Merry Christmas!

Because my son-in-law’s relatives are upset that we have monopolized the grandkid the last 6 Christmases we are doing our presents Saturday over pizza, so I don’t know what I’m getting yet. The cats are getting flea treatments because 1) they don’t know that Christmas is any different than any other day, and B) they really need flea treatments.

I take that back, I do know some of what I’m getting because Mrs. the Poet let me open my present last night… in bed.😍

We are having ham for dinner with our son and I guess I’ll get back with you Monday after family presents on Saturday and RPG party on Sunday. Once I know what I got for Christmas, I’ll blog what I got for Christmas.

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I’m not dead again yet

And that is one convoluted headline that wraps up my life in a sentence. I’m just reading and doing stuff, practicing making exhaust tips and things. I haven’t made any real good tips yet because I keep collapsing the tubing against the bending post, because the differences between soft enough to bend and soft enough to collapse are this much (holding fingers almost touching) and I haven’t got the touch down yet. I need to get the spatial relationship between the heat source and the bending post better, but ATM I have zero idea what that should be. What I’m looking for is close enough to get the soft tube to the bending post while it’s still soft and so I don’t have to let it get too saggy and stretch it out and make it too small. There are literally thousands of ways to screw this up and I’m finding most of them.

Mrs. the Poet wants me to be in bed at the same time she is, and so do I. It’s getting close to the time she gets up, so I’m putting this to bed now and me shortly after.

Being out of sync with the rest of the world is freaky

OK little infodump here but I don’t have what is considered a “normal” circadian rhythm. For some of you this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, but for some of you knowing I live in the US Central Time Zone is going to be a bit of a surprise if you track my posting schedule. Or lack of schedule because I publish whenever I finish composing a post, no matter what time of day it is. Basically what it looks like is my body is working on a 26 hour day, and if I just do my thing and work and sleep when I feel like it, I lose a day every month or so. But for a good part of my life I’m on Vampire Hours which means I get faster internet because not as many people are using it, and there’s nobody calling me on my phone.

But because I have to interact with the rest of the world on a regular basis, I lose that day more frequently so I can sorta get back in step with the rest of the world. For instance if there is an event coming up that would be during my sleep cycle I stay up as long as needed to get my sleep cycle sometime between midnight and 0800, usually meaning I’m up about 36 hours to get to sleep at midnight. That also means I’m usually going to bed about the same time as Mrs. the Poet gets up until I have to reset. That’s the really bad part about it, because Mrs. the Poet is still not used to Vampire Hours. But anyway, I do the model building and picture taking when the natural light is better, and the writing when the internet is faster. You get the idea.

And it’s about time to reset to “normal” time again, as I went to bed after 0600 the last 2 days, which really bothers Mrs. the Poet which makes her complain I spend “All day in bed!” when it’s the same amount of time asleep she spends in bed. I just don’t like to get out of a nice warm bed and let my feet get cold. So to counter that I have slippers, fuzzy on my Xmas list, right before the swat pants because I have discovered how comfy they are when the thermostat is set for economy over “running naked through the house comfort” in the winter. I think Mrs. the Poet would like “running naked through the house comfort” over low electricity bills except when she sees the electricity bill.

A little late, but here it is

Sorry to take so long but I finally got a decent picture saved someplace I can use to post it to the blog.

There’s a wrinkle that doesn’t show well in the picture because of the angle, but is glaringly obvious IRL. So this part is Just Practice while I perfect my technique. Also I have been looking at pictures in catalogs and online of turnouts that used this method and they have egg-shaped openings, not teardrops. That means I have to work on my technique even more to get the opening right every time.

Since I spent so much time trying to get a good picture today after trying to get a good turnout yesterday I’m up past my bedtime and I really need to be awake when the stormdoor installation team shows up in the morning, I’m putting this to bed and then myself. Hasta la Friday. Which I know is ungrammatical Spanglish, but anyway, Mañana

I spent hours practicing

Last night I did the bender again and started trying to do the “sliced tangent to the inner radius” exhaust tip. Now while I was building my tool and practicing bending the raw stock I was listening to YT Music on my phone, which ran the battery down so I couldn’t take pictures after I was done. But I promise pictures for tomorrow after the phone gets charged.

The tricky part is the heating of the raw stock to make it soft enough to bend without causing the tube to collapse. I ruined many bends because I overheated the tube and collapsed it. I also discovered that heating the stainless steel bolt I’m using as a bending post doesn’t work for tubing at all, unlike solid rod. If the post is warm enough to soften the plastic, the wall of the tube next to the post collapses before the outer radius starts to bend. In retrospect I should have expected that, but I was thinking in metalworker mode not plastic model builder mode. The way to go for the plastic tube is to spin the tube on its long axis with the intended bend area in the heat source (butane torch flame) until it gets soft but not floppy, then put it in the bender and make the bend. This has to be done extremely fast because the temperature spread between floppy and rigid is very small and soft enough to bend and too cold to bend smoothly is even smaller.

Anyway I discovered another reason for using the sliced bend exhaust tip, it leaves a delightful teardrop shaped opening besides directing exhaust away from the car, similar, shorter, but not exactly like when the reverse technique is used for side-exit exhaust. But I wasn’t expecting this shape from the inside bend, I was expecting a more oval shape opening. Maybe when I get a better quality bend the shape of the opening will be more oval than this attempt. But better quality requires more practice and there is a limit on how much raw stock I can waste on practice. I really need to reserve one stick of tailpipe material for the final build so I have enough length. But I will get a picture of the pretty practice tailpipe for tomorrow’s post

Here’s the link to that lean-burn Corvette

Lean burn Corvette testing video.

You can see what it does IRL on real roads. This video was done last week and uploaded Saturday 12/7 so cold weather which is very bad for gas mileage because of increased aero drag and rolling resistance. Now my car is going to have horrible aero especially compared to a 1999 Corvette. If I’m lucky I’ll get about 30 MPG highway because of that, but that is still about as good as I got with my 1987 Hyundai with the non-overdrive 4-speed transmission. My best Dallas-Nashville mileage was about 31-32 back in the early ’90s partially because I was driving at night and missed everybody’s rush hours for all the cities I hit. Again, 1980’s technology and no overdrive with a carburetor but I did have an external oil cooler running as low viscosity oil as was available at the time, I think 10W-30 non-synthetic because synthetics were like 3 to 4 times as much as petroleum-based oils and as always we were Not Rich even then.

So, now that we know what’s possible, let’s see what we can do with what we have.

I have been practicing on raw stock

This is a technique I haven’t used since the last time I was building models for/with my son when he was a child, who will be 42 next birthday. So to say I was out of practice would be a gross understatement. So I decided some practice on some of the raw stock I’m using for the exhaust would be in order. I decided to start on the hardest exhaust end first because if I could a decent job on that the others would be a piece of cake.

Well the pictures didn’t turn out so good because the new phone doesn’t do macro very good, the old phone used to do macro real good, but this one stinks. Also it’s all white plastic so while I can see it, the camera just doesn’t pick it up well at all. But given the limitations of the technology here’s a before pic. Actually the other end of the tube that hasn’t been worked yet, but you get the idea.

And after, notice the thin edge looks like the whole tube is really thin.
On a different background and lighting to make the difference more noticeable.
And before really needs a contrasting color on the edge but the tube wall is still discernible.

So this was the straight-cut tip, the tip I’m going to be emulating in plastic is the turn-out tip, where the tube is bent around a radius and then cut tangent to the inside of the bend right where the bend begins. This is a classic hot rod design motif that forces the exhaust in a different direction without enlarging the width of the exhaust in tight confines. The normal use is to turn the exhaust down in front of the rear axle when a combination of no ground clearance and not enough floorpan clearance when the axle is at full bump prevents routing the pipe over or under the rear axle. Or like I’m doing putting a side exit exhaust where there isn’t a lot of room to the side and you don’t want to hang a sharp edge out on the side of the car.

And if a picture is worth a thousand words then I have posted enough for today. Next step is to fire up the bender and make that turn-out tip.

Waiting on the door installation people

OK I have selected storm doors to replace the ones installed when the house was originally built in 1985, now I’m waiting for the installers to arrive and measure the door to get the right size storm frame. As this is one of the few standard size things on the house, I don’t expect too much hassle getting it installed.

One thing I have to say, it’s easy to get through the door once it’s open, the frame is 3′ x 6′. Looking through the Lowe’s listings this is the largest standard door available. There are taller doors, but they are only available by special order. There are lots of doors that come narrower, but I didn’t see anything wider. So 3 by 6 is as big as you can get without spending buttloads of money. But the installation people have to verify that in person so they get the right thing.

I have been practicing with the bender for the plastic stock of the frame and exhaust for the Mini Sprint-T, as the exhaust in particular requires lots of work to get right and there is a bend for the muffler/tailpipe in particular that really needs to be done right. To simulate the thin wall exhaust tubing of the 1:1 scale vehicle the end of the exhaust tip needs to be filed to a knife edge from the inside and the inside painted matte black or matte silver. That’s something I’m going to have to research, does E85 leave a carbon deposit when tuned for best power? I already know that the highway mileage tune for 87 octane won’t, as it is about as lean as the engine will run right with, emulating a tune that let a ZO6 Corvette get just over 38 MPG in a real-world highway test. For airplane drivers this is the car equivalent of tuning 150° lean-of-peak on the EGT. And for people not aware this is over 40 MPG steady-state from an engine that displaces 427 in³ (7 liters) and put out ~500 HP at the rear wheels back in the day. But anyway the highway tune will not remove carbon deposits at the end of the exhaust, so if the tune for E85 carbons up the exhaust then I need to emulate that in the model. And I just checked the E85 forum and there are 3 posts that say they don’t get any carbon from running E85, and one that said he still has carbon in his tailpipe from the 87 octane the dealer put in when he first bought it, but nothing more than that in 5000+miles since he bought the car, so I’m going with the matte silver for the inside of the tube.

The fuel map is going to look really strange when I get this tune done, because most of the map will be slightly rich except for the RPM block and throttle setting for steady-state freeway cruise at 60 MPH which will have a “hole” that leans the engine as far as it will go and still run right. On 87 octane this will be leaner than the max NO_x point so low CO, CO₂ and middling NO_x.

And I have been sitting here writing for about 3 hours waiting to hear from these people, and it’s about 1630 CST so I’m going to assume they aren’t going to answer today. And this is a good word count to stop at, because I don’t want to bore anyone today. So, I have to go out again tomorrow to deposit a check, which means going on the bus again. But not as bad as Black Friday in the rain.