More stuff arrived, part MMXXIX

Well, something for the 1:1 scale Sprint-T arrived, inspired by free shipping and Mrs. the Poet giving me the engine hoist for Christmas, and it’s something essential for driving the car second only to the steering wheel. Let me show you what it is.

As you can see, without the mounting bracket it doesn’t set straight inside the body. The black stripe is where my personal centerline is supposed to be inside the car, and the seat is a bit off to the side and a few degrees off plumb. Also I was in a hurry to check the fit both inside the car and on my backside, so I didn’t take the seatcover out of the separate box inside the delivery box. That delivery box was almost as big as I am. This was also before I tweaked the rib supports to not bite me in the latissimus dorsi quite so much. The seat was actually a bit wide through the butt, but painfully tight in the chest area the first time I tried to sit in it even without the cover. The only way I could breathe was to keep my arms up and my lats stretched out. Getting back out to adjust the rib supports was really tricky and brought much amusement for Mrs. the Poet.

These pictures were taken prior to “adjusting” the left side rib support which you can see in the top picture is a bit closer than the right. I might need to “adjust” both sides a bit more before I start building the seat mount, because I literally can’t put my arms down from the “9 and 3 o’clock on the steering wheel” pose even without the cover. By using my body weight and holding the seat down with one foot I was able to use the other to move the left side rib support out until it was even left to right with the right side. Now I need to figure out how to move them both out by about an inch so I can sit in the car without holding on to the steering wheel, which comes out by the way. If Mrs. the Poet didn’t recycle the old phone books I think I might be able to do it without scratching the shiny aluminum seat.

And it’s kinda late at night/early in the morning (0500) so this seems like a good spot to wrap this up and go to bed.

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I am disapoint

My book finally got here yesterday. Hundreds of pages about fuel injection… for other kinds of car than the donor vehicle for the Thunderbolt Grease Slapper 2. For the make of the donor vehicle it had 3 pages, none of which applied to the year my car was made. So basically I spent $9 and a week of waiting for some interesting light reading and a bunch of stuff I already had elsewhere (on my computer).

I think the local library will be getting a donation.

Something I have been looking at very hard lately is the Holley HydraMat fuel pickup and pre-filter for fuel injection systems. What it amounts to is my car will never run out of gas as long as there is gas still in the tank. Also the pre-filter on the donor vehicle is basically a screen to keep large debris out of the pump, while the latest permutation of the HydraMat is a 30 micron filter that is way better than the 100 micron post-filter on the donor vehicle. So in theory I could install a HydraMat and just plumb from the pump directly to the injectors without additional filtration. I won’t of course, because the pump could break down sending junk down the line to the injectors, but I could if all I was concerned about was the gas in the tank. Now there is the competing parameters of maximum size to allow minimum fuel for racing and minimum cost. The cheapest one is the 8″ X 3″ that for this application would mean I could get maximum fuel endurance on the highway between fill ups. If I was running a tiny tank like a 3 gallon this would make sense. Even the 10 gallon tank could use this, but for anything larger than that it doesn’t make sense. For the larger tanks the mat acts as an extended pickup to allow racing with just enough gas for the course, so it has to be large enough to catch most of the fuel slosh. The largest mat that fits the tank I have selected is the 24″ X 15″, and the cheapest that will work is the 15″ cross. How this is good is I can use a large gas tank/fuel cell for getting there, offload almost all the gas to another container when I get to the race and only have enough gas to complete the run in the car while I race, further reducing the racing weight of the car without the bother and expense of multiple tanks/cells and support systems, or finding a place to put them.

On other parts I just found out the smallest adult-length seat I can buy is gonna be too big for my backside. I think I mentioned a long time ago I did some width measurements to see about buying a streamlined shell for the Stratus and basically the only way I would fit would be removing an arm or two to make my shoulders narrower. Well I also measured my butt width, and to fit the 14.5″ wide seat on my build list I’m going to have to fill ³/₄” on either side of my butt with firm foam of some kind. I think maybe the seat insert kit will fill the gap? It may have to because smaller seats are pricy and will still need the insert kit for things like back support. Although it would be nice to not have to buy the insert kit, the fact that selling the car will become necessary at some time means a removable insert to fit me can be removed for a prospective buyer to see if he or she fits. Otherwise a new seat at $300-500 for a home-built car could be a deal-breaker. I know the seat I had in my last car was too tight for most people but gave me a lot of wiggle room on long trips.

And it’s getting late and I still need to take my walk so I’ll see you later dudes.

Good news, bad news and an end of an era, on Wreck-Free Sunday

First the good news, Blue is back and seems to be a repairable wreck. The big problem is getting the right seat cover to replace the now-white formerly-black one that came on the bike. The ones at RANS bike store look like they were made for the later model crank-forward bikes, which means replacing the whole seat just to get one with a usable seat cover.

The Full List, so far:

Seat cover/new seat
Rear derailler
New tire tubes
New shifters
New Chain
New rear cluster
Computer battery
Brake pads
Taillight (requires fabricating another bracket to install)

Rough estimate on costs for repairs is $300 doing it cheap, and $600 doing it the way Blue deserves to have it done. Yeah, I think I found a new candidate for the steel-toed boots and shin guards, bike thief…

Now about that “end of an era” in the headline. Yesterday was the last game for the RPG group as we lost both of our GMs. One will be leaving Texas tomorrow for OH, and the other will be leaving for OK sometime in the next two weeks. This is the same group I have been playing with since 01/2011 and I still have my original character from that first game, a D&D3.5 Warlock that is now 9th level after surviving several low XP adventures. My Eldritch Blast is raised to 7d6 after finding a Chaucible of Eldritch Power on a dungeon crawl (some critter was using it to keep warm in the dungeon). My second 3.5 Warlock was up to 7th level after many target-rich adventures in a short span, and buying another Chaucible in an actual magick shoppe at 6th level has a 5d6 damage Eldritch Blast. I created several other characters for other game systems along the way, but Sparrow and his son Sparrow Jr. were my first two since I started playing again for the first time in about 25 years. So, I have a little sorrow about no longer playing those characters.

And I think this has been an emotional enough trip through the weekend, so I’m stopping it here.

PSA, Opus the (unkillable badass) Poet