Happy Samhain!

This is going to be a busy night, so I’m going to wish everyone a pleasant commune with your departed loved ones and relatives.

Quick note before I go work on the car in the living room

And yes there is a car in the living room but that’s not what I’m going to work on. I’m going to install the bushings in the spindles and hone them to fit the kingpins. But first I have a needy cat on my lap who wants belly rubs so brief break.

OK belly rub needs satisfied, back to the blog post.

The concept is simple, the kit ships with bronze bushings that press into the spindles and have to be fitted to the kingpins, similar to how the axle bosses had to be fitted so the kingpins would go in and out of the axle. The difference here is the kingpins are locked into the axle with the grub screw while the bushings have to be honed for working clearance, the size difference is only a few thousandths of an inch (0.03-0.06 mm). There just needs to be enough room for a layer of heavy grease in the bushings where the axle bosses didn’t need any room at all.

Enough words time for work.

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Sunday’s early post was an extreme example

Of what happens when I can’t work on my designs. They get changed, “improved”, made different just to fool myself into the illusion that I’m actually doing something to make progress. If the hands can’t work on it I either drop it completely or completely change it. In this case I think the combined floor/splitter is such an improvement over the previous kluges that I will keep that part. But the rest I will keep in a brain folder marked “do not open until stinking rich”. Seriously 9 plies of Kevlar are both much lighter and more resistant to penetration than the 0.25″ steel plate I had been considering, so that’s an actual improvement.

On other fronts, my feet still hurt, but not as bad as before. I think I might be getting better. I still don’t want to go for my walk tonight, but I might be up to it by the end of the week. The axle is getting closer to being done and the spindles are up next. I want to go work on honing the boss to size but my feet are screaming “NOOOOO!!!!!” at just the thought of standing on concrete again.

And since I have to go run errands in Carrollton tomorrow, I’m having another lie down to give my feet more time to recover before spending the day on the bus.

Why I need to run cartoon tire sizes

I found the perfect video to explain why there needs to be such a large difference in tire width.

Tire Load Sensitivity – Why Wide Tires Add Grip

Most mid-engine cars don’t have the extreme rear weight bias the TGS2 is saddled with and they still run the very different tire sizes. Heck, the Corvette is almost 50/50 and still has to run wider rears than fronts because of the added tire load caused by the high horsepower.

And that’s all I have to say because This Hit Me while I was in bed and I had to post it before I forgot it. My memory still hasn’t gotten any better. And my neck still hurts, but I had to do this.

What a day for a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well, this has been a busy day even by Sunday standards. As far as church doin’s are concerned we had morning and evening services as usual and then a Board Meeting. So about 4 hours of the day was church or church-related. Nothing much to report about that as today was Pledge Drive Sunday, the day when members are “encouraged” to meet the “doors open” part of the budget or more if they can spare it. That’s pretty standard and boring.

The interesting parts of the day were the time between the morning service and the board meeting while I watched the Mexican GP and the Sprint Cup race from Martinsville. There was a lot of drama in the F1 race even though I didn’t see much passing on the track not caused by a wreck or near-wreck of the car being passed. Most of the drama was caused by pit strategy, who was stopping for tires and when, and how long they took to change the tires when they did stop. Now that the F1 driver’s title has been decided for Louis Hamilton all he has to race for is the total wins record, and everyone else is racing for a job next season either with their current team or a new team that picks up the pieces when their current team possibly folds at the end of the season. F1 is the most expensive form of motorsport on the planet, and some teams lack the financial muscle to compete.

The Martinsville race was typical NASCAR short track beating and banging, with many cars finishing with less than the number of fenders they started with or missing other body parts. The incident between Joey Logano and Matt Kenseth looked a lot like “payback” for the Kansas incident where Joey took Kenseth out of the lead and ultimately out of the Chase. There were a lot of other incidents that looked like just trying too hard in too tight a situation, and that wreck that knocked Kurt Busch about 3 feet into the air was an extreme example of that. I don’t recall the other 3 drivers involved in the wreck, but Kurt’s car was the last in that chain to get hit as one car hit another, that hit a third, that was sent violently into Kurt’s car causing it to climb over the third car’s tire and continue to climb on a ballistic trajectory for about another tire diameter after that.

And after all the beating and banging was done Jeff Gordon won on his final start at the track and his first win there in a long time and first win all season. So Jeff is in the final round in Homestead and waiting for the next two races to tell him who else is racing for the championship.

And it’s time for me to wrap this one up because I have a lot to do tomorrow.

PSA, Opus

Mowed lawn today and other things I do when I’m not blogging about dead cyclists

Mowed the lawn this afternoon, as much as I could until my back started acting up, which was about ²/₃ of the lawn. If the gas holds out I should be done tomorrow. If the gas doesn’t hold out I will be done tomorrow anyway… 😉 I had to stop because my back was starting to spasm again. I’m thinking that the increase in back spasms is related to the decrease in bike riding caused by the bad bike fit and the thing growing on my neck. Or maybe just from the sebaceous cyst growing on my neck, that thing is huge now and it affects the way I carry my head.

Anyway, that’s what I did one day one of my “retirement” from bike safety blogging after reading e-mails and web comics and telling a few friends that I was changing the direction of the blog. Francis/es approves: “Huh, what? Yeah.” Longest conversation I have had out of it since I bought it. Still nothing about gender preference, I don’t think it knows what that is. Or cares about it if it does…

I have been contemplating why my back hurts so much lately, aside from the fact that I’m just old and abused (I totalled out 3 pickup trucks that hit me either walking or riding my bike and survived, if that doesn’t count as “abuse” I really don’t want to know what does). I’m thinking that the sebaceous cyst on the back of my neck has altered my posture and that might be a really big part of the problem. I mentioned that it affected my ability to ride, well it also makes me hold my head forward more than usual for me, and causes pains all up and down my back, not just the “usual suspects”. All the more reason to get that thing on my neck removed…

Well, I’m running out of things to say and I’m in pain, not a good combination for a guy that writes mostly stream-of-consciousness when he’s not doing news reporting. I’ll be back tomorrow night with more words hopefully of wisdom. If not then words of surrealism…

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

Finally have Internet access

I still haven’t been able to find wi-fi where I’m staying here in NY, but I managed to find a network cable and get wired access. I only had about 1K new emails waiting in various inboxes…

Can’t post more I still have about 500 unread e-mails left to go and I’ll have to let the owner back on the Internet again soon…

PSA, Opus