I managed to get up in time to do the game today but I did get to watch a decent race from Vegas. The game didn’t work out because of bad communication, one of our players does Scarborough Faire part-time and they had some pre-season setup to do today, that they thought would get knocked out by noon and back home to eat and then play by 1500. They didn’t get finished until 1600, and everybody decided that when they didn’t get logged into the game chat by 1530 the game was SNAFU and logged out. The race was a constant back and forth, but eventually Kyle Larson managed to stay in the lead after pit stop strategy played out. Interesting part of that strategy was leaving Daniel Suarez out until he was leading the race and on the camera as the leader, several times, to get his sponsor as much airtime as possible. This got the sponsor, Camping World who also sponsor the Camping World Truck series, several minutes of airtime that driving to a top 10 finish would not have gotten, which is about as good as they could get from the car.
Other news, I finally got to sign up for a COVID shot, thanks to evolving rules about co-morbidities. And the really stupid thing is the vascular damage I got from the wreck wasn’t the thing that got me qualified, it was my high blood pressure. The vascular damage moved me up the line a bit, but wasn’t enough to get me on the list. What did it was high BP controlled with medication. Also I’m on the list for an experimental COVID vaccine, which might get me jabbed quicker, so I have options now. Also Mrs. the Poet’s arm was only slightly impaired for a couple of days, but the word on the internets is the second jab is the one that does you in, so we still have that to look forward to /s.
On the Sprint-T build, it’s a good thing I didn’t weld those brackets to the front axle yet. I did a little figuring and the way I had been planning on doing it would have resulted in the 4-bar links passing through the radiator tanks. This would be plus ungood for driving. The new plan is to put the inside edge of the inside bracket on the 31" ℄ mark, which moves the links 3/4" ± further out and just clears the radiator. On a related note there is some kind of funky interpretation of the double quote mark from the composing software that when I enter from the keyboard I get unpredictable results. Sometimes I get a simple double quotes, sometimes I get opening double quotes, and sometimes I get closing double quotes. It’s slightly insane. The only way to get the same character every time is to use the HTML for the quotation mark (""")
Another note on the Sprint-T build, I’m still trying to work out that side brace that runs over the top of the cage and also acts as the top bar of the space frame, running from the front top spring mount to the rear of the frame since the rear top spring mount is on the rear hoop of the cage. I was thinking about having the two hoops front and rear and then putting two hoops, one on each side to handle the front to back loads. Problem is while that simplifies the bracing it greatly complicates the load paths. I mean there is a hoop running front to back next to the hoop running side to side and how are they attached to each other? Structurally it is a very mixed bag with lots of stiffness in the vertical mode, and dubious stiffness in torsion mode. Essentially this puts a hinge on front and rear hoops for twisting loads. Translated from structural speak that means crushing loads are well-resisted so my head is probably safe in a roll-over, but the thing I’m making the frame this way for in the first place is not what I had hoped for. So, back to the drawing board. I really need to get my CAD program knowledge up to snuff, because I know it will calculate what I need to know once I figure out what to tell it to draw. Basically I have the radius of the bender, and I know the brace will have to be tangent to that radius projected from the top of the front and rear hoops to the front spring mount and the rear end of the frame, respectively. The top of the side brace runs parallel to the tops of the hoops until it goes past the hoops, which is where the bend starts. Lots of words to describe a simple tube with two bends. And if I could figure out how to tell my CAD program what I just wrote I would be flying.
Witch on a Bicycle 