A couple of days ago I had another idea. Use a fairly conventional two sided HCS system, with the lower arm holding the wheel and suspension load and a light upper arm and twisting fork to turn the hub and take braking load.
The difference is, instead of a kingpin arrangement in the hub, use a Rzeppa type CV joint to mount the wheel to a splined axle. Let the axle rotate on bearings in the swingarm ends. The CV joint therefore would form both the lower pivot joint and transfer torque from the axle to the wheel. All I need to do then is run a shaft up front with an angle drive to the axle; just two smallish components instead of tbe mess I was thinking of before.
The key to this is using the Rzeppa joint as a suspension component as well as a drive component.
This all seems, in retrospect, to be so blindingly obvious it only took me a few years to figure it out. I keep wondering if I've missed something.
> > Dave, would you restate/repost your MC front suspension idea?"One thousand words equal one crayon on tablecloth..."
The Difazio setup is the most common hub center steering. They made, oh, maybe a hundred or so over thirty years. Then there were some variants and copies.
The Dizafio has a teeny-tiny kingpin in the center of the wheel. Some are fixed to the front swingarm, others have a link running back to the chassis to vary the caster during bump.
The wheel turns on a big pair of bearings that surround the kingpin.
This allows the wheel to rotate and pivot about the kingpin, but to steer it there is a yoke that comes down from the top. The top of the yoke attaches to an upper A-arm, usually of quite light construction, which may sometimes also act as the brake torque stay.
The open end of the steering yoke goes down to the hub, where it attaches to a giant thin-section ball bearing on each side, four or five inches in diameter. The only purpose of these bearings is to allow the hub to rotate while being steered by the yoke; they have to be large to keep from hitting the axle when the wheel is turned.
My idea is a bit different. Start with a front swingarm. Mount an axle at the ends. Put the bearings in the swingarm ends, so the axle is "live."
Push an Rzeppa joint to the middle of the axle. That's the ball-and-cage setup like at the back of semi-trailing-arm VWs or innumerable small racing cars. They have a splined center and either press into a hub or have bolt holes on their perimeter. Put a tube on each side of the CV joint, then torque the whole mess down tight. You now have a CV joint spinning with a live axle.
Now we press the joint into the center of an appropriate wheel. The wheel, joint, and axle now all rotate together. The CV joint forms the "ball joint" part of the suspension, to let the wheel turn left and right.
To steer the wheel and keep it from falling to one side, we use a steering yoke and upper A-arm like the Difazio, with the same giant ball bearings to connect the yoke to the wheel.
My design would be substantially simpler and cheaper than the Difazio. Downsides would be less flexibility in geometry - the Difazio offsets the kingpin to provide extra trail; my design locks the lower pivot to the center of the CV joint. But center-no-trail is a known-to-work geometry, so no big deal.
Think of an ordinary rear swingarm, except the wheel has a CV joint in it. You add a steering yoke to keep the wheel from flopping around, and a lightweight A-arm to hold the end of the yoke. It's way simpler than a Difazio HCS.
You'd spline the axle to the CV for 2WD, or outboard brakes. And I think you could get away with properly-lubricated thrust washers instead of the giant steering bearings. Or worst-case, Torrington bearings instead of balls; Torrington bits are cheap by comparison.
> > Anyone recall the "Bra" keyboard? Two mounds with 4 x 4 arrays > > of buttons plus a few auxiliary keys?There were several of those; the manufacturers claimed "ergonomic" benefits. They seem to have mutated into the weirdly bent keyboards. Microsoft is selling one under their own name nowadays.
As far as I know my arms, wrists, and fingers bend just like anyone else's, so I'm damned if I can see how any of those "ergonomic" boards are worth flaming dog shit. If you were going to twist the board (which would be comfortable at only *ONE* height and distance - check it out yourself!) it should twist the other way, with the V toward you.
Similarly, the "bra" or "mound" boards require you to lift your fingers *up* to access the keys; maybe it's comfortable for someone to crank their wrists back 90 degrees and reach around the humps with their 6" long spider fingers, but if I went to some non-flat layout, it would have pockets, not humps.
When IBM screwed up their fine 84-key XT/AT keyboard into the 101-key AT/339 surfboard, they changed the offset of the keys slightly, which I guess you could get used to. But then they dished the hell out of the board, so the top row is canted back toward you. This makes it awkward as hell, since the keys don't all move in the same path any more.
I can sort of understand why they did it; the DIN standard, slavishly adopted by OSHA, says that in a business environment your keyboard should be in your lap. (the monitor should be jacked up way off the desk, even with your head, btw) Low keyboard placement was important for MANUAL TYPEWRITERS, where it took some wrist and finger strength to punch images through carbons, but it doesn't make sense with computer keyboards. As for praying to the Monitor God... lots of old IBM and DEC systems had the monitor recessed into the desktop under a piece of glass, at a natural angle to where you would be looking when you were sitting at a desk. That's because they were designed by engineers, not "ergonomics specialists." Give me engineers any day... all the LCD monitors I've found have big riser posts made into them. This really sucks with bifocals. Since I don't want to carve up a monitor that's under warranty, I guess I'll be putting a 6" step in the desk eventually...
And don't even get me started on mice...
1) the curved face.
This is a line contact interface. Theoretically, the end of the rocker is shaped so that the line of contact "rolls" across the valve tip. This actually works in some OEM applications. In others, (particularly engines with more lift than stock) the rocker tip skids across the end of the stem. This causes some wear on the valve tip (often countered with hardened tips), and side load on the valve stem, which isn't easily dealt with. The side load increases friction and wears the valve and guide, eventually degrading the valve seat.
2) the rolling tip
This is also a line contact interface, but the curved end of the rocker is replaced with a roller. This makes the rocker a bit heavier, but the sliding contact becomes rolling contact, greatly reducing the side load on the valve stem.
3) the swivel tip
This is usually implemented as a big round foot, normally at the end of an adjustment screw. The foot swivels on the screw in a captive ball arrangement. The only place I've actually seen these was in some aftermarket VW rockers, and for years I've wondered WTF the reasoning behind this design was.
I think I've figured out part of it.
First off, the ball swivel is just there because the screw has to turn to adjust the lash; the motion of the foot is always in the plane of the valve train.
Second, the foot is touching the whole tip of the valve; it is a plane contact, not a line contact. It slides slightly across the end of the stem during the valve stroke, but it's (at least theoretically) floating on an oil film. This probably results in less side load than a conventional rocker tip, which would lengthen the time between valve jobs, and since the unit loading would be much lower than line contact, you could probably get away without hardened valve tips.
I don't see any reason why you'd want to go to a swivel foot instead of a roller, but I'd always wondered why anyone bothered with a swivel foot in the first place
Recently, I've unsubscribed from several mailing lists (Australian ones being the worst, but not the only offenders) because what was coming in looked more like white noise than English text. Normally I just delete the cat-walked-on-the-keyboard messages and continue on, but when a whole list is like that, the BS limit is exceeded.
"Yes, I am a blithering idiot. If you could see me in person, you'd be able to tell because I tie-dyed my hair in primary colors, haven't brushed my teeth since the Reagan Administration, and I have size 54 pants hanging down my thighs to expose my skinny size 24 ass. I also speak mostly in my own language, which is sort of an enhanced Ebonics with sound defects. But since we're separated by the barrier of ASCII, I have to express myself to you by slamming my head against the keyboard until the screen is full, and then I hit 'send.'"
http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle.html
Chock full of nifty stuff, and ideas I can use in the shop or in the house. And when there is nothing useful, I can drop into Lileks mode and admire the '56 Buick towing the DIY airboat with the snow skis, or ads for cigarettes, beer, guns, and motorcycles. Or even look in the classified ads, which, as I remember, looked just as stupid when I was a kid as they do now...
I got to looking at that thing, and thought, you know, you could install a TV card on the motherboard, load the FreeVo software, and have your own integrated TiVo clone. And I'm sure you can get channel listings somewhere on the web; plug up the Ethernet and have a daemon go out and keep things updated. And the NOAA weather site would be a click away. And your favorite news sites, and you could have a newsreader and some scripts continually vacuuming the news servers to download and assemble movies in the background, and you could put your mp3s on the hard disk and let XMMS play them, and you could cut a slot somewhere to insert a DVD into a player, and you could use the TAPI interface to turn it into an answering machine/Caller ID/phone recorder, and you could put your memo/todo list/calendar software on it, and it could work as an alarm clock, and if you were running Linux you could open multiple windows and watch broadcast TV and recordings at the same time, and you could put Cinelerra and Audacity on it so you could edit video and audio, and you could use an IR mouse and IR keyboard, and... except I don't need or want a TV. But if you wanted a TV, it would be way cool.
The other night I stopped at the Love's on I-40 at Galloway, where I usually gas up when returning from easterly routes. There was a cop wandering about outside - there's often a guy in a cop suit, unlike the abandoned cop cars elsewhere - and he'd left the door open. This one was painted up like an Arkansas State Police cruiser. I looked in when I went into the building. Prisoner cage, check. Six antennas, check. Spotlight, check. Big radio under the dash, check. Laptop computer atop the dash, check. (displaying a weather map) Silver and black West Coast Choppers seat cover, check. Row of stuffed animals along the front of the prisoner cage, check.
I dunno... it could be a case of unusual vehicle personalization, or... the squirrels wondered if there was some focus group at the State Police HQ who might have handed down mandates for a "kinder, gentler State Police."
The bad thing about knowlege is, sometimes it's better not to know...
I would certainly take advantage of this kind of thing if it were available and affordable. Get rid of that spare tire, fix those crunchy joints, myopia, and lower back trouble...
We'd probably wind up with a population consisting mainly of Playmate bimbos and variations of Kirghan from "Highlander."
With a sizeable percentage of females being named with variations of "Kayla" and males as "Brandon", I could see most people trending toward similar looks. I've already noticed a preponderance of females with the same general facial features usually wear the same hairstyles and makeup. It might become difficult to tell your friends apart.
"Hi Bob!"
"I'm not Bob. I'm Ed."
"You don't need no steenkeeng badges, right?"
> > times by the Texas Transportation Institute finds this year that the average > > rush-hour driver in the U.S. spent 51 hours a year sitting in traffic, up four > > hours in the past five years,Most commutes are 15 to 30 minutes around here, unless you hit the middle of rush hour, when it can easily take over an hour. Zoning, you know - all the residences are here, and all the evil workplaces are over there, with limited accessways between the two.
AB's commute is 20 minutes each way.
5 workdays per week * 52 weeks per year ---- 260 - 20 holidays and vacation ---- 240 working days per year * 2 you commute both ways ---- 480 commutes * 20 minutes ---- 9600 minutes / 60 get hours ---- 160 hoursFor the *average* to be 51 hours, that'd mean their commute was 1/3 of AB's, figure seven minutes. In an urban area, with an average speed below 30 mph, that's three miles or less.
I don't even know anyone with a commute that short. I know several who drive 45 minutes or more.
"another working day has ended rush hour hell to face just like lemmings in their shiny metal boxes contestants in a suicidal race" - The Police, "Synchronicity 2"
>> I wonder why Americans call that runny burny stuff "gas" when we call it >> "petrol"?"Petrol" is a diminutive of "petroleum", which could be anything from propane to asphalt. "Gas" is a diminutive of "gasoline", which is a specific type of petroleum.
What you ex-Brits refer to as "gas" we refer to more precisely as "butane," "propane," or "natural gas."
> > The term 'worm' actually comes from a science fiction story called The > > Shockwave Rider written by John Brunner in 1975."The Shockwave Rider" was written a long time ago, by a Brit, and set in a future USA. Brunner had probably not heard of the Altair, so all of his computers were mainframes... but he'd researched those *very* well, and even 31 years later there are no technical faults to be had.
The story is told in flashback mode, which I personally detest, and the writing is definitely rough in spots, though all of Brunner's later stuff lacked the flair of his early work. I didn't care much for the book when I read it in 1977 or so, but I got another copy after I got a PC a decade later, and I'm deeply impressed. I don't know if Brunner knew someone at the cutting edge of computer science who fed him the absolute latest stuff, or if he pulled it all out of his imagination, but it's still impressive.
By modern standards the book is clunky, but... jeez... 1975!
Imagine... what if things had developed, oh, along Soviet lines. There's a Web in 2008, but there's only *one*, and everyone uses terminals to access it. And the State had trained you from shortly after birth to be a system-level coder, until you escaped... and you know the back doors into the system, so you can delete your old identity and become anyone you want, because *you* are what the system thinks you are...
My Dad has been called into court by computer error. A close friend did a few days of jail time for the same thing. Stories pop up in the press every now and then, not widely reported, of people who have been repeatedly arrested due to bad data. Heck, Kemper locked horns with the states of Mississippi and Connecticut, when MS refused to renew his driver's license because he had an unpaid traffic ticket in CT. Only problem was, he'd never *been* to CT. My own twenty-five-year war with the credit reporting industry. People hosed by Homeland Security's no-fly lists. So, yeah, the world of The Shockwave Rider has a simplistic poignancy; there was only *one* computer network to screw you...
Kenney wanted to borrow my run stand to fire it up before they dropped it into Joe's Corvette, which is a '76 model with limited engine compartment access. So I backed the wagon up to the shop, hefted in the stand, the Chevy mounting brackets, the exhaust manifolds, the exhaust pipes and mufflers, and four large Rubbermaid containers full of the miscellaneous bits you need to fire one up - pulleys, water pump, hoses, etc.
Kenney said it sounded good when they first fired it up. Then they started getting a lot of blowby out the valve covers and oil pressure started dropping. The dipstick looks like vanilla milkshake.
Well, that's what the run stand is for... he hasn't pulled it down yet, but since he decked the block, bottom tapped all the head bolt holes, and decked the heads too, he's thinking more along the line of a cylinder wall failure than a blown head gasket. They had to grind well up into the cylinder bores to clear the rods with a 4" stroke.
If the problem isn't obvious on disassembly I'll trek back out to help with the forensics. They ran into a *lot* of problems with that thing - I wound up having to balance it twice, when they found out the rods were too short for crank to turn, then they had to have it decked .075" when the stack height turned out to be too short, and then all the rods and inboard rod bolts had to be clearanced for the cam, and the massive grinding inside the block, and heating and hammering the oil pan for rod clearance, and... He's half sick that it might be a block failure, but I pointed out there's not likely to be anything wrong that can't be cured with sleeves and Hard Block. For some reason, he didn't seem reassured.
There are places that sell 4.25" stroke cranks for the small Chevys. I suppose you could grind enough clearance inside a stock 400 block to spin one, but after seeing the amount of hassle just a 4" stroke entailed, I sure wouldn't want to do it. Either the customer would have to pop for a Rocket block or similar, or I'd tell him to do his own freaking clearancing.
1971. I saw it in 1975 or so, and remembered it as funny. It *is* funny; think of a more subtle Italian version of "Blazing Saddles," except it predates Mel Brooks' movie by several years.
The voices were all dubbed from Italian to English. They did a pretty good job. The voice dubbed for the guy who played Bambino was very familiar. Bear in mind I'm not a movie fan, and certainly no kind of actor fan, and I can't even identify most Famous Actors by sight, much less by their voice... but I knew that voice. The fat detective with the big Lincoln on that crummy old TV show... a little google, a little imdb.com... *that* guy. William Conrad, with the articulate bass. His imdb page has dozens of "voice" and "uncredited voice" listings. Though he's not credited in Trinity, it's him.
I don't even like Westerns. I liked this one a lot. Go figure.
>> and several animals were stolen from the shelter.]] > ..then sacrificed in various pagan rituals, no doubt... ;)Might as well.
The local pound kills all their excess animals twice a month. I've known a couple of people who went down there to get a dog or cat; they wanted $50 for a dog, $35 for a cat, plus you had to pay for shots and neutering or spaying, so the out-the-door price ran close to $300. So neither one left with an animal. At those prices, I doubt many people do.
They could probably save a lot of time by just putting up a big sign, "UNLESS YOU WANT TO PAY THOROUGHBRED PRICES, WE'RE JUST GOING TO KILL THEM ALL, HA HA HA HA."
> Actually, the point I was trying to make is that perhaps more funds > and campaigning should be channeled towards stopping violent crimes > and wars and genocidal massacresEh? What planet are you from?
If we were actually to *do* something about crime, millions of policemen, lawyers, court officials, public welfare workers, and the entire prison industry would be left high and dry. And *then* what would happen? You'd have packs of feral social workers prowling the streets, and bankrupt lawyers hiding out in alleyways... and since lawyers are the larval form of politicians, our entire government would eventually collapse.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of the underprivileged and not-quite-normal are working hard - sometimes risking their very lives - to prop up the very basics of our social structure. Little Tyrone is willing to leave his Nintendo to trudge down the block and rob a convenience store, to support our social structure. What have *you* done for society lately? You're just a taker, living off the benefits of modern Western society, but you're not willing to go out there and work for it yourself, are you?
You loser.
Something that cropped up a few years ago, which I've noticed *only* at Wal-Mart, is for some bozo - usually with gray or blue hair - driving up near a particular parking place, then "staking it out" until the owner returns to his car and drives off. These wipes will block traffic for hours. A couple of times I knocked on their windows and told them to move along; the outrage was fun to watch. If I was a store manager, I'd have someone out there to put at stop to that kind of crap - maybe their security guard, which seems to be a fixture of every Wal-Mart nowadays. Of course, it's not like there's any choice, the only store we have is a Wal-Mart now.
For some reason, I find the while thing more than a little tacky.
Either Wal-Marts now have Generators From Hell, or they have their own power mains coming from somewhere.
I found it rather interesting.
That's along with the '84 GSL-SE, which will donate its suspension, brakes, wheels, and other bits.
"I love it when a plan comes together."
"Anyone who thinks money can't buy happiness has never had a wife with breast implants."
>> I'd happily pay a reasonable sum for a decent US-made drill press, but >> such a thing doesn't seem to exist new anymore (if it ever did.)The last of them went away in the '80s, horribly overpriced. Bridgeport still has a small presence in the small milling machine world, but everyone else has abandoned the small to medium machine tool market to the Chinese, Indians, and Poles. The last 5-axis "Cincinnati" CNC machining center I saw appeared to be mostly Japanese-made.
This isn't a case of foreigners coming in and undercutting American businesses, it's a case of American businesses deciding they simply didn't want those markets any more. Demand still existed, and customers buy Polish-made lathes and Chinese drill presses because there are no domestic alternatives.
They're selling Ukrainian plywood around here. 4x8, but metric thickness. Even if plywood was free in Kiev, how the hell can they ship it across Europe, the Atlantic, and the eastern USA to Little Rock, and still be competitive with Weyerhauser, with trees and sawmills a hundred miles away? We used to see Canadian plywood. And what American plywood we see mostly seems to come from North Carolina. Maybe that tells us something about the markup on plywood; shipping has to be at least half of the price of a sheet of imported plywood.
>> On a positive note, gas prices have finally gone beyond the "I'll >> complain but not actually change my habits" zone and entered the "Hey, >> you want to carpool?" zone.Car pooling only works if you live and/or work very close to someone else. Back in the company-town days when everyone lived in the same neighborhood and worked at the same plant, it was a good deal.
In the real world, most people don't live close enough to anyone else working in the same area, on the same shift, for it to be practical. If your commute is 20 miles and you drive 15 miles out of your way, you're not saving much to start with. If your shifts are an hour apart, someone's going to wait another hour per day, probably running the heater or air conditioner, and perhaps paying for parking. And you can lose your job if your ride fails to show up too many times.
Fenders are called fenders because they fend things off. Duh. ""Fend" isn't a word you come across very often in modern American English.
Tools are good karma!
>> get rid of all the bloated, bureaucratic, monolithic entitlement >> programs and replace them all with a single, simple Citizen's >> Dividend. It would be a straight cash payment to every citizen, >> rich or poor.There was actually a fairly detailed proposal for this at one time. It came from Richard Nixon in his first term, as a lever against the Roosevelt/Kennedy liberals in the House and the bureaucracies.
Nixon's staffers had figured up it would be cheaper to do exactly what you just proposed - a cash handout, or "guaranteed annual income" to everyone. By his figures, it would be substantially cheaper than than the massive HEW bureaucracy (even back then, in its comparatively svelte days).
Opposition to the proposal was practically unanimous from both parties. There were/are a lot of people whose jobs are dependent on "the poor," and most of them work for the government. Or as I like to say, "there's a lot of money to be made from poverty."
If the idea seems vaguely familiar, SF writer Mack Reynolds used it as part of the setting for most of his novels from the '60s and '70s.
If the numbers still hold true, I'm moderately in favor of the idea, though I would have to reconcile it to one of my more vehemently held ideas; to wit, people on public assistance shouldn't be allowed to vote. This may not be a real problem since the last few elections have shown how broken the electoral system is.
Besides the GAS, NIT, or whatever he called the stipend at the time, most novels also featured the "pocket phone", which was a telephone, emergency locator beacon, and credit card (his societies were usually cashless). Interestingly, the phone and locator parts are already merged technology, since most cellphones have the e-911 system now. All it would take would be marrying them to the credit card network, which already runs off the telephone system anyway. Heck, you could put the "credit card" part into the SIM card on a GSM phone... the main problem is that you couldn't swipe it through a common card reader. I'm sure some RFID advocate will come up with an idea for that soon enough,
> I don't consider my "true identity" to be anything that can be > encapsulated on a single card.And the flip side, of course, is that the important item becomes the card, not its bearer. Whoever the card identifies *is* you, to the system.
I've managed systems running largeish databases, and was shocked to find out that the database admins were unconcerned unless the errors exceeded ten percent or so... and at that, only because the losses in legal action began to exceed the billing/collection overhead.
"We show you still owe $15,000 on a triple bypass. Do you want to give us your checking account number so we can deduct the money by EFT, or will you be paying by credit card?"
"But I never had a bypass! I haven't even been to the hospital in years!"
"I'll just mark this down as 'refused to arrange payment' and pass it on to our collections lawyers, then."