I really don’t have much to write about

I walked 2.29 miles (3.68 km) going to get my toes done, buy breakfast sausage for cheap$1.67/lb, drop by the ATM for Mrs. the Poet, and get a Whataburger and fries. Then I took a nap. Whoo! living the life.😑

Still thinking about the TGS2 because what else would I think about if I wanted to stay sane? Since the part I didn’t have totally nailed down before I was still thinking about getting that upper coilover mount figuratively nailed down in every plane and triangulated against flex. Basically the plan is to run tubes from the upper and lower frame rails to the upper mount from two verticals between the rails, one vertical right in front of the firewall, and one just in front of the axle. The bottom of the upper rail will be 1.5″ (3.81 cm) plus the thickness of the bump stop, that I haven’t sourced yet, above the tube of the axle. The bottom rail will be 7.5″ below the center of the axle at intended ride height, or 6″ (15.24 cm) measured to the top of the rail, with a bracket coming from the rail to support a droop stop 1.5″ from the bottom of the axle at normal ride height. Yep, that comes to 3″ (7.62 cm) axle travel at the frame, which is normal for a T-bucket front suspension. What’s not normal is to control the axle with both bump and droop stops, normal is to use the shock absorbers for this function. But it really tears up a shock to use it as a droop stop and even worse to use a shock as a bump stop without an external stop fitted over the shaft. Basically without an external stop the shock piston slams into the foot valve and after a couple to a few times of that happening you no longer have any dampening control over the axle travel. So belt and suspenders there will be a bump stop on the coilover, and another on the frame.

Now where the frame leaves the front of the body the top of the top tube is 17″ (43.2 cm) from the bottom of the bottom tube, leaving 7″ from the top of the axle to the bottom of the top tube, lots of space to mount a bracket and bump stop and still leave 1.5″ for travel up. In fact good design principles require less than 1.5″ clearance between the bottom of the bump stop and the top of the axle so that there is enough travel to cushion the axle before reaching the limit of the shock and slamming into that foot valve. It might touch the valve but if I do my job as an engineer there shouldn’t be enough force to damage anything.

Now one of the problems I’m having is getting springs light enough for the front end because there is so little weight on the front end with the mid-engine configuration, without installing ridiculously long shocks. The shortest shocks I can find that will hold the springs are nearly 20″ long extended and 13″ compressed. The issue is the free length of the springs, and there has to be enough extended length to get the spring in place without compressing it so the adjustable seat can be spun on by hand so it doesn’t get cross-threaded. The problem is the shock has to mount as close to the kingpin as possible to control the single-wheel motion, and I need to limit wheel travel to keep the TGS2 from turning into and off-road buggy and to control camber, body roll, and prevent the frame from crashing into the ground. And the weight situation is we are talking about a car with a race weight around 1300-1400 pounds with more than 60% of the weight on the back and about 240 pounds per wheel on the ground and less than 25 pounds on the spring. It doesn’t take much spring to control that little weight, but a lot of shock dampening to control the unsprung mass. The sprung/unsprung ratio is almost off the chart for this car. It’s not bad in back, but there is just too much previously bought parts weight up front that isn’t resting on the springs. And seriously, all that weight just in the front axle and suspension does a serious negative to polar moment.

Looking at the numbers makes me seriously question my tire choices for the street setup because each tire weighs 31 pounds, without the 24 pound wheel. Fifty-five pounds is a ridiculous amount of unsprung weight per corner for a 1300 pound car with more than 60% rear weight distribution. Seriously the wheels and tires together weigh more than the rest of the front end minus suspension.🤯 Also I need to move more stuff forward of the center of the wheelbase, to keep the weight more forward and also keep the polar moment low. Also, seriously, this will probably raise the car weight more than a little. The race tires are a little better at 23 pounds each and the aluminum wheels are about 20 pounds going by shipping weight. So that’s a huge chunk off the unsprung weight.

And I have been thinking about the TGS2 in street rod parameters rather than mid-engine sports car parameters because Goodguys is a street rod and muscle car sanctioning body. Thinking in the proper terms gets the tire weight down to 20 pounds and the wheels are a smidge lighter at about 18 pounds. Still more than the sprung weight for each corner… I seriously need to redo my weight estimate because of how heavy the front axle, brackets, and spindles are. I’ll ponder my calculator and weight charts more now that I have weighed the parts I have on hand and use known weights whenever possible and get back to you later.

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I’m suffering from water damage

I sustained water damage yesterday, but not from malicious actions. It was raining yesterday and I had to pay my mobile bill or my phone would be shut down, and there were ankle-deep streams over the sidewalks in places because drainage was directed that way, on purpose, because it was cheaper than installing a culvert to direct runoff under the sidewalk. This resulted in soaked shoes that are still drying out this afternoon. It was basically just drizzling so my hat was a little damper than desired and the rest of my clothes were only slightly damp. But my shoes are still wet, after I dumped the water out yesterday.

Because the Sprint-T design is almost frozen because of drivetrain choices and previous purchases, my mind wandered back to the TGS2 with a FWD drivetrain installed as a mid-engine, because I might get a free one. (Hey it still could happen). Basically I didn’t complete the front part of the frame for the center-seat design of the TGS2, and I didn’t like what I had very much in light of what I had for the Sprint-T. After considering pull rods and rocker arms I decided direct-acting coilovers mounted next to the kingpin would be lighter, and most importantly, less expensive. And I can make it more rigid that way than I can with pull rods and rocker arms, plus as the saying goes parts not on the car won’t break or leave you stranded. Or get out of adjustment and cause bad performance. So, no suspension rocker arms. The design for the TGS2 has the frame rails running through the top and bottom of the firewall area of the fiberglass body with the front axle 13″ in front of the firewall, which will look a little strange, especially with the frame members running from the top and bottom rails to the top spring mounts, but that is the closest it can get without hitting the body at full steering lock. Any further back will hit the original bucket and look really strange. I mean really, really strange, like cab-forward taken to the nth degree. Also the 13″ distance allows for placing the battery between the firewall and the front axle, next to the steering box. This helps the front-to-rear balance but is terrible for the polar moment. But the polar moment was pretty good (I don’t have the actual numbers because I don’t have a theoretical engine and transmission, but the minivan engine and transmission had pretty low numbers when I ran them back when I thought I was going to get them any day), so moving the battery from the top of the transmission to just behind the front axle doesn’t make that big a difference.

Another good thing about the TGS2 is automatic transmissions are easy to hook up as mid-engine installations. Just run a cable from whatever I use for a shifter and connect it to the shift arm on the transmission, routing to miss exhaust pipes and other obstructions. And by whatever I use for a shifter I mean I could literally use any lever I want to move the driver end of the cable as long as the housing is marked with the lever location for each gear and there is some kind of detent to keep it from moving out of gear if accidentally bumped. And the brake pedal assembly is much simpler than the clutch and brake pedal assembly. Steering is simpler because there is much less junk in front to route around. The main drawback is Goodguys might not let me compete and only do “demonstration” runs. 😦

We have such small dreams

Mrs. the Poet and I were discussing what it would feel like to be rich while talking about the take home from the Lotto Texas drawing tonight. And as we did it dawned on me just how small we dreamed. And how little it would take for us to feel “rich”.

The big thing we kept coming back to was inspired by end-of-the-month grocery shopping, and having to eliminate items from the cart as we got closer to the budget limit, exchanging branded items for store-brand items, and just not buying stuff we could survive without. And a big part of our definition for “rich” became “don’t have to take stuff out of the grocery cart because we can’t afford it”, and the corollary “buy what you really want”.

Later we expanded on that to “have all the bills paid at the end of the month and still have money left over” and “get everything fixed and not have anything in the house that wasn’t fully functional”. Basically get back to where we were when I was working 7 days a week at TI back in the 90s, bringing home 20 hours of extra pay a week. We made a total of $57K that year or $100K in today’s dollars. We had a nice townhouse, savings, and I was taking flying lessons once a week. I had a “hot hatch” for autocross, my 87 Hyundai, and was building a Pt. 103 legal ultralight, so I was living my dream life at the time. So that’s what we are looking for with the lottery, living like I was working 60 hours a week at a good paying job, minus the working 60 hours a week.

And since I can’t stop thinking about the Sprint-T after considering the dynamics of the right side torque arm 22″ off center I changed my mind again and moved the torque arm over to the center section of the rear axle. Seriously the right side torque arm has the potential to steer the car left under power. And turning the swing arm into a two-piece radius rod would bind the axle as the car rolled into and out of corners. Not severely, but a bind at any rate. So the swing arms are back to free movement on both sides, and a new low profile torque arm is added to the right side of the center section.

Also the frame design was changed to the side rails extended to the far end of the car and a X braced crossmember placed vertically across the end to support the gas tanks and battery and the tonneau cover for the pickup bed. The bed is going to be similar to the original bed in that it won’t be attached to the bucket, but much deeper than the original Model T pickup bed, with the tonneau more or less level with the back of the body and the floor at the same level as the bottom of the bucket more or less, and the vertical crossmember will be supported by two diagonals running down from the top of the rear roll hoop, one to the bottom and the other to the top. There will also be two bolt-in braces at the rear of the frame to allow mechanical access to bits in the back and also allow the body to be bolted to the frame after the frame is completed. One brace will triangulate the rear hoop to prevent deflections during a rollover wreck and also provide a place to mount the shoulder harnesses, the other will be a brace across the top pair of diagonals from the rear hoop to the rear crossmember to stiffen the frame in torsion.

And yes I’m obsessive about frame rigidity especially in torsion. Torsional rigidity is essential in tuning for handling balance with springs and anti-roll bars, with a frame that is not torsionally rigid the only way to tune front-to-rear balance is by adjusting the roll center heights. While this works for fine adjustments it takes way too much movement of the roll centers to have that as the only way to adjust balance. That’s why the design for the Sprint-T has an adjustable mount for the Watt’s link, so that the rear roll center can be precisely tuned to balance the handling front to rear. The TGS2 has adjustable anti-roll bars to the same end for quickly adjusting the balance of the car for street or autocross or Solo racing, street driving requires a touch of understeer, but not too much while autocross requires a fair amount of oversteer, with Solo in the middle but biased more to the oversteer side because it’s basically the same as autocross, but faster. Goodguys course rules require top speeds “around” 30 MPH, where Solo rules allow speeds up to about 70 MPH. The descriptive term is “highway speed” for Solo, which was 55 MPH when the rule was first written and now could mean as fast as 80 MPH. Either way, Solo racing can get much faster than a Goodguys’ autocross or it can be about the same, so requires more tuning flexibility. But toss street driving into the mix, and you really need a simple and quick way to adjust the balance of the car from front to rear and back again.

And I mention the TGS2 because I haven’t given up on the mid-engine bucket if someone gives me a FWD car to use as a donor vehicle for an engine and transmission. I’m open to free 😈 I mean seriously open to free, as long as it is done legally, like asking to haul off a car from your land, or something like that. And seriously if you have a vehicle you need hauled off leave a comment 🙂 I will find a way. And if it’s a FWD minivan with an automatic transmission, well I’ll just suffer the ignominy of driving a slush box. Seriously, as light as the TGS2 is going to be it won’t take much to make it a rocket for SCCA Solo, even if the mid-engine makes it ineligible for Goodguys. And there is a chance I could still run Goodguys with a minivan engine and transmission stuck in the back of the car.

Not watching State of the Uniom Tuesday

“State of the Uniom” was just too good to pass up. It just encapsulates the current administration perfectly. I mean it’s a simple typo, easy to make and easy to catch with spell-check. I mean I have that ugly red squiggle staring me in the face right now because I used the meme in the first line. Are the GOP so afraid of technology that they don’t have spell check turned on for their computers? Or did they somehow manage to get the tickets printed without using any computers?

I’m going to do my civic duty and pay my taxes in person tomorrow taking the bus downtown and then walking between the various offices because they are almost all on the same two streets. I’m going to make a detour to the phone store and pay my bill while I’m out, and maybe drop by the hardware/home store that’s on the gift card I got as pay on Monday and pick up some LED lights to replace the burned-out CFL lights in the kitchen, some of which are left over from Obama’s first term. We’re down to one working bulb in the kitchen over by the pantry, which makes cooking dinner a dark art, literally.

Still haven’t heard anything from any of the junkyards nearby about some kind of powertrain for either the Sprint-T or the TGS2. This is not unexpected as there have not been any winter storms that have created treacherous driving conditions yet. If we get an ice storm then totalled-out cars will be stacking up like cordwood, and I will have a choice of cheap to free engine/transmission combinations. Until then I have to wait. Impatiently, but I will wait.

Making room for a clutch pedal

Since I’m back to square one on the T bucket build, I’m contemplating how to make enough room in the footwell for 4 pedals including the dead pedal. Now installing a mid engine leaves tons of room for a clutch because everything is behind the body so all I need to worry about is linkages. But as low as the Sprint-T is the transmission and bellhousing will be fighting for room with the gas, brakes, and if I get a manual transmission the clutch pedal.

So one thing I was thinking about was my 210 or so pounds sitting halfway between the center and the outside of the body has a moment of 2362.5 inch pounds. I can off set the engine and transmission by an equal moment and get a perfectly balanced car for autocrossing, and that many inches will be available for pedals and feet to push the pedals. My worst-case is an all-steel SBC with a TH 350 transmission that weighs a total of 695 pounds that is 19″ wide at the crankshaft, and much wider at the heads. The tricky part is I only have the width of the front firewall to work with because of how the body pinches down to the firewall on a T-bucket. On the driver’s side I have 3½” of room without offsetting the engine to the right. Add in the offset and I’m looking at 6.9″ (175mm) of side-by-side foot room to fit feet that are 173mm wide the pair without shoes. My absolute worst case is the 4.6 Mod motor by Ford that weighs a ton and is like 22″ wide where the footbox goes, same size as the Coyote but 200 pounds heavier and half the power. The moment for that engine alone is almost the same as the SBC engine with the TH350 transmission. It’s a good thing that engine is so durable because otherwise it sucks as an engine.

Actually I don’t need to fit my feet in that space, just the master cylinder(s) and linkage. I have an entire 7½” to put my feet, side by side with the SBC engine mounted on centerline, or 11″ with the engine offset. Which leads me to ask how small were my parents’ generation’s feet, because I know there were Track Ts with the body mounted down low over the engine and the driver with his backside inches off the racing surface sitting beside the transmission, using a frame that had been heavily “Z’d” to get the engine and body down low.

I was also thinking about using the kit brake mount and a false floor over the master cylinder to move the pedals out of the way. I’m not sure how I would get that pedal hooked to a balance bar pushing two master cylinders to adjust the brake balance, but I can figure that one out after I get up in the morning.

Still no engine or transmission so now what? continues

I was hoping I would get the corpse of a RWD car or pickup to use as a donor vehicle for a Sprint-T, or maybe a dead minivan for a TGS2. But, alas, such was not to be. I still have no powertrain to use building a hot rod.

All I need to do to keep Mrs. the Poet happy is find a perfectly clean engine and transmission and not spend any family money buying it. Yeah, and to quote my elder daughter, “And maybe flying monkeys will fly outta my butt”. To say the least, keeping Mrs. the Poet happy will be a challenge.

So if anyone has an old car, pickup, or minivan that has a good engine and transmission and a wrecked or rusted-out body, I will give the engine and transmission a good home.

Sorry about that last post

OK so it was late and my meds had just started to kick in and that last paragraph got a little… confuzzled? rambley? around the bend? I don’t know the right word for it, but whatever that word is that was what happened. Basically the Front-engine Sprint-T got mixed up with the TGS2 design and I was trying to mash them together and came up with something that was both and neither and a major mess.

N E way, the TGS2 has been pretty much designed except for the parts I need to have hands-on the engine and transmission for. I didn’t calculate exactly how stiff the frame is, but it looks pretty stiff if a bit difficult to get in and out of. The driving position is slightly cocked to the right and pushed up against the left and back sides of the body because there was too much going on in the footbox of the frame even with the engine out back. The reason the footbox was busy was keeping the frame bits aft of the firewall and forward of the rear of the bucket inside the body so they wouldn’t hang out in the breeze too much. This caused the front hoop to run just behind the dash, and that meant the diagonal brace from the front spring mount had to run to the bottom of the hoop inside the body instead of in front of the firewall like on the Sprint-T. I mean the Sprint-T has its own reasons for not having any room in the footbox, but running multiple diagonals through the space is not on the list.

So, now what? I have done most of the design work on 2 versions for this car leaving only the detail work of brackets and stuff that requires actually having the objects that need the brackets to do the design from. So until I get a donor vehicle this project is going nowhere. Or a huge stack of parts from Speedway or Jeg’s or Summit or someplace like that. So if anyone reading this has a rusted out front-engine RWD car or truck with a decent V-8 or V-6 engine, transmission, and rear axle. or a minivan in a similar state less the rear axle of course, leave me a message and I’ll get back atcha on how to get it to me. Because at this point either build is pointless mental masturbation, thinking to keep my brain from atrophying from lack of use.

And it is late again and the cats are out in the cold and damp and won’t come back in. So either way, more electronic scribbles in this blog are useless, so this post has come to an end.

I need something that will let me turn my mind off

OK I had another situation where I saw something on the internet that caused my mind to run around saying “This is perfect! This will fix all my problems!” and happily run rampant as I try to sleep. What started this was Cleetus finding a Renli 4X4 with nothing except the front and rear diffs left of the drivetrain. A little research tells me those differentials have 1:1 gears and are purpose made to turn a transverse FWD engine and transmission mounted longitudinally into an all-wheel drive drivetrain. And guess what I have with the Town and Country donor vehicle?

I could regale you for pages upon pages of discarded concepts and wild-assed ideas that I came up with while trying to get to sleep last night, and I still haven’t decided yet what I want to do. If I go with the AWD that destroys the sunk costs of the parts I already bought and/or built for the RWD version I have been working to build all these years. Basically the only thing I could use would be the fiberglass body, the windshield posts, and the steering wheel. All the suspension parts would be essentially trash as they couldn’t be sold for as much as half what they cost, especially the custom front axle and the steering parts. That loss would come to about $500 plus my time and labor preparing those parts for installation. In the grand scheme of things that’s not a lot of money, but it represents a ton of hustling for a buck here and a buck there to accumulate that money, like the job that makes $6/month, times a lot of months and a ton of other hustles like it that made $1 and $2 there, scraped together and hoarded to get me as far as I got so far.

Conversely I solve a bunch of problems with weight distribution and tire sizes by getting the mass more forward and centrally located. The Plan is mount the engine and transmission in the passenger side of the body and squeeze me in as best I fit on the driver’s side and all the main masses are right there in the middle of the car, engine, transmission, and fat-assed driver all in one place. Toss all-wheel drive into that equation and I get a race car that works, pretty much in any weather conditions. As a street car I get twitchy but controllable and decent gas mileage because everything’s covered in bodywork or a bellypan out of the wind. There are still some major compromises to finagle, like getting squeezed to the left by the engine and transmission or widening the body by 10″ so I can sit on the left side of the body with nothing intruding from the drivetrain. I am really divided about this, because on the one side I get comfort and space to spread out, and on the other side I get better gas mileage from reduced aero drag and slightly better handling, and a cozy cockpit that keeps me in place because there’s no room for me to move around 🙂

OK just from a performance standard cramming that engine and transmission into the passenger side of the body and cramming me into whatever space is left over will get both the best handling and the best gas mileage and is a lot less work to produce, so I’ll be seeing if there is enough room left for me after the engine is installed in the unmodified body as soon as I finally get said engine and transmission pulled from the donor vehicle, so basically … never. Even if I get the engine into the body I’m going to have to do a lot of work on the body to be able to service the engine for things like oil changes and tune ups. Because of the computer control tune ups are going to be few and far between and consist of removing the injectors and getting them cleaned or replaced and replacing the spark plugs every 60K miles or so. The most frequent service I’ll be doing is changing the oil and filter every 12 months or 12K miles whichever comes first. But I’ll still need to be able to do it without removing the engine first, so either the body comes off or I have to cut holes in the body where I can get to the oil filter and spark plugs on what is now the front of the engine that will be the right side of the engine as it will be mounted in the car.

And just now on my YTM app it pulled up one of my favorite “go get ’em” pieces, the Emerson Lake and Palmer version of Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”. That bass line, man it just makes me want figuratively to kick butt and take names. If you haven’t heard it, recently or ever, give it a listen on YouTube. The complete string to enter is “fanfare for common man emerson lake and palmer” don’t even need to use caps or punctuation. This is Montage Music, when I do the video of building the TGS2, this is the music I’m going to play while the pictures flash by.

And it’s about time to put this to bed so I can go there too.

Things have been difficult adjusting to my meds

I accidentally took my meds twice night before last and spent more than 12 hours having really strange dreams.

Seriously, very strange dreams, but nothing resembling a nightmare, which is a minor blessing in and of itself. I haven’t had a nightmare since I started taking the new med, which is fantastic, since I have been dealing with nightmares almost every night for more than 3 decades to go along with my PTSD. Getting a change in my nightly mental programming from horror to farce takes some getting used to. The good part is the new med works at keeping me from being depressed, I’m almost completely non-depressed now.

But the bad thing is my sleep schedule has been majorly disrupted by being unconscious for 12-14 hours and waking up around 1700 yesterday. So I’m doing another all-nighter and staying up all day to get back on a normal schedule. Seriously, I’ll be clunking along semi-conscious all day today until my normal 0100 bed time Tuesday morning. And I’ll be using the down time to just kinda do a random write post overnight. I’m also watching YouTube videos of people building cars of various types, including a guy putting an OHV head on a vintage Briggs and Cleetus trying to put an engine into a side-by-side designed to use a FWD engine turned sideways so the wheel diffs are 1:1 and the reduction is in the gearbox of the donor engine.

On the TGS2 I’m still looking for street tires for getting to and from the track on wheels that don’t break the budget. Seriously the tires that would balance the car require wheels that run $250 and up each meaning we are looking at about a $3000 budget just to get wheels and tires for the street, with the race wheels costing maybe $500 for all 4 and another $1000 for tires. Whoever heard of a dual purpose car where the street budget had consumables more than 3 times as much as the race budget? That’s insane.

While I was prowling YouTube I was thinking about how badly I was hamstringing this build by using the T-bucket instead of making a decent body around the frame to streamline the car and generate downforce, especially since I’m building what’s called a monoposto or center seater. I could make the car a lot shorter without the Bucket body also, but I wouldn’t be able to run Goodguys like that. Goodguys doesn’t really want sports racers running their autocrosses, and there is a class the TGS2 fits as long as I use the bucket body and pickup box (Truck). I could make it street-legal without the bucket body, but all that would get me would be I wouldn’t have to trailer it to get to the next race. I would be faster in A-Mod but at the cost of not being legal for Goodguys.

Also I have still been thinking about sitting on the normal driver’s side even though the car would be a single seater, just to make it a bit more “normal” going down the road. The frame would be slightly more complicated, but mounting the top separately from the rest of the frame as a bolt-on takes most of that out of the situation. Making the rear hoop part of the bolt-on part of the frame makes putting the driver on the left less complicated than trying to wiggle the body around the full cage less the fore and aft braces when it has to be offset to protect the driver in a roll-over wreck. Making both hoops bolt-on also would have made building the Sprint-T a simpler task as the frame would have bolted together around the body instead of trying to finagle the body around the frame, but I never got the drivetrain to build a Sprint-T full scale.

I just got a reminder call I have an appointment with the lab rat keeper tomorrow. I will have to get up early to catch the bus for a 2+ hour trip across town because DART still doesn’t understand what “frequent headway” means. I’m only spending a little over an hour on the bus, the rest of the time is walking to and from the bus stops and waiting for the next bus. I live about as far from a bus stop as I can and still consider the bus as a viable means of transportation, but still the next-largest chunk of time is waiting for the next bus to show up.

Spitballing other gas tank options for the TGS2

I have been thinking about other places to put the gas tanks than inside the body with me.

One place they will have an aerodynamic effect is between the wheels to fair them in aerodynamically and keep the undercar and top of the car separate aerodynamically. This design would basically be a wall instead of a fence keeping the high-pressure flow constrained to the top and not letting it spill over into the low pressure flow under the car, and also clean up the wake from the tires. This will increase downforce and reduce drag at freeway speeds which will help the gas mileage. Now the bad parts, the tanks will be pretty vulnerable stuck out on the far edge of the car even if I put a protective cage around them. Also putting the fuel out there does bad things to the polar moment of inertia, which is a measurement of how much energy needs to be expended to change direction of the car. The further away the tanks are from the center of gravity the higher the polar moment and the harder it will be to make sudden changes in direction. I could make this work for me in setting up the car for highway use where a high polar moment is good for stability, and run pretty much empty tanks for racing and a low polar moment for a car that changes direction almost telepathically.

A quick punching of numbers on the calculator app gave me over 700 pounds of E85 for near coast-to-coast unrefueled range (2900 miles), so I don’t need to use the entire volume available for fuel, some could be empty space for strictly aero purposes, or the tanks partitioned for ballast use to make the polar moment higher when I want it to be high. But with the tanks out on the edge I’m still stuck with the vulnerable in a wreck scenario. Now the other setup with the tanks inside the body with me but outside the frame gives me a low polar moment with tanks full and even lower with race levels (almost empty) than the outrigger tanks because even the empty outriggers have some weight and so does the support structure even without crash bars.

Something else that occurred to me was that I could use a 1 gallon fuel cell as a surge tank when in street mode and the total fuel capacity in race mode. On the street or even in race mode there wouldn’t be any time that I would drain a 1 gallon tank. In an autocross the longest courses I would run are less than 2 minutes long, while on the street even frequent stop-and-go traffic would not use fuel faster than a low-pressure pump could refill the surge tank, or gravity if the level in the main tanks was higher than the surge tank. There are several models in the current JAZ catalog from a quart to 3 gallons capacity set up for use as a surge tank so I don’t have to design this bit from scratch, just buy and attach the plumbing and drive it, NBD. And looking at the catalog I could easily stuff 2 10 Gallon cells per side into the outriggers without much effort. The only thing that might make it tough is the 9″ width getting towards the front of the enclosure where the tire it’s chasing is only 7″ wide. But a 9″ wide tank can fill the wake just as good as a 7″ one, if not better.

OK then, the fuel system is 4, 10 Gallon fuel cells with foam, 2 per side inside the wheel fairings on the outside of the car with the low pressure fuel pumps mounted between the tanks on each side, connected to a 3 gallon Pro Mod cell with foam as a reserve/surge tank feeding the high pressure injection pump. This gives me a system with enough range to get to El Paso from Dallas with reserve for adverse winds and also use crash-resistant containers to prevent leaks in case of a wreck. Also, dividing the fuel load between several containers limits the amount of fuel spilled in a wreck. Still subject to revision in case of a different donor vehicle, because changing the location of the engine changes everything else, and changing the donor vehicle can change the end of the vehicle the engine is placed in.