpg format so I can post them here, but I’m still at a very low level of proficiency with the program. When I get to a high enough level that I can save to *.jpg you’ll know it because you will see CAD drawings in my posts. I’m trying to learn OnShape, which is a free browser-based CAD system. I have used graphics and CAD programs in the distant past, and used the design program embedded in the flight sim “X Plane” to create things in this century, but this is a whole different kettle of fish. I have been reading the documentation for the program and what it says about *.jpg is I can screenshot the page I’m working on and save that as a *.jpg. Not quite the same as generating a *.jpg from the program. But handy to know.
Well I have run out of words to share for today so this is the end of the post, but not the end of the story.
Witch on a Bicycle 