Ouch! I got some exercise

I went out to get lottery tickets the long way and took the long way home for about a mile and a quarter walk. My old feet did not take kindly to the abuse and started to swell inside my shoes, and let’s just say the results were neither pretty nor comfortable.

I’m still thinking about the alternator and driving the stock water pump on the LS engine, and discovered after a few minutes that no matter which side of the engine I hung the alternator I was going to need an idler pulley to turn the water pump the right direction, because physics. The rib side needs to drive the alternator and the crank pulleys, the flat side needs to drive the water pump. That means the belt has to change direction twice to get everything running the right direction, and that means an extra idler, or two alternators with one placed in a strange orientation to be running the right direction while driven by the wrong side of the belt. Personally, I prefer an idler and a high amperage single alternator over trying to wire in two alternators to the electrical system. But it is feasible to run two alternators if you include blocking diodes to prevent power from trying to go into a dead alternator. I think the technical term is a “crowbar” diode to stop the flow of current if the alternator shorts out.

And this came in as I was composing this, Mrs. the Poet is doing some volunteer work for the election and has some information about us on the voter registration list, and there was a strange phone number attached to our names. I did a reverse lookup and it either is now or at sometime in the past was for a church in Grand Prairie, which is a few miles down the road, and about three cities are between us and the church. Looking further had my name and my father’s birthday attached to this number, which is understandable because we have different middle names to prevent me from being a Junior, but the same first name and middle initials. And obviously this is not in my stage and pen names because he was never “Opus”. He’s always been “John” or “Johnny”. But it was funny to see me listed as 85 YO, and a whole bunch of old addresses where we used to live. Further investigation shows another person currently attached to the number over in a different part of town who I never heard of. A quote from Alice seems appropriate: “Curiouser and curiouser”.

Now, back to the Sprint-T, I have also been thinking about that intake manifold and how to make it. One thing I was thinking about was to use carbon fiber around a positive mold for the runners and just doing everything into a single unit that will bolt to the heads. I have been thinking about mounting the injectors in the roof of the plenum aimed at the mouths of the runners for charge cooling, since the runners are all downhill to the mounting face on the heads. All of the fuel sprayed into the runners will get to the cylinder it was intended for, eventually. Now making sure the fuel delivered is the fuel needed will take some finagling in the tune, but I don’t see that as an insurmountable problem so much as a calibration issue with on-throttle enrichment. This is a programming function that acts like the acceleration pump in a carb, except in software. And calibration is similar to calibrating the pump shot on a carb set up, by trial and error on the street or track. The tuner has to start with enrichment disabled, then gradually increase enrichment until the engine runs smoothly even when throttle settings go from idle to wide open in a fraction of a second. The tricky part is a little too much enrichment acts like a little too little, a slight stumble on tip-in. That’s why taking very small steps is better, because the tuner is more likely to hit the sweet spot in throttle response before going past it.

And this looks like a good place to put this post to bed.

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Foot problems are keeping me off the computer

Can’t take too long this time. In a nutshell I have been spending too much time sitting down, which makes my feet swell, which then makes my feet hurt, and so far the only relief I have found is lying down and elevating my feet.

And while I’m lying down, I think. It’s almost a reflex by now, the feet come up and the brain goes into gear. Since I’m lying down during the day I have light to read by and I bring a Speedway catalog with me. This at least keeps my mind from wandering off on tangents instead of solving problems that need solving for the least amount of money possible.

Something else I should mention is I won a $25 gift certificate to Speedwaymotors.com that had a limited lifespan, and I wanted a shift handle so I got the one in the link. The gift certificate covered all but $0.38 after the handle, shipping, and sales tax. So I have the style shift handle I always wanted for $0.38 out of my pocket.

And I just faceplanted in the keyboard again, so I’m calling an end to this post and time for bed. I guess I shoulda said I haven’t been sleeping well to go with the foot problems.

Still here, still nothing much to report, except a shocking picture of a sick cat (CW)

Basically the most newsworthy thing this entire week was my son is taking a long weekend in San Antonio so no grocery run Saturday, and my feet hurt too much to take the bus to the store and backpack the groceries home. Yay, news!

On other fronts one of the people I follow on Twitter turned out to be a scam artist from Ghana, asking me for money after a long conversation by DM. Fortunately my BS detector started going off well before the request for money for her mother and babies. And no it isn’t because I want her mother and babies to starve, it’s because I don’t believe those are her mother and babies in the pictures she sent and put in her account. I might be cynical (YA THINK?!?) but I’m also experienced in getting scammed, having been scammed many times in the 61 years I’ve been crawling around this planet. Actually most of the time when people try to scam me I didn’t have any money to get scammed out of.

On the Sprint-T front, currently the best option is the junkyard 5.3L iron block LS engine and a 4l80e transmission which will give me a 1800 lb. car with 300 HP at the wheels if I just leave everything stock, or 400 HP with a cam swap and headers. Since I have to build headers to get the exhaust out of the firewall anyway, spending the extra $200 for the extra 100 HP seems like a decent trade off, since I’ll have to tune the computer setup either way.

Now what would be cool is if the engine comes with the VVT cam drive which would let me tune the cam timing for best low end and high end power, if I also get the ECU and harness that originally came with the engine, which kinda supposes I get the engine from the vehicle it came in. But I have been reading articles about tuning the VVT and compared to fixed cam timing it can be worth as much as 50 lb-ft of torque below 3000 RPM compared to running a fixed timing setup for high RPM power. This means I can get more dig out of tight corners when racing and still have power at high RPM. It also means I can squeeze the last MPG out of the engine for the transit from one race to another, as getting more power at low speed means I don’t need to burn as much fuel to get the same speed as power required doesn’t change.

Other things dancing around my brain included seeing cars at the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals that had either the right or left halves of Chevy or Mopar V8s in front of the driver and thinking “Throw an LS3 engine and a clutch in that and you would have a killer A-Mod autocross car.” Sure I would need to run a larger radiator to cool 376 cubic inches of gas powered V8 than 166 cubic inches of alcohol powered 4 cylinder, but it would be a practical race car with a high power to weight ratio. The cars running half V8 engines were rules-limited to iron block and heads, so there wouldn’t even be that much increase in weight to go to the all-aluminum LS engine, and the radiator could go to the rear of the car right behind the driver to keep the balance the same front to rear balance and a 3 gallon fuel cell would be enough to run all day if I stayed with pump gas, so no heavy fuel tank hanging off the back. I could even take a wrecked sprint car and chop most of the front end off, keep the cage and rear suspension, and rebuild the front to the 72″ minimum wheelbase for A-Mod and get pretty much the same thing as there is very little difference between the two types of racer behind the firewall. There are wrecked sprint cars locally but they tend to be scrapped out pretty quick, so I would have to have $$ in reserve to buy the wreck practically at the track. Mind is still trying to solve the problem of not having a race car even though I have no way of getting the race car to the races. I don’t know why, besides I want a race car that I can race.

In other news I finally got Clyde to sit still for a minute so I could take a picture of how he looks now. Image not suggested for sensitive viewers.

Yes that is blood oozing from those cracks in his skin, and that’s also the reason why we can’t use the medicine we have to make the itching stop. It has a big black box warning in the instructions to not apply to open injuries or sores, and will make him very sick if we do. So we have medicine to stop his itching we can’t use because he scratches until it’s raw and bleeding, and he still has itches he scratches until they are raw and bleeding 😿. Poor kitty! We might have to take him to the vet again.

Feet still hurt and other things

Well I was supposed to go run errands in Carrollton today but I could barely walk to the mailbox in front of the house so no trip to Carrollton. I seriously did something bad to my feet, and I wish I knew what it was so I could not do it any more. I mean this is highly annoying not being able to leave the house except to get the mail.

Anyway I didn’t log on to post about my feet, I’m here to post about THINKING! > thunder, lightning, dogs and cats living together < No need to panic I’m just going to discuss on how my brain works > spooky music, portals to strange dimensions, screams of the damned <. NOW STOP THAT! I swear I will turn this blog around right now if this doesn’t stop > … <

OK now as I was saying I’m going to show I knew about how much to move the springs in on the front and rear axles so I could balance the car’s handling without resorting to heavy anti-roll bars. It has to do with single and double wheel rates and how they differ on a beam axle.

On double wheel rates or technically a “two wheel bump” the wheel rate is whatever the spring rate less whatever is lost if the springs are not vertical. Plus the motion ratio for springs not mounted directly to the axle which doesn’t apply here. What starts getting weird is when you get body roll or looking at it from a static body reference a “single wheel bump”. Then you start getting all kinds of motion ratios involved.

I should explain what a “motion ratio” is before I continue with this post. On a beam axle like both the ones on all of the iterations of the bucket from Sprint-T to TGS2 the motion ratio is the ratio of the tread (the distance between the center of the wheels looking from one end) to the distance from the center of the wheel to the point that the spring affects the axle, on the slant height. I guess you could use the distance on the horizontal plane because there is only a few % difference, but if you know the slant height between the contact point of the stationary tire and the spring closest to the affected wheel, why not use it?

On the front axle the springs are mounted as close to the ends of the axle as is physically possible, so the motion ratio for the spring closest to the bump is nearly 1:1 and the motion ratio on the other end is effectively 0, after taking the effect of applying the motion ratio into consideration. (The effect of a spring on the wheel rate is effective spring rate at the mounting point times the motion ratio squared.)

On the rear axle the spring away from the bumped wheel is actually close enough to be affected in a single wheel bump and contribute a significant amount to the spring rate at the wheel, so it has to be added in to find the wheel rate. To explain why I present a reductio ad absurdum where there is a single spring mounted on the center of the axle. The effective single wheel spring rate is ¼ the two wheel spring rate with zero resistance to rolling over in a turn, demonstrating the three spring rates for a beam axle: the two wheel rate, the single wheel rate, and the roll rate.

And I bored myself writing about it. I don’t get it, this is exciting to do, why can’t I convey that excitement when I write about it? Seriously this is giggly hand-rubbing exciting to do with the calculator and the graph paper, why can’t I make it sound as fun when I’m writing about it? I make it sound like homework instead of the nuts and bolts of deciding where the nuts and bolts go.

I guess I’m just tired and need to take a break from writing and go do something.

I do stupid things sometimes

And yesterday was one two of those times. First stupid thing was extending my walk after ordering the hone I needed to install the kingpins and spindles on the axle. The second stupid thing was refusing the ride home after I started hobbling instead of walking. I can barely walk now because of the pain in the balls of my feet. I walked for 4.4 miles last night which is about 2 miles more than normal. Since the end of May I have walked more than 33 miles which averages out to 2 miles a day, and there were days I couldn’t walk because of pop-up showers in the evenings. But there were 2 extra-point check-ins on my mobile game that gave me an extra 70 points for checking in. That’s the equivalent of an extra 14 check-ins over and above the 25 I get per day, so you can see why I would want to get those check-ins. If I grab a bunch of those I will be back in the black for the weekly $1 gift card. Now the smart thing to do would be to catch the bus to the Wendy’s and order fries and drink soda all day while I walk back and forth between the two extra point check-ins and collect 245 points in 8 hours. That’s almost 10 cents! 😀 and right at 2 miles, and I could take the bus home or within 0.4 miles of home.

I have made zero progress on the TGS2 outside of buying the hone, that will be here tomorrow afternoon. Seriously, I can’t even think right now because of the pain. That kinda worries me, because I’m the guy who wrecked his knees and barely felt it, pulled a couple of my own teeth without painkillers, only took a painkiller because they made me on my last operation, and only needed one on the previous operation. Having something hurt this bad must mean I destroyed something. In fact I think I will take a little lie down because my feet hurt so bad.