Category: Racing

Soybean racer

2006-03-12 rolfje No Comments

The big car manufacturers could have done this, but they didn’t, because they are sponsored by the big oil companies. And your local governement is swimming in taxmoney that’s added to your oil price. And no, they don’t want to get rid of the cars, despite of what they say. The nicest thing for governements would be the complete population sitting in single-seated, gas guzzling cars in a traffic jam accross the country!

Now that a few school kids have proven that you don’t need oil to race, and several American race series run on methanol (no that’s not an oil product), can we please stop making cars that run on gasoline? And by the way, also stop pumping money into the super-dangerous liquid nitrogen cars? All that is purely to keep the oil companies in the same place: monopoly. Do you really think they do it for the environment? What if I told you that your current petrol car can run on bio-degradable methanol, with almost no changes? If you have a very modern car, the fuel system will even auto-adapt! But noooo, they won’t tell you that, because the oil companies and governements want to keep the monopoly intact!

Not that you can really do anything about it though. Except maybe not buying liquid-nitrogen or hybrid cars. There are better technical alternatives, although not on the market yet. Boycot the “environmentally friendly” car, force them into making a *real* environmentally friendly car.

Yes, I’m driving a diesel, and a motorbike. And no, I’m not worried about oil-shortage. It’s all bullshit from the oil companies, who could have come up with alternatives a long while ago, but chose not to. If there really was an oil shortage, we all would have been driving on methanol for quite some time now. And co2 emmisions would have been reduced to absolutely 0.

Hardware, Racing

Where’s North again?

2005-10-03 rolfje 1 Comment

Lately, I’ve been collecting race circuit locations using Google Earth. It’s really nice to see the sometimes very detailed satelite images of race circuits. You can actually see the seperate kerbstone blocks of silverstone, and see how many cars there were parked at the time the picture was taken. You should try it.

What really started to catch my interest is the fact that the maps of circuits as they are used in logo’s or (worse) “how to get there”-maps are almost never of the “north pointing up” type. An example:
The circuit “Road America”, which is located a few miles north-east of Atlanta, Georgia, has a web-site which shows you a detailed map of the circuit, as well as pointers to the nearest highways. I have grabbed an image (because they only have these stupid noise making flash movie thingied nobody is interersted in after the second visit). It looks like this:

So, in my quest to find this circuit using Google Earth, I found the circuit to be along the 53, halfway from the I85 to the I985, just like the directions stated. But, the circuit seemed to be “turned around:

I have noticed this with a lot of ciruits. I understand the need of turning and simplifying the circuit to make a nice logo, but when the circuit is depicted next to driving directions, I would make the map “north side up” so nobody gets confused. In the first image, the I85 apears to be west of the circuit, while it is actually east of the circuit.

Google Earth location of Road America (so you can check for yourselves):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<kml xmlns=”http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0″>
<Document>
<Style id=”khStyle662″>
<IconStyle id=”khIconStyle664″>
<Icon>
<href>root://icons/palette-3.png</href>
<x>224</x>
<w>32</w>
<h>32</h>
</Icon>
</IconStyle>
</Style>
<Placemark>
<name>Road Atlanta</name>
<LookAt>
<longitude>-83.81483349103033</longitude>
<latitude>34.14598906888146</latitude>
<range>2835.974155514713</range>
<tilt>-8.888997363646108e-012</tilt>
<heading>0.3186400317363279</heading>
</LookAt>
<styleUrl>#khStyle662</styleUrl>
<Point>
<coordinates>-83.81483349103033,34.14598906888146,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>
</Document>
</kml>

Racing

Drag Racing Season 2005 Calendar

2004-12-11 rolfje No Comments

As usual at the end of august, in 2005 there will be another edition of the Nitro OlympX. Aside from being a great entertainment-for-the-family weekend, it is also round 5 of the FIM/UEM EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIP TOUR:

Round	Venue	Date
1	Santa Pod, England (Main Event)	May 27-30
2	Alastaro, Finland (FHRA Nitro Nationals)	July 1-3
3	Mantorp Park, Sweden (Veidec Nitro Festival)	July 28-31
4	Gardermoen, Norway (Drag Challenge)	August 5-7
5	Hockenheim, Germany (NitrOlympX)	August 19-21
6	Santa Pod, England (European Finals)	September 8-11
–	Bahrain (Dragracing Festival)	November 9-11

Please note that the dates may be subject to change.

More information can be found at Monique’s Top Fuel Drag Racing Site (it’s also the place where I got the schedule from :-), thanks Monique!.

Have a great 2005 season and may the best bike win! (like it did last year 😛 )

Racing

Milling aluminum housing

2004-11-14 rolfje No Comments

Today I found the first good use for the milling machine. I had this cast aluminum housing for an electronics project, with ridges on the inside. I made a hole for a connector in it, but I never got the nut on the inside flat to the surface because of the ridges on the inside of the housing. I decided to use the mill to flatten the surface on the inside of the housing. The housing did not fit in the clamp, so I had to find a way to get it attached to the bed of the mill in a different way. I took a piece of wood, drilled two holes in it and bolted that to the bed of the mill. Then, I used long plywood screws and another piece of wood to hold the housing. In the picture on the right you can see this construction. I used a test indicator to align the house to the X-axis of the bed.

Since I only needed a plane large enough to place a ring and nut on, I roughly adjusted the 6mm mill to just not touch the bottom of the housing. I milled down to the point where the ridges were not visible. The image on the left is the result of the work. The mill is a very nice tool to adjust ready-made electronics housing to your likings.

Hardware, Racing, Workshop