Well, it would be there except the image host server is returning a "down" message, so suffice to say it looks like any of a hundred photos I've posted to the yawns of the congregation.
If you could hear him snoring this morning, though, you'd be in tears.
2) The Midget Project; A few further mods as the bits came in and opportunity presents itself to work in the workshop. The carburettor I'm using is pretty much the bog-standard choice for racing and rallying these things over the years. It is a side-draught Weber DCOE, a wonderful instrument in that it really is almost infinitely "tune-able". Even the airflow can be tuned as the venturi tubes and choking orifices are separate pieces that can be slid out and exchanged.
In this case, the latter are the objects of my affections as going to a larger or smaller choke (choke not in the sense of the butterflies you close to start an engine cold but the constricting throats of the air inlet downstream of the venturi tube) shifts the peak of power output vs. RPM up or down the power curve. I went down from 30mm throats to 28mm, which brought that peak down to the 2800-3200 rpm range, perfect for slow curvy bits as there is where one wants strong response in order to induce oversteer, neutral, or understeer at will. Oh, its just a hoot to drive now.
My pursuit of horsepower really didn't make the hundred I don't believe, as the later 1500 has a lower compression head in the American market than the earlier one in my Spitfire. Still, I'm probably in the mid to high 80 range, plenty of improvement for so small and light a car. We might get a little more in the last step still to be undertaken, a revisit in tube-diameter of the exhaust, but I don't think there will be a huge gain there. The result is still worth the effort, to me anyway.
(Grrr, who is sleeping on a cushion under the Trainasium, has now joined in the snoring concert. Just a hilariously peaceful sound!)
3) Without getting into the truly painful details, we have migrated mobile service from AT&T after 20-odd years. It started when the service at the house dropped off to about nought. My wife went to the local AT&T shop and they proceeded to bullshit her into some sort of different plan that they said would "improve service" yet be less expensive, then sent a new billing prospectus that actually raised the cost, and another different one that didn't match the first after a deathmarch to Customer Disservice on the Ganges, and three days worth of obfuscation, roadblocks, lies, distortions, half-truths, phone-trees, and driving back and forth to a real AT&T location after the local one admitted to being a contract retailer unable to do anything but sell plans and phones as we incurred another two full-time days of this lunacy after telling them we're done and started the migration exercise which they inhibited at every turn, another two days full-time wasted on this bloated miserable excuse for a communications company for a total of a work-week of gut-wrenching frustration.
How do people with jobs find the time to deal with phone service gone pear-shaped, which it inevitably does from time to time?
Message Thread Stuff & Nonsense - sarge August 26, 2024, 7:30 am
« Back to index