Swimming as hard as I can but not getting anywhere

One of the things I do is compare and contrast, it’s how I got my stage name when I was a spoken word poet, which became my pen name when I was first starting out as a blogger, and now is just my name. Well now I’m feeling like that place in Wonderland where as the Red Queen put it “You have to run as fast as you can just to stay put.” Or I’m in an infinity pool set on high and it won’t adjust to my speed.

And I have this tremendous urge to write, but nothing to write about except this complaint about wanting/needing to write and no topics present themselves for me to expound upon. I have been looking for things on the internets to write about and coming up empty, except for politics, which I don’t want to write about here for obvious reasons. I mean I have had personal experience with bad police work, but my complaining here about a grievance that is nearly twenty years old or even the most recent is more than 5 years old.

Actually that is a good stepping off point for this rant, stolen bicycles and their non-reaction from the police. I have had 3 bicycles stolen from me and had slight response (they tried to give me someone else’s stolen bike they recovered) to zero response (refused to take a report) to negative response when I attempted to recover my bike from the pawnshop it was fenced to. It took months after people in my bike club saw my bike in a pawn shop before I could take possession of the remains that were damaged even further by the cop trying to stuff the bike into the trunk of the cruiser.

And even more annoying was the “detective” who tried to tell me they didn’t look for the truck that hit me doing about 60 MPH (100 km/hr) because there was no proof it was damaged in the impact with my body that threw me over 100 feet (30 m). Now everybody knows hitting anything weighing as much as I did at the time of the wreck (about 225 pounds (100kg)) at that speed is going to crumple sheetmetal beyond simple repairs (no, that won’t “buff out”), but there was no attempt to find the weapon vehicle at local bodyshops.

So, yeah, I’m on the “defund the Police!” side of the debate. My experience was when I was a victim they did almost nothing to either catch the perp or recover my property, and when I found my stolen property on my own I had to wait months to get it back because someone else might have a valid claim to it (?!).

And I’m stymied on working on the steering arm because my tools won’t work with the stock I have. I need to get bigger drills to handle the drill bits I need to use to make the threaded holes I need to make the part, and I need something like the drill press, but hand-turned, to make the threads straight so the bolt doesn’t get bound up in boogered threads.

Oh yeah, while looking for topics I found this article on German beer types. A Beginner’s Guide to German Beer Styles 

 

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Doing more thinking

Still thinking about the LS powered A/Mod car, so you can get back out from under whatever it was you got under when you read I was thinking again. I was also thinking about making the Sprint-T less expensive by retaining the stock water pump while just using an alternator, instead of installing an electric water pump and just sticking the alternator on the right side of the engine.

The difficulty lies in that the stock water pump is designed to be driven opposite engine rotation with the back side of the serpentine belt. Now for the Sprint-T the problem is that puts the alternator to the left side of the engine where other things want to be. For the A/Mod car this puts the alternator where the driver’s legs want to be. For the Sprint-T this can be overcome by not putting the stuff where the alternator needs to go to drive the waterpump in the correct direction. I’m not sure how to fix the problem for the A/Mod car because the interfering components can’t be relocated away from each other, there are limited options for the alternator and for the driver’s legs. The front of the engine will be about just below the knee which if this engine didn’t have the exhaust going over the driver’s legs the solution would be to have the driver in a knees up position. That puts the driver’s knees in the middle of the exhaust header, which is another unworkable design. Moving the engine forward or the driver back have other problems, like bad balance if the engine is moved forward and hitting the rear axle for moving the driver back.

OK I just got finished watching the NASCAR Gander Truck series and the Indycar series from Gateway, and while I was watching the Indycar race the solution to the alternator problem on the A/Mod car just jumped out at me: if the driver is obstructed on the left side of the engine swap the driver and engine sides and put the driver to the right. It’s so simple, which was probably why I didn’t see it at first. There are no rules about driver position left to right, just that the driver’s feet have to be behind the centerline of the front axle and ahead of the centerline of the rear axle. I can hang the driver outside the wheels in an armored pod like on a Indycar design by Smokey Yunick if I can get it to balance. But this time all I need is to put the driver on the right like I was making a UK road car. The driver’s feet can be in front of the engine without having any issues with the alternator. Now if I had an unlimited budget I would put the electric water pump on it and stick the alternator on the right and the driver on the left like my original vision for the car, but driver right and saving $$ will work, too. I also took some measurements and the left side alternator will clear all the parts I was concerned about clearing for the Sprint-T.

Another thing: at 0119 Monday (tomorrow as I compose this) it will be exactly 19 years since Some Asshole driving a pickup truck tried to kill me for the “crime” of riding my bike on the same street he was driving on in the opposite direction I was riding. He had to drive down to someplace he could cross the median separating the two directions of travel so he could be on the same side of the street and hit me from behind, or he could have just ignored me like I ignored his outburst to “Get off the F***ing road!” and lived whatever kind of life he would have lived. Instead he hit me and then less than 2 years later he died in a single vehicle DUI wreck with either a tree or a telephone pole depending on who’s story you want to believe. I want to believe in Dharma (which is kinda like Karma, but it bites your ass in this life instead of the next), but I also want to believe in a criminal justice system that puts people like that in prison, but they probably were never even looking for him. His dying from a DUI is probably the most “justice” I could expect to get. So anywho, to celebrate the fact that I survived someone trying to kill me, tomorrow we are having brownies and ice cream, and next year to celebrate 20 years [Monty Python]”I’m not dead yet!”[/Monty Python] Mrs. the Poet wants to throw a proper party that we couldn’t this year because COVID and because next year will be two decades, a full 20 years “not dead”. As I explained to Mrs. the Poet, the celebration is not because I died, it’s because I didn’t stay dead. Here’s to another 20 years of “not dead”.