What a day for a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well, this has been a busy day even by Sunday standards. As far as church doin’s are concerned we had morning and evening services as usual and then a Board Meeting. So about 4 hours of the day was church or church-related. Nothing much to report about that as today was Pledge Drive Sunday, the day when members are “encouraged” to meet the “doors open” part of the budget or more if they can spare it. That’s pretty standard and boring.

The interesting parts of the day were the time between the morning service and the board meeting while I watched the Mexican GP and the Sprint Cup race from Martinsville. There was a lot of drama in the F1 race even though I didn’t see much passing on the track not caused by a wreck or near-wreck of the car being passed. Most of the drama was caused by pit strategy, who was stopping for tires and when, and how long they took to change the tires when they did stop. Now that the F1 driver’s title has been decided for Louis Hamilton all he has to race for is the total wins record, and everyone else is racing for a job next season either with their current team or a new team that picks up the pieces when their current team possibly folds at the end of the season. F1 is the most expensive form of motorsport on the planet, and some teams lack the financial muscle to compete.

The Martinsville race was typical NASCAR short track beating and banging, with many cars finishing with less than the number of fenders they started with or missing other body parts. The incident between Joey Logano and Matt Kenseth looked a lot like “payback” for the Kansas incident where Joey took Kenseth out of the lead and ultimately out of the Chase. There were a lot of other incidents that looked like just trying too hard in too tight a situation, and that wreck that knocked Kurt Busch about 3 feet into the air was an extreme example of that. I don’t recall the other 3 drivers involved in the wreck, but Kurt’s car was the last in that chain to get hit as one car hit another, that hit a third, that was sent violently into Kurt’s car causing it to climb over the third car’s tire and continue to climb on a ballistic trajectory for about another tire diameter after that.

And after all the beating and banging was done Jeff Gordon won on his final start at the track and his first win there in a long time and first win all season. So Jeff is in the final round in Homestead and waiting for the next two races to tell him who else is racing for the championship.

And it’s time for me to wrap this one up because I have a lot to do tomorrow.

PSA, Opus

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My Warlock died yesterday and more on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Yep, my poor Warlock was severely killed (along with my apprentice NPC Bard) in the kinky D&D game yesterday. I was down to 6 HP when I got hit by a 34 HP attack centered on me and my apprentice because we were not in the room in an earlier attack that made the entire rest of the party magically pregnant with the half-siblings of a half-dragon daughter of a Green Dragon. She was pissed at us for not being there to get pregnant during that attack. I managed to get off a few good shots but a 5th level Warlock going up against even a half-dragon just ain’t gonna work. And so, I died.

Fortunately in the party loot was a clear bottle with a lead stopper filled with orange smoke and flashing lights, a “bottle of djinn”. This djinn was fairly powerful in that he had enough moxie to do two resurrections and bring both me and my apprentice back to full life with no loss of levels or XP. The senior member of the party then ordered the djinn to be free, much like the climactic scene in Disney’s Aladdin. We did this because we only had control over the djinn for 24 hours and if he was powerful enough to bring two characters through a full resurrection he was more than powerful enough to do a TPK in a single attack. So, “bring my friends back to life, and be free” seemed like a good choice.

On the Sprint Cup race today Martin Truax finally got a win this season after practically pounding the door down all season long with the Furniture Row Racing team. They won simply by virtue of having the stronger car pretty much all race long, and were able to outrun Happy Harvick at the end. This puts him in for the Championship Chase at the end of the season. I have liked Truax as a driver since his days with Michael Waltrip Racing, and was highly disappointed when MWR let him go at sponsor request, even after winning races. Well now he won driving for a single-car team with a tiny fraction of the resources of the big name teams. I mean until now had you ever heard of Furniture Row Racing?

With the parts that arrived last week detail design work on the Sprint-T progressed a little further as now I know how big the things holding the rear axle from moving relative to the frame are. Knowing this I know how much leeway I have to provide to keep them out of the bodywork and frame, and where they have to connect to the rear axle so that the coilovers don’t hit that. Having the actual items in my hands to measure makes things that much easier to draw. The issue I’m now facing is that I need the instant center for the rear suspension to be above the rear control arms slightly so that the rear axle doesn’t chatter under heavy braking, and when you throw that in with the “don’t hit the body” during suspension travel, or violate the “nothing lower than the main frame rail or the rims” parameter that is one of my basic rules for building a street vehicle it kinda boxes you in.You might have noticed that there was a bit of a bow in the control arm in the picture last week to accommodate the mount for the coilover unit.
This means I can’t just run the part between the rear end and the frame or it will run below the frame rail as this is a dual-use part. Not only does it locate the axle fore and aft, it also controls the up-and-down motion by mounting the rear springs, and the anti-roll bar bolts to the bottom to control roll (obviously, part of the name of the part). Why let a part do only one thing when you can use it to do three jobs at no increase in weight? I think it was Colin Chapman (founder and first designer for Lotus Cars) who said that, but he might have been quoting an earlier engineer.

I just returned from evening service where Mrs. the Poet was installed to the board of the church as a member-at-large for 2 years. It was quite moving. It was also rather frightening on one level, as the oath of office was basically in invitation for your gods to hunt you down and kill you in the most painful way possible if you screw up. I don’t know if that was the intent of the oath of office, but that’s surely the way it came out. I guess that is an effective way to ensure that screw-ups will be unintentional.

And I should let this end here as I have already gone a bit over my planned word count. And I’m having trouble putting the abstract concepts into concrete words.

PSA, Opus the Poet