I had another dentist visit

I went to the dentist again for an adjustment, but my lower still hurts my mouth. On the plus side, all the meditation I’m doing to block the pain is having a major effect on my blood pressure, my diastolic is in the 70s and my systolic bounces between the low 100s to above 130 when I get a pain spike. Like I said, pain spikes are daily, but Ibuprofen and meditation lets me deal with it.

Current writing jam and meditation jam is Occam’s Laser – The Divine Trilogy. It’s about 2 hours long, so I don’t get any jarring changes to take me out of my trance.

My other difficulty is getting enough calories in a form I can get through my mouth since I can’t actually chew. I have been eating a lot of oatmeal, ramen, and applesauce and drinking protein shakes. I originally bought the shakes to help Mrs. the Poet get some stuff to heal her skin grafts and maybe put some weight back on, but she can’t handle the soy in them and also the taste turns her off, but I love them. And they help keep my weight from dropping too much as I can’t actually eat until my mouth heals up some more. The biggest problem I’m having besides the lower plate jabbing the inside of my mouth is I’m having a hard time keeping my lips closed as I eat and also using my lips to take the food off my spoon since I can’t use my teeth to do that at the moment.

My dilemma with the lower plate is I need to have it in so my gums are protected from food but I need protection from my denture. It it a conundrum.

And that pretty much covers everything I had to bitch about today.

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I don’t feel good

Woke up this morning with the lawn guys mowing and blowing and generally making a racket, fed Mrs. the Poet and got her some juice and managed to make a pot of tea and drink some. I wasn’t able to get my teeth in because of swollen gums and putting in the lowers hurt again. My BP was 114 over 69, so I only took the pills for my blood sugar and the antibiotic to prevent infection of the extractions. My eyes hurt again for some reason. I’m just hating life today and didn’t even want to get on my phone or computer. I barely had the spoons to get dressed this morning. I don’t know what the problem is, but I want it to go away, soon.

I has new teeth

Just got back from the dentist and getting dentures. I have to wear them overnight to control the swelling from having my last 12 teeth pulled, then I can pull them out to clean and soak overnight. It was an ordeal, but I have dentures!

I have to leave them in overnight to control the swelling, but I can take them out for cleaning tomorrow night. I’m still bleeding slightly, and I hurt some, and I’m drooling a bit because I still can’t work my lips right, but by this time tomorrow I will be able to bite and chew again.

Now if you’ll excuse me my eyes are leaking.

It didn’t work

My trip to the massage place failed to get my neck massaged. That’s because in spite of what Google and their web site said, they were not open for business. There are (were?) three massage places in close proximity including the one I normally go to and in spite of what their web sites said none of them were open for business.

So I still have a neck that locks up at random and hurts pretty much constantly, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.

In an attempt to distract myself from the pain I was still thinking about the steering and radiator mount for the Sprint-T. And yes because of proximity they will be a single thing for the frame the mount for the steering box will be welded to the lower mount for the radiator and also to the front bulkhead and the rest of the frame so it won’t move when the steering moves. There will be a bunch of light tubes running from the mount to the frame to triangulate everything. The frame is very narrow at the point where the radiator crosses it, but the front bulkhead provides lots of places for triangulation. One of the definite things I’m doing is tying the steering mount into the panhard bar mount to keep everything in sync and keep the tires pointed in the right direction.

And I apologize for the lack of coherence in those earlier paragraphs but I’m starting to lose it because of the pain from the neck spasms. Seriously, I can barely think straight from the pain, much less type coherent words. I really need to get that massage. As in really, really need. Not quite foaming at the mouth “in pain” like the old Mad Magazine Anacin parody ad, but in enough pain to get really short-tempered even for people who haven’t earned it.

I can’t wait any longer

As much as I do not want to expose my massage tech to infection, I’m to the point that if I don’t get a massage very soon I won’t be able to function. I had to take a break from dinner tonight because I was having problems getting food into my mouth, which is a sure sign I have something wrong with me. The neck problem is making it hard to use my phone, my laptop, watch TV, fool around with my wife. Basically everything but use the toilet, so far. I don’t want to jinx it because I know I’m going to have problems using the toilet at some point because of this neck problem, I just don’t know how at the moment. And right now it HURTS all the time.

No kidding, every once in a while I move my head just the wrong way and I get tears running down my face. It’s really sudden, I’m just tootling along minding my own business and WHAM! it feels like I just took a 2 by 4 across the back of my neck and everything locks up for a second and tears are running down my face. While the pain is going it’s like I can’t move because it might make things worse or something, like my fight, flight, or freeze kicks in and sets everything to freeze.

On more pleasant fronts, I got another package from Speedway Motors containing the seat mount I have been waiting on. Now I have something to bolt the seat to and mount to the inside of the car. And I will have a way for other skinny-assed people like me to sit in the car and it won’t matter if they have long or short legs because the seat can move forward or back so they can reach the pedals. The package also had the gas pedal, taillights, mounting pads for same, and some stickers and a Street Rod parts catalog. The gas pedal is really neat with a clockable arm to connect to the throttle cable and everything works smooth as butter and the whole thing costs less than the local cost of buying the raw stock locally and that doesn’t even count the bushings. Now if you’re wondering how they can do this, a big part of it is they buy raw stock in ton lots, while I have to pay retail prices for a few pounds of stock at a time and because of minimum purchases I wind up with a lot of scrap left over that may or may not be usable in another project down the road. Anyway for the Sprint-T the arm has to be on the right and the pedal on the left of the bracket to keep the pedal from hitting the transmission tunnel and also leave room for the throttle arm to not hit the steering column or the brake pedal bracket because there is just that little room between the transmission tunnel and the inside of the driver’s side of the body, even with the engine moved to the right for balance.

The taillights I’ve linked in the past, but basically they’re round and red with chrome bezels and a black mounting gasket and enough bulge to have some function as sidemarker lights. Obviously I need to install a red marker on the rear fenders and an amber marker in the fronts, but these have a little more for a little extra margin of visibility.

I’m still thinking about DRL and fog lights (which are allowed to be the same thing under the regs) but my Scrooge Genes kick in every time I look ones up that meet the regs for dual use. Seriously they’re like $60 a pair, which is more than I spent on all 4 headlights, which can also be used as DRL on the high beam circuit. So that one is still up in the air. I can buy a headlight controller that only lights the high beam part of the headlight while still leaving the rest of the headlight off, but the thing is I don’t know if the headlights I bought have that ability until I can get a 12V power supply/battery charger to test them. The web page didn’t make that explicit when I bought them, just that all 4 lights were high-low beam.

Something else I’m thinking about is getting the steering around the radiator and getting the radiator cap under the bulge in the nose so it can be filled without removing the nose by opening a flap in that bulge, and putting a funnel into the radiator neck… Woo. (Tom Slick unenthused crowd noise) If I have the numbers right I can sneak the pittman arm out in front of the radiator from the side without having to do anything that interferes with either cooling or steering, by putting the steering box right beside the radiator so the steering column is clear. Still thinking, still planning, still working…

Just a short health report

I took the bus to the lottery ticket store for about 0.8 miles (1.3 km) of walking with my broken toe. There was some pain even for me but nothing I couldn’t deal with even with that much walking. I probably didn’t need it but I took an ibuprofen before I left. There are two points of discomfort on the affected toe, one on each side of the knuckle, and bruising reflecting where the pain is along the length of the toe. I find this interesting, because I see myself as an experiment in progress and everything is data.

What makes the pain and bruising interesting is how I got injured in the first place. I was walking down the hall in the dark and the cats had put a big wrinkle in the rug, that I couldn’t see and caught my toe in the rug. Now if I didn’t know what a broken bone feels like my first guess would have been that I did something to the knuckle since I didn’t make contact with anything solid. But the knuckle doesn’t seem to be injured, while there is injury on either side of the knuckle that feels like a break. Now how I managed to do this I have no clue, but I did it. I’m not proud of it, but I do accept responsibility for it. Tl;dr I broke my toe in two places and I don’t know how.

Well the pain kept disturbing my sleep last night, so I’m going to hit the sheets now.

Sitting here sweating

Our last window unit seems to be dying and not cooling and I’m suffering in an 86°F(30°C) office. I’m pretty much covered in sweat and somewhat smelly or maybe more than just somewhat smelly. I am seriously lacking energy from all the heat, but there is an up side to this: my back is not hurting much while the muscle is nice and warm. I was able to get to sleep without using pain relievers last night. I made the mistake of also not taking the diphenhydramine I use to shut the brain down so I can sleep, so I basically didn’t get to sleep for anything more than a catnap and woke up again around noon. I’m bobbing and weaving in my chair so I think I will be able to get to sleep early.

And I think I will take that trip to bed shortly.

There are no words

There are no words to describe how bad I feel right now. First of all I spent about 2.5 miles on my feet today running around and generally getting nothing done. I was supposed to get my kidneys imaged for the surgery next week, but when I got there none of the paperwork had been sent. I found out that over the weekend the study had been defunded, and I would have to go back on daily meds to control my hypertension. The few people who got their operations done are doing great with normal blood pressure.

All that running around has given me a headache and also aggravated my back. I’m thinking the headache is from the problems with the study, my cell getting shut off because I didn’t pay the bill on time, and Mrs the Poet injuring her face and knee tripping over stuff in the dark after deciding to not come to bed when I told her I was turning off the lights and she would probably be more comfortable in bed than on the couch. She took a big hit to the knee in the fall but her face looks worse than her knee. She says the looks are deceiving, her knee is the worse hit. Anyway, we are both in some degree of pain tonight.

I have to go get my new anti-depressants tomorrow. The big problem was finding one that had a low incidence of sexual side effects but was available as a discounted generic and wasn’t too similar to the one that had just quit working on my depression. I don’t know what I’m getting yet, but I was asked about how that Zoloft trial went several years back when they were looking for interactions between anti-depressants and a certain BP med.

I have been checking and my 3.8l engine was one that had a 10 cc dish in the piston and roughly a 9.8:1 compression ratio. That means I have a stock combustion chamber of roughly 55 ccs and don’t need to take too much off the heads to get the ~45 cc combustion chamber I need for the 14:1 ratio for running E85 at best efficiency. I have been repeating the mantra for getting best efficiency out of E85: high compression but remove all possible sources of preignition by removing sharp edges and polishing the combustion chamber.

And I feel like cold excrement (fancy words to slip by censors) so I’m taking more pain pills and going to bed now.

No post tomorrow, guess why?

Something happened 16 years ago at 0119 so I’m not doing a post tomorrow. Yep tomorrow is my Death Day. I’m celebrating all day long, not because I died, but because I’m too stubborn to stay dead. I have a flipping frequent customer card for the ferry to Hades with 3 check marks on it already. It makes me wonder if other people have cards like that and can we see each other’s cards? Anywho, it’s going to be as much of a party as I can stand at Casa de El Poeta tomorrow. I’m out of anti-depressants so I can drink as much as I want (not that I’m a big drinker). Probably no more than 2 beers tops.

I’m not going to kid you that the last 16 years were a walk in the park. Between the loss of income and the ongoing medical costs it has been a struggle even with the lab rat gig. And when Mrs. the Poet retired it got even worse, because she kicked out all the people renting rooms so we lost about $400 a month from the rental and another $300 from going from her paycheck to her pension. That was a serious financial hit. And besides the poverty there were also medical issues not covered by the lab rat gig. Like the fact that the injured leg is shorter than the other leg, like the brain damage, like the depression, like the back pain from the short leg, like… The list is endless but the brain damage keeps me from being able to remember everything at the moment.

So after beating the odds big time I’m taking the day off to do something not related to bicycle safety or anything else related to what put me in this situation. Maybe I’m going to work on the front axle of the TGS2, maybe I’m going to make a pie. I don’t know yet. I’m going to read web comics first, maybe pop a beer.

See y’all in two days.

Lots of road course racing this weekend

There are two road courses today on the tube and one yesterday. And there was an Indycar race from a short (by Indycar standards) oval. And for those wondering we are way north (about 250 miles) of the hurricane down on the coast so all we have gotten was a few showers and some slightly damp kitties. I’m worried about my Houston friends as H is getting drowned with feet (not inches) of rain. Last report they are expecting 5 feet of rain total. I have some friends living less than ¼ mile from the Brazos river which is way out of its banks last report. I’m especially worried for them and their dogs.

I have been thinking about the Mini Sprint-T and the scale mockup for the TGS2 as they both need a body. What I have been thinking about is making a mold off of the AMT kit body then casting a plug from Bondo to use making a vacuformed body after making the desired body modifications to the plug. The plug would then be split in half to draw the body material over to a form with no undercuts so the body can be removed easily from the mold. The TGS2 mold would have the rear hatch molded separately so it can be hinged to work on the engine and I can test side versus top hinges for access to the rear suspension and engine.

Still thinking about making the little V6 run on E85 only. There is a hypereutectic piston I can use that is flat topped and can be zero-decked for the minimum clearance between the head and the piston, and then the heads will have to be angle-milled to shrink the combustion chamber in the head without taking too much material off the bottom of the head. And I realize that the preceding sentence read like technobabble to about 90% of my readers who were not brought up hard-core gearheads, but every word was a valid technical term or connecting word between. IOW it was all English, just not a common dialect of English. Translation: There is a cast piston made with a low expansion rate high-strength aluminum alloy that is flat across the top and can be fitted flush with the top of the cylinder. Then the heads will have to be milled on an angle with more taken off on the big side of the combustion chamber to get the chamber as small as required with the least amount of material removed. Hypereutectic pistons can support about 375 HP on gas for this engine, and I’m only hunting 225 to 250 HP with cooler-burning E85 so well within estimated stress limits, plus they are inexpensive especially compared to forged pistons. In this case that is especially true because forged pistons would have to be custom made, they aren’t available as regular production items.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph pretty much sums up my biggest frustration with this build, almost everything is $pecial order or cu$tom made, especially in the engine. Some of that is because there were no performance applications for this engine aside from the 1991 Shelby Can Am series which only made 150 engines putting out about 225 HP. The other reason is the last one left the production line in 2011, 6 years ago. Compare this to the ubiquitous SBC that was in production as a factory-installed engine from 1955-2001 and is still in production as a replacement engine for emission controlled vehicles of that era, and as a crate engine for new cars that are not required to meet emissions controls like the Sprint-T. There were literally tens of millions of SBC made in dozens of different sizes from 265 to 455 cubic inches when you include the hybrids made from mixing different blocks and cranks. One of those hybrids actually made production status as the Z28 302 in³, which was a hybrid of the 283 crank in a 327/350 block. One of the most popular hybrids is the 400 crank in a 350 block bored 4.030″ to produce 383 in³. How popular is it? There are now twice as many 400 cranks as there were 400 SBC engines made, the aftermarket is producing brand new cranks with the 3.750″ stroke of the 400 crank with the smaller main journals of the 350 block. It’s even easier to get parts for the LS/LT engine families than it is the 3.3/3.8l Mopar V6.

And that’s enough kvetching about the free engine I was given, at least stock replacement parts are cheap and easy to find because of the millions of them on the road. And some of those factory parts are suitable for use in a high-performance engine with a little preparation, like balancing or grinding off flash and light polishing to remove stress risers.

And I have to go now because my friends on the Gulf are finally starting to check in and I don’t want to miss any. Also my back is starting to hurt again. I did pretty well for several hours today but the pains are back.