Thursday was significant

As I type this it’s Friday night, but by the time I post this it will be early Saturday morning. Not that the date is meaningful, but the original headline was “Yesterday was Significant” which would be wrong when the publication date was Not Friday.

Anyway, first thing we did was get our taxes done, and apparently the IRS charges for a paper check since Trump took office. After paying for the preparer we are going to net just under $200 back from our 8.5K taxable income. Be still my beating heart! I have given Mrs. the Poet until the end of March to get the plumbing fixed before I take $100 and get an engine hoist to build my hotrod with. Until then she can spend everything on plumbing and I won’t care, because I don’t think I have any chance of building that hotrod without winning the lottery. But because I can’t let the dream die without a fight, if she doesn’t get the sink fixed I get an engine hoist. This is incentive to actually get the sink fixed and not just flounder around not getting anything done.

Then we wandered around the Half Price Books store across the parking lot from the tax place, but neither of us found anything to tickle our highly-refined fancies so we left without spending anything. By that time it was verging on 1600 and we still hadn’t had lunch, and we were thinking about doing dinner after shopping. So instead of wasting time at the nearby mall we decided to combine lunch and dinner in what cold be best described as “too much food, the sequel”. The place we went had ½pound cheeseburgers, so more than Mrs. the Poet could eat without discomfort in a single meal. I had the house specialty burger, and Mrs. the Poet had a mushroom swiss burger from the build your own menu. We split a salad that was basically an eighth of a head of iceberg lettuce drowned in bleu cheese dressing, fried onions, and bacon bits, as an appetizer. There were also several refills on the fries and drinks (Diet Coke for me and unsweetened iced tea for Mrs. the Poet), and we followed that up with what they called a Mountain Mud Pie for dessert, which was your garden variety Mud Pie under about 6″ of chocolate ice cream, drenched in chocolate and caramel sauces and whipped cream. We split this as per the menu suggestion. The only problem was the ice cream was frozen so hard that we crushed the pie trying to scoop it off to eat. But it was all good and if you live near a Red Robin I strongly suggest going on a fast for a day or two before going to eat there.

On the date comic strip me is on, we are still on coffee and introductions in Rayne’s kitchen , so I think the arc will extend well beyond this week. And her name is Olivia.

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Not done yet

I was reading on twitter that having a goal, even an unrealistic unobtainable goal, that gives you reason to get out of bed in the morning can save your life. So, I’m doing more research on the Sprint-T and the Pentastar engine and all the transmissions that can bolt to it. Right now it looks like my best option is the 845re 8 speed automatic, not because it has 8 gears with 2 overdriven, but because it’s 20-50 pounds lighter than the other two autoboxes that bolt up. The transmission used at introduction was the same 5 speed slushbox as Chrysler bolted to the Hemi for the same year.

Because new people read my blog every day a review. The Pentastar V6 is a very lightweight engine that matches the baseline hotrod engine (Small Block Chevrolet or sbc) for horsepower on 87 octane while getting much better fuel consumption figures (bsfc for you technical folk out there) and weighing more than 200 pounds less. The sbc weighs 545 pounds fully dressed while the Pentastar scales 330 pounds (326 for 2016 and later engines) with all the junk bolted on. The 845re transmission comes in at 198 pounds less fluids plus converter, meaning a stripped-down Pentastar weighs about the same with transmission and fluids as the sbc without. I’m pretty sure a car with no roof or windows can do without the AC compressor, so that’s another few pounds off compared to the sbc.

Getting back to those power figures the version of the sbc that has the highest HP on regular gas is only rated at 308HP, compared to the versions rated over 400 on premium fuel and others rated over 600 on race gas. There are 2 versions of the Pentastar rated at 305 HP, but substantially lower torque at much higher RPM than the 347 lb-ft at 3900 RPM of the 5.7 liter sbc. But with the transmission and the higher RPM it allows combined with the weight savings over the sbc I’m looking at a higher power to weight ratio on regular gas, to go with much lower fuel consumption with the 4 valve DOHC combustion chamber at 10.2:1 compression compared to the 2 valve pushrod bathtub combustion chamber at 8.0:1 on the sbc for regular gas. Now the other drawback of the Pentastar is I can only buy used engines, Chrysler doesn’t sell a crate engine Pentastar. Yet. And a shoutout to any FCA marketing types out there, a Pentastar mixing it up toe-to-toe with more traditional hotrod engines at Goodguys would be quite a marketing coup for selling base-engine Ram 1500s if y’all would like to drop a unit out of your emissions testing program on me. I promise not to sell it for street use. In fact I’ll probably get buried with it.

And over on the comic strip I have met my date out of makeup and in street clothes and nobody in the cast knows who she is. Literally they don’t recognize her without her “costume”. And I think I found my avatar for my Twitter profile in the first panel of today’s strip .