everything is always 85% done

      Knowing that I'd lose access to a really awesome workshop when I left EMP|SFM, I tried to make stuff that I knew I was going to use at some point but probably not right now. Plan B is certainly going to get a inner-rotor ignition at some point, ala ciaociao. A standard Puch flywheel weighs about a pound, a standard Vespa flywheel weighs just under three pounds. -And for a 'race' bike, thats like riding with the brakes on. Which I do enough of, already.

     If you want a ciaociao flywheel fan, you'll need a plastic kinetic TFR fan. The guys at Cosmopolitan Motors were very helpful locating one for me. You'll also need an inner rotor ignition, probably off of a smaller CC dirtbike. PVL makes some really good stuff. Just make sure its a 2 stroke not a 4 stroke. I got started by eliminating 1.5mm thick disc from the underside, inner portion of the plastic fan. I did this using lather-beams. Using that as reference, I drilled a .5" hole in a piece of aluminum, and fitted a hex bolt & nut through the hole- which is the same diameter as the crankshaft- to then set up in the lathe. I lathered the aluminum to the same diameter as the underside of the plastic fan, then took that down to 1.5mm thick. I stepped it out to then match the inner diameter and thickness of the plastic fan's hole, and also stepped another 1mm as a spacer. There is something really satisfying about the look and feel of freshly cut metal. -and I'll just let that last statement be creepy, whatevs. This project still has aways to go, but I think this is the only part that I could not do at home. We'll see.

I also made a rear wheel alignment/ adjuster do-hickey, because Plan B could use it.

       I've been screwing around with a vacu-forming rig in hopes of maybe making some transparent flywheel covers. So far I've been close but no cigar. I believe I need better suction to pull out the wrinkles. I have one more modification to try on the buck before I rent a Shop-Vac and try that. Work harder, Dirt Devil!!

        Finally, I have just moved to Portland. Thanks to basically 100% of people that I have talked to about or during the move, I am yes aware that Portland has an inordinate number of excellent coffeehouses, strippers and microbreweries. The move was bittersweet, mostly because I liked Seattle a lot, and because my career seemed like it was getting a toe-hold as an exhibit designer/fabricator. Portland is known as a design-savvy town, but unless I work for MotoCzysz or Nike I don't know who would hire me? plaid pantry?

The Mexicana 400

    Le Mans. Isle of Man. Baja. Laguna Seca. Dakar. Mugello. Bonneville. The Nürburgring.  Daytona. Some race events throw such a wide net on our imaginations that the location itself overwhelms the record books, the teams, the engineering and transforms a location on a map into a symbol for humankind's unending quest to redefine the physical limits that shape our lives. Missing from that short list is a flat, grassy field in New Somerset, Ohio where Man and machine struggle against one another -and themselves- for Glory and Victory only known to a special few. The event is, of course, The Mexicana 400.

    When I reach back through the sundered veil of time, and recount my misspent 20's; many of the most grotesque moments of pitched debauchery and frivolity were had at the annual Band Camp rally, hosted by The Pittsburgh Vintage Scooter Club (PVSC). Every year, they rent an isolated marching band practice field, and create a vast, drunken slumber party for anyone with a penchant for underpowered italian machinery. One highlight is the Saturday afternoon games. The most epic of which being the Mexicana.

    For the un-initiated, let me explain the event. The Mexicana combines a flat-track circuit race, an eating contest, and a drinking contest. Before the race, the scooters are lined up on the track, engines off, with racers gathered off to the side (LeMans -style start). Racers must wear the ceremonial garb to compete: 1. Sombrero -large, caricaturesque & 2. A Curly Moustache - Optional for those already with Mustache. At the word "Go!" racers must start by eating a foul, uncooked burrito. Once they have finished -with an empty open mouth, a judge approves them to go. They run to the scooter, start it up and complete one lap around the track. On returning, they now must drink one Corona -no foaming or overflow allowed, the beer must be drank in entirety. A judge again validates the drank beer and the racer heads out for a second lap. On completion of the lap, the racer drinks a Margarita, and after the judge, leaves for the third lap. Upon finishing the third lap, the racer takes a shot of tequila and heads out for the fourth and final lap. The first racer to cross the line wins, unless they puked -in which case, they have to restart the entire event. Its tons of fun to watch and race in, but it is serious seriuzz business if you're trying to win.

Let's Review:

PRO TIP: Bring a Napkin, Burritos are slimy, the napkin helps you keep hold of the damn thing, and keeps the slime off of your throttle. 

PRO TIP: Relax/Sustain your swallow reflex, and exhale out of your nose -it will allow you to pour the whole beer down your throat. 
 













PRO TIP: Even seemingly dry grass is very slippery, use the rear brake only and sparingly. 

PRO TIP: Cheating is not permitted, but highly recommended, check your fuel tap Noob!

    The only reason I won the Mexicana the year I did was a combination of good luck and tenacious effort. I had been trying & failing for several years in a row. Losing because certain racers would start the first lap without finishing the burrito, simply shoe-horning it into their mouths and taking off. Then around corner 3 on the other side of the track they'd spit it out. Creativity has its rewards. The year I won it, was the first year the PVSC judges were very strict about finishing the burrito in front of them. I know I wasn't the fastest on the track, and not the fastest eating the burrito, but I was the fastest of both. I also benefited from Nak'd Dav "stalling" in front of my nearest competition, Greg McCormick who still nearly caught up to me. Whew!

    The burrito and the corona are what really decide the race. Some people think I was working at Zoot Scoots because I needed a 'job' or was good at 'mechanics'. In reality, I was studying at the foot of a hyperbolic drinker, A Shaolin Monk with a sixer of Becks. He guided my path towards enlightenment and got my Corona-Chug-Time (C.C.T.) under 8 seconds, which was still pathetic compared to his own C.C.T. of approx. 4.3 seconds.

 

Here's a clip of me getting p'wned back in '06. I got way far back by my borrowed machine refusing to start, then stalling around turn two of the first lap. Note my obvious annoyance with the "burrito wedgers". Also, near the end of the clip everybody "OOhhhhs" at Joe Casola (on the green bike), nearly passing Greg, but then wiping out on the last corner, unfortunately off-camera.

Here are some other random pictures of PVSC Band Camp silliness, of which I am very nostalgic for:

  

Come get a taste, Mantooth!

         So, I am so far back on updating this thing I forget where to start. Probably the funnest thing to talk about would be the awesome work Michael Mike and Phil did on my Simonini race exhaust. Getting ready for the race at the end of July, I was scrambling around to get everything sorted out. With the new subframe in place, the exhaust was not mounting up correctly, running short on time with my "job" & all, Phil offered to sort it out only if I brought the whole bike down to then set it up. With only a few days left, and the welding taking a day or two longer than expected, I grew somewhat concerned. Pictured at left is the exhaust such as it was in the original configuration. My concerns were solidly laid to rest when I drove to Georgetown to collect Plan B. Pictured here is the exhaust in its utterly transformed state.

       Truly the pictures do not do justice to the Naz's tight welding and metal work, nor do they highlight Phil's crazy powder coating. Nice Work Fellas! It is very good to have such talented and generous friends. So with the pipe and sub-frame completed, here's a look at Plan B after her 2010 makeover:

 

Dang! Some advice for future sub-frame builders:

1. USE A JIG. warping will occur.
2. Save the old sub-frame.
3. Lots of parts had to be customized or ordered special.

        The belt is a weird extraaa-long AX51. I wasn't sure of the dimensions i needed, so i just ordered several and tried them all until I had a winner. Also, the brake cable is custom too, again extra long. Speaking about the pipe again, there are absolutely zero ground clearance issues. When i lay the bike over on its side, the first contact point is the pedals in the vertical position. Also, the twin silencers are begging for flamethrowers to be added. That may be a special Team Nerdspeed edition ....

          So in spite of all the work done, Plan B was still not happy come race day (carb/fuel issues) and I ended up borrowing Naz's Lomos for the race. Practice and qualifying went well, Naz JJ and Travis all pushed towards the front of the pack. Phil suffered a breakdown in practice and Travis was having considerable trouble with the new disc brake front end on the hobbit. In the qualifying run I thought I had a legitimate shot at a podium finish with so much competition on the sideline, but NASCAR pit crew team efforts in the paddock got Travis' machine back in action, and I decided sharing is always the right thing to do, so Phil took the Lomos for the second qualifying run and the race. The plucky and reliable Lomos kept its head on a swivel, which is what you do in a vicious cock fight. This is me keeping the hyenas at bay:

For awhile now, Liz & I have been trying to sell her Vespa P200e. It wasn't going very well for along while, so after a new paint job didn't work, and dropping the price tag several times, we had some fun & made a commercial:
 

Less than 36hrs. later we sold it to a very excited girl and her friend who was from ironically, Columbus.

My blog post brings ALLAH boys to the yard

        I have way too much to update, and no time right now, but I want to share this. When I was working on "To boldly go waaay off topic" I wanted to make sure I wasn't spreading misinformation, so I did a bunch of fact checking to be certain. If you recall that post was about NASA, and the importance of manned spaceflight. I remember reading/hearing that the first operational integrated circuit computer was aboard the Apollo missions, so I was googling things like "Missile Navigation" and "Rocket Guidance Computer" over and over and over again. The Very Next Day I received an email unlike anything I've ever seen before, and not in my spam folder either:

From: Bintu Mahmud
Subject: ALLAH CALLS ON YOU

I am Mrs. Bintu Mahmud. Please contact my lawyer

Ramli Sariman (barr_ramli.sariman@gala.net) for a
very important thing ALLAH wants you to do for
Him. May ALLAH be with you always.

Something tells me big brother noticed a pattern in my web queries and wants to know whose team I'm on. Kinda funny/scary depending on your take.

Let's talk about my fat ass

    Can we talk about my out of control obesity? Certainly, the years have ravaged my once boyish figure; but it was still to my surprise that I all but bottomed out my suspension when I first sat on Plan B with the new subframe. I built the subframe around a shock I've had laying around for a while, a spiffy Malossi RS24 shock (by Paioli) originally designed as the front swingarm shock for an Italjet Dragster.  I suspect  the difference in geometry is to blame, and my addiction to transfats and sweet, empty carbs.

    Regardless, I needed to find a beefier shock with similar dimensions to the one I had, but that was a bit tough, and most quality shocks of this sort go for around $400, even a good spring for a motorcross application retails around $120, and the dimensions would still be a rough fit. Luckily, I was able to get a couple of random industrial springs with appropriate specs for not very much money. The thinner one is rated at 470lbs. and the thicker at 790lbs. Both springs match the outer diameter of the original and are 8in. long.
HELLO LIZ!

    But that's where it gets complicated, as the shock will accept a spring of a maximum 5 3/8" long and has a travel of about 2". I'm having a tough time staying in front of the math on this one, as I'll have to cut off some length to allow the shock to fit, but also compress the shock enough to keep the sag within a usable range. So, I'm willing to accept a fair bit of trial and error through this process.

   I headed down to Naz & Phil's shop to use the press to get the spring on, but it was a smidge more involved. After trimming an inch off each spring, I cooked the coil top with a torch to flatten it out. Ultimately, I need to fab up a tool to help rebuild the shock. This process had a few false starts and took nearly all day. After the tool was done, the spring installed easily. Knocking an inch out of it's length reduces the spring's max load to 347lbs, but that will hopefully prevent my massive girth from dragging the motor across the asphalt.

I luv my Obnoxious Subframe

 

A few shots of the newly powder coated subframe. Thanks Responsible Jon!

To Boldly Go ... Waaay Off Topic.

    Enjoy 'em while you can: Friday, May 14th, The space shuttle Atlantis STS-132, will blast off for the second to last ever Space Shuttle launch. The final launch of Endeavour in November 2010, STS-134, will be the final launch of the space shuttle program, effectively ending the manned spaceflight program in the United States. ...Indefinitely. Given the rate at which aerospace programs develop, it could seriously be 30 years before another U.S. spacecraft breaks the surly bonds and sends men & women into outer space.

        Is this news to you? Allow me to recap. The first ever Space Shuttle (Columbia) was originally delivered to the Kennedy Space Center on March 25, 1979, coincidentally the same day I was born. The first launch of the space shuttle was in April, 1981. Given the stresses involved in leaving and returning to Earth's atmosphere, the service life of the typical shuttle was estimated at 30 years. (A timeline sealed by the 2003 destruction of Columbia)  NASA & US Air Force chose to develop a new craft rather than request funding to build a larger Shuttle fleet. This new craft was proposed to place a low-cost orbiter within the reach of private corporations, while simultaneously developing frontier technologies and drastically reduce overall mission costs for NASA. The new experimental ship was called the X-33, with a larger production version follow-up called the Venture Star. X-33/Venture Star was planned to be active by the time the original space shuttle fleet was retiring. -but that was before Narloy-Z.

The reason the X-33 could be so cheap and still get the job done is because it doesn't require a large external fuel tank or solid rocket boosters; not to mention eliminating SRBs makes space travel much, much safer. The reason the X-33 didn't need the external periphery is because it was to use a RS-2200 Linear Aerospike engine. The conventional rocket engine uses a bell-shaped thrust nozzle. The design of the thrust nozzle greatly determines the amount of power it's capable of producing. Just as a two-stroke expansion chamber exhaust performs optimally at a specific RPM, rocket nozzles perform optimally at a specific altitude and air pressure. Thing is; rockets aren't supposed to stay at specific altitude, they're supposed to shoot through them. As a result, traditional rocket engines spend most of their lives outside the powerband. 

            Now, a linear aerospike engine doesn't have that problem. The RS-2200 uses a pair of variable geometry ramps to maintain optimum explosive pressure regardless of altitude. The new engine is 30% more fuel efficient than the older engine, and as a result, all fuel tanks could be internalized. As you can imagine, even with liquid hydrogen cooling from within, the stress on the ramps directing a river of exploding rocket fuel is quite tremendous, and the original material was insufficient for the task. X-33 engineers reluctantly selected Narloy-Z to build the ramps, which was tougher albeit significantly heavier. In doing so, this altered the flight characteristics and the weight difference had to be accounted for elsewhere.  The engineers spent a lot of time and money developing a composite tank for the liquid hydrogen fuel, but met with repeated failure. The traditional Aluminum-Lithium tank worked flawlessly, but required a revision of the entire frame to meet the needed power-to-weight ratio. At this point, despite numerous NASA & USAF challenges, the off schedule and over budget X-33 was canceled,  but mostly to make way for Constellation. 

            Rather than support a high-technology, low unit-cost vehicle that could open up private spacecraft enterprise, the Bush Administration favored a robust, far reaching, long-term approach to space exploration. The plan was to return men to the moon, but rather than just planting the stars & stripes and collecting rock samples, Constellation would also deliver modular units to be assembled as a semi-permanent base on the moon. With the larger orbit of the moon and its low gravity, the moon in many ways makes for a superior 'jumping off' point for missions to Mars and the other planets in the solar system. But... with the War on Terror, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the publics' general lack of confidence in all things Pres. Bush, the idea of a "Moon Base" seemed ridiculous. Regardless, NASA engineers progressed with plans to return to the Moon in a similar fashion to the Apollo missions. The last few years have seen the current crop of NASA Scientists and engineers scouring for resources to essentially create a high-tech Apollo sequel with early missions in the late 2010's and moon landings in the early 2020's.

         With 9 Billion invested, President Obama terminated Constellation across the weekend of April 15, 2010. Obama's new plan relies on the rise of (as of yet non-existent) commercial spaceflight providers to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, with the Russian space program filling the interim gap of... an unknown duration. The other initiatives set aside funding for research on a mission to land on an asteroid, earth based astronomy and emphasis on earth-centered exploration, with particular focus on climate change. In escence we will go from the clear global leader in manned spaceflight, to relative nobodys with zero experience overnight. The private leader in which Obama has placed his trust is Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and owner of SpaceX, a company which to date has launched 1 of their primary rockets. -Compared to the thousands of launches and the hundreds of manned spaceflights NASA has successfully and safely conducted. Killing Constellation to force NASA to sit on its laurels, waiting for amateur hour to play catch-up will cost about 6,000 jobs at Cape Canaveral. Most of those jobs are highly technical and specific to spaceflight; it will also cost another est. 14,000 jobs in the greater community. This in a time where job creation is allegedly a priority, where we hand out vast fortunes to down-on-their-luck bankers, auto-giants and nearly any yacht owner with a frowny face.

           The biggest bummer for me is that at one time as a kid I fantasized about being an astronaut; and now as a grown man I get to learn that even if i ate my Wheaties, and did my push-ups, and studied real hard to be an astronaut, it wouldn't have mattered. A lot of people ask, What's the point? Why spend all that money? There's a lot of poetic, soul-searching responses that you either already get and don't need to be told, or that you will simply never understand. So I'll provide a practical answer: Look at the computer in front of you, or your cellphone, or thisisphotobomb.com. NASA is the benevolent arm of an innovation machine. We live in an 'information age' whose economy all hums along on microprocessors. Think about how much we use computers in our daily lives, if you're old enough, think about life before the internet or before you owned a computer. Microprocessors are the direct descendants of the Integrated Circuit, which was developed purely because vacuum tubes couldn't withstand the violent shaking and G-forces of a rocket launch -one of the first ever integrated circuit computers was the Apollo Guidance Computer. Obama wants to create a 'Green Ecomony'- he has a industry legend at his fingertips; Silicon Photovoltaics (Solar Cells) were invented by NASA. NASA has been using Fuel Cells in satellites and spacecraft for decades. If anything, that is NASA's value: huge life-altering innovations.

      Some food for thought. The Over-Budget & Off-Schedule X-33's entire program budget was 1.3 Billion dollars. That equates to 5 days of occupation in Iraq at the height of the occupation, or 2/10ths of 1 percent (0.002) of the bank bailout. It's still a chunk of change, but we've spent far more money in far less effective ways.

           The way I see it, the biggest threat to manned spaceflight is the meddlings of the President of the United States. If not for Bush's far-off vision, and Obama's complete lack of vision, we would not be in this situation right now. The X-33/ Venture Star was supposed to be the torch that NASA handed off to the private sector, to initiate private spaceflight. If it hadn't been canceled, the technical issues could have been sorted out - for a fraction of the cost of Constellation- without damaging the livelihoods of the average NASA engineer, and without US Astronauts having to cross their fingers on a rocket ride with Captain PayPal. In November or whenever the last launch ends up being scheduled, I will make the trip (pilgrimage?) to see the final Shuttle launch. I will raise my Mai Tai or Corona to the heavens and offer a salute to the life and death of a beautiful and truly inspired era known as "The Space Age".