I didn’t get out to buy butane and bolts today because Mrs. the Poet got a call to go to lunch with a friend and I had already started a pot of beans and couldn’t leave them unattended for the hours and hours they need to assume their beany goodness. So she went out and I stayed with the beans, and I will go shopping on Friday. NBD.
I’m sitting at my desk eating my last meal of the day, which is usually the sandwich and veggies Mrs. the Poet makes for lunch, but because she went out for lunch I had to scrounge up my own food today, after spending hours slaving over a CrockPot full of beans and ham bone. In such a situation my goto meal is usually something in the ramen family or cup noodles, this time microwave ramen bowl with veggies. It is just a constant source of amazement that that tiny packet of dehydrated veggies fills so much of the plastic bowl the noodles ship in. I mean the package is barely as big as two matchbooks, but after cooking there is about a third of the bowl full of veggies. The noodles hardly change at all, but when the veggies are rehydrated suddenly there is a bowl full of food in front of me. I don’t care what others say to me this is one of the miracles of the modern age.
So anyway while I was making sure nothing bad happened to the beans I had some time to think about the reason for the shopping trip. One thing I came up with was spending the extra money for a second 5/16” bolt to make the jig for the roll hoops, since they are going to be identical now. And with the jig I could theoretically make a kit for converting the AMT T roadster kits into a Mini Sprint-T if that seemed like it was a good idea. Right now it isn’t, but that might change in the future, who can say? Certainly not me. My prognostication abilities aren’t that precise. When I was asked to look at the possible outcomes of Bush v Gore I saw battles and chaos and interpreted that as possible civil war or riots in the streets, not the Iran /Afghan wars.
Anyway, back to the car model, if I can find some good wood in the garage I can drill a couple of holes in it to put the bolts into that would be the right distance apart. Then after making the first bend I could use the second bolt as a jig and make the second bend to make the hoop the exact right size for the frame, using guide marks on the jig to get the angles right, which is almost a pun, because both hoops need to have their legs bent to a right angle to the top bar of the hoop. The design has gone through some iterations where this was not a true statement, but for the time being it is true. Both hoops are the same, same width and same angles, and when the frame is finished and painted the internal bracing for the rear hoop gets bolted into the 1:1 Sprint-T after the painted and wired body gets slipped inside the frame and roll cage. Technically that should be a slash (/) instead of the word “and” because the frame rails go around the roll cage which forms structural bulkheads in the frame and the roll hoop bracing becomes part of the triangulation of the frame. As I pointed out years ago now, frame stiffness is a function of d4 where in this case d is the average distance from the bottom of the bottom rail to the top of the top rail, and running the top rail over the roll cage increases d to the max it can be without making either the top or bottom disconnected from the rest of the frame. And it’s much easier to build the frame with removable sections than it is to either spray the body inside the frame a different color, or build the frame around the body without causing damage to the body or getting overspray on the frame or body or both. The tricky part for the model is getting that same effect without messing up the paint when gluing the braces in the frame. I think I might need to use cyanoacrylate for these joints instead of my usual Testors solvent cement because “assembled after paint” so these joints will require a bit more patience fitting together than the ones for the solvent cement. And it’s starting to get to be time to hit the sheets, so I’m cutting this one short here.
Witch on a Bicycle 