Considering that I’ve had a bunch of hits using the title of this post as the search term, it seemed fitting that I write something on the subject.
Today I walked past a worker cutting away some material from a metal door frame with an oxyacetylene torch. A wooden door. Never mind that it was propped open with a corn broom, or that there was no fire guard and something tells me no hot work permit either. No, all that was fine, it was the gallon-size jerry can sitting ten feet away. Oh brother. Some people really need to get the fuck off the planet for the sake of the rest of we.
Once I’m in charge, I shall encourage auto manufacturers to kindly cast into the bottoms of their manual transmission cases a pattern of 3/8-16 threaded bosses on a 6″ by 12″ rectangle, aligned with the length of the case, and centered upon the transmission’s center of gravity. Why is it that an automatic can be solidly attached to a jack, but a real transmission cannot? Boo, I say.
Ok, I’ll be reasonable and specify M10×1.0; As much as I’m not particularly fond of metric hardware, it is pretty much the standard on motor vehicles now.
Ok, half a dozen houses down vice next door, but her grandparents are Dutch, and seeing a hit from a city called Bergschenhoek made me think of she. I gather it is a smaller agricultrual town not too far from Rotterdam, and looked at one point reasonably recently like this:
It looks like a pretty tranquil place to live, no? I don’t like the idea of living below sea level, but to each their own anyway.
Did I ever have a weird one: The ugly bag of mostly water I have now got mangled in some manner of trauma, so my consciousness had been transferred to a new – and apparently recently vacated but still serviceable – one. I remember seeing my original body sitting in a chair inert but still around, so I guess the transfer wasn’t complete or something? Note to self: Spicy food for lunch, not supper.
The muse was quiet for a bit, but an idea popped into my head a moment ago.
What if cars today automatically opened a voice channel if they got too close together on the road? Imagine, some jerk is three inches off your bumper at highway speed, you could tell him to shove his cellphone up his ass directly rather than the usual combination of dirty looks and rude gestures. It would be necessary to scale the connection distance to speed, but perhaps a ring measuring three seconds of travel at whatever speed? It would be an interesting experiment if nothing else.
The other thing I would like to see is a simple strip of LEDs along the top of the cowl, running from green through to red, tied to some means of measuring the distance to the car in front. I know this has been done for the automatic cruise control systems on BMW etc., but perhaps a simple aftermarket add-on which could be installed as a front license plate frame. I gather BMW uses radar for it, but what about an imaging sensor to track the car, and a laser to actually measure the distance? Will BMW’s system work when following a motorcycle? A guy at work has a new M6, I should ask.
This leads to putting in a HUD and an EO/IR sensor suite… and then it gets messy.
The Mazda has proven to be a little vexing, really. I apparently have no choice but to run two conductors from a common connector under the pax-side kick panel through the firewall to the battery box. That will be the home for the relays for the clutch bypass system. I can’t blame Mazda, I am in fact glad that they’ve made everything pretty accessible, and they use nice connectors for their wiring. I saw a photo of the bundle going through the firewall, and there apparently is a little plug you can take out to add wires, which I will use if I can’t add them to the main bundle.
In any event, the Weatherpack pin removal tool that I should have purchased sooner is in the mail somewhere, so once it shows up I can put something together to make this thing go. At the moment my intent is to take a square piece of aluminum big enough to put a relay at three corners and the disable switch at the fourth; a #10 screw through the relay, the aluminum and into a well-nut should make for secure, weathertight attachment to the side of the battery box. After that, four conductors into the box for the ECU, two through the firewall, and a ground to the battery.
After that… Whats next? I’d like to run two strands of 4-ga wire from the battery to a suitable connector tucked into the grill somewhere, so I can hook up booster cables without having to open the hood and unclip the lid for the battery box. The hood isn’t any pain to open, but the latches on the box are fiddly little buggers, and I’d hate to do it with cold fingers.
Today I read a classified ad wherein a young man wanted to sell the subwoofers out of his Honda Civic so he could buy some real performance parts. IMMD.
I had a Geocities page. I guess after I freak out my godson by telling him there was a time before computers and ubiquitous internet, I’ll freak him out by showing him someone’s archived Geocities page.
I’m still not entirely sold on the terrified look on the front end of the new ones, but this car – for the Speed World Challenge – looks awfully damned sharp. I know mine handles like a kart as it is, I’m nearly down to the wear blocks after about 30000 miles, and a good chunk of that was on the winter tires, too. Heh. I was looking at an RX-8 at the dealer when I was there the last time and it had 140 tread-wear tires on it, I’d be surprised if you could get around the block twice without needing a new set of those.
Imagine if Mazda would release a Mazda3 GT-R, right? Like the race-built Mustangs or the Viper ACR. I don’t know what the spec motor for that series is, but I’d take the force-fed four from the MAZDASPEED3. Add a stripped interior, two meaningful seats, anchors for harnesses, a cage, and a nice coat of white paint. Bin the radio, the air conditioning, all the airbags, the sunroof, etc. Add lighter, wider rims, gummy tires, and appropriate brakes* to adjustable shocks, and it gets interesting in an almighty hurry.
*As in, the lightest that will stop the car for 11 at Laguna Seca:
Lucky guy, right there. I’d be glad for a chance to go around that track in a shopping cart powered by a poorly-tuned weed eater.
ETA: I went to make the picture of the Mazda my wallpaper. The magnification it defaulted to? Zoom. IMMD.
Sequential-port EFI has made carburetors obsolete for anything bigger than a Coleman lantern, so having solved that problem, we’ve made ourselves some new ones:
Maybe I don’t think too much of GM products, but that thing is pretty sick. I wonder how much it would benefit from a more track-tnned suspension; it seems like it should be a lot closer to 10s with that much power.
