For Sale!

I should start by apologizing to people who actually read my blog, I just haven't had time or money to make any progress in quite a while. I've also had ideas I would like to share and discuss here - but no time to put them in a good format for the blog.

So I am selling off what I can of my project car, which was supposed to become Mid7. I'm not giving up, I have just had a bit of a priority shift. My wife doesn't want me to sell it because it seems to her that I am giving up on a dream. I can see now though that a project of this scope is not well suited to a man of my age with a young family (and other less time-consuming hobbies). Going forward I would like to work on getting more tools for my garage, I badly need a compressor, bandsaw, sandblaster, drill press, etc.

I will leave this blog up for whatever use anyone gets from it. In the future I am somewhat interested in continuing to post about my interests such that it would read like a magazine made for people sharing my interests. I'm just not sure if it is helpful or narcissistic. I want to avoid the latter.

If you care, or are interested continuing to read about homebrewing, urban gardening and hop growing, far-fetched ideas for homebuilt transportation, and other sorts of figure out how to DIY because your "overly value conscious", please speak up!

Thanks for reading!

Matt

My Son Noah's Birthday

Excuses...

I just wanted to get a brief update in here for everyone who still reads my blog, even though I have been sadly lacking in new posts. My wife is scheduled to deliver a big baby boy tomorrow morning! We are both very excited and feel extremely blessed. This means that I won't be getting too much done on Mid7 in the near future though.

To be honest, Mid7 as a project isn't well suited to my life situation right now. I could work on it in hour increments here and there, but it is difficult to be motivated enough to spend every free hour I have in the garage when I know that I still won't drive it for a few more years (working at this pace). I'd much rather have a beater anythingmobile that handles well, and do easier upgrades on when I feel like it. I've actually been brewing more and more lately becuase it doesn't take too long to make a batch, I enjoy "engineering" the brewing process, and then I get really good beer to drink (for about $3 per six pack). I may get some brewing posts in here in the future as well.

I have plans to expand the scope of what I post here soon. I have been working though the design of a 3 wheeled car that handles like a motorcycle. When I'm done getting it sketched out I plan to post my drawings and discuss the concept here. I frequently have ideas that I could probably commercialize or patent, but at this point I would rather present them publicly and let others use them. Patents are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to make money with. This 3 wheeled car is the first such idea (if you don't count Mid7).

Random Car Thought

This thought struck me on my way home tonight, and then sort of brewed a bit farther while I was running. Cars are an answer to a problem, getting you and your stuff from point A to point B. At it's most basic, a car is more comfortable than a bike, all-weather capable, and effortless. That is much less than most people buy, and less of a car than is even available (unless it's used).

Cars aren't just a vehicle to get around in, they are a vehicle carrying additional bells and whistles car companies are selling. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and for car companies it's good business. It's just interesting that now every widget tacked on to a car to make it more attractive to customers also uses more energy. This is at odds with a policy of saving energy that most people agree on.

So when you understand that car companies make money by adding extra stuff to cars, it's easier to understand why they build the cars they do. When the big 3 automakers imply "Americans won't buy small (efficient) cars" what they really mean is "We can't make as much money selling those cars".

The truth is, there is a huge market for cars just like this. They are called "used" cars. All the stupid features you don't need in the first place are broken or have been stolen, and all you use it for is to get from point A to point A.5, where you call a tow truck to take your car back to point A so that you can fix it. All the used cars I have ever owned got just as good or better gas mileage than new ones, and that is currently one of the most marketed features on new ones.

Typing this out has really helped me realize why no automaker ever seems to build a car that is "just right" for me.

Fall Update

Wow. It's been a whole season since I have done anything on Mid7. I've gotten a few nudges from people who are apparently interested in this project. So I'll give a little re-cap of the summers events and hopefully get back to doing something soon.

Most importantly, my Wife is pregnant with our first baby. Noah is due in January! He will certainly take priority over working in the garage. Earlier in the summer I installed a dishwasher and new countertops to prepare for his arrival. No more washing dishes by hand!

When it got warm out in the spring I was also distracted with all sorts of gardening and lawn work. We are the only family on our street with a vegetable garden in the front yard. I tried to grow my own hops for brewing as well, but first year plants combined with a hail storm that broke them in half means no harvest this year.

Lately I have also been getting my brewing equipment together, transitioning to all grain brewing outside on a turkey fryer. Thanks to Flying Bison Brewery for an old keg that became my new 13 gallon brewpot. I may write about my homebrewing exploits here in the future.

I've also been really distracted with other design ideas. Working on projects depends on my own enthusiasm, so when I get on another idea it's hard to motivate myself to get out to the garage to fit tubes.

Thanks to everyone who reads my blog and encourages me to keep up with things. That's a big part of the value of this blog for me. In the next weeks and months I plan to detail some of my other designs to help get them out of my head, and also someone may want to take them on as a project of their own. Now that it's getting cold out again I'll be getting back to fabrication.

Thanks for reading.

Side "Truss" Analysis

I was wondering if I can use a few smaller tubes in the sides of the chassis, the truss-like structures on either side of the cockpit. So I decided to model them in Pro/E and do an analysis. (I am now doing all my CAD work in my old student copy of Pro/E).

Often when doing analysis, simplifications are made to speed up the work and allow the designer to focus on a particular area of interest. Sometimes spaceframe designers optimize tube frame chassis designs one segmend at a time, for example modeling only from the front suspension to the front bulkhead. In this case I am only working with one side of the chassis. In reality it does not lie on a single plane, but I have simplified it slightly since it is close. I am doing this only to consider the relative effect 2 tubes have on the strength and stiffness of the chassis so I don't care about very small differences.

So... time to use some science and see what happens.

I constrained the rearmost nodes (where the roll hoop would be), and applied a very high load identically to the front nodes (where the front wall of the cockpit would be).



What I found after several iterations is that the node on the bottom tube in the middle of the truss needed to be moved 9" toward the front to reduce stress on the lower tube, which also results in increased stiffness. I wanted to make the 2 tubes forming a "V" in the center of the truss from .75" x .065" square tubing instead of 1.5" x .095" as I had originally planned. My quick and dirty FEA check showed, however, that this would reduce the stiffness of the structure by 10%. So I will be using the larger tubes.

Rust Policy

I spent the last 2 evenings trying to change the fuel tank in my '98 Sunfire. I took some pictures so that people who live in California can better share my misery. After 10 years and ~130,000 miles many critical parts of my Sunfire are well on their way to dissolving. At this point the fuel tank, fuel lines and brake lines are all severely rusted. I only changed the gas tank since that was all that was actually leaking.

I have a point to make though, with all the talk of renewable, sustainable, and green products - why not legislate that all brake and fuel lines must be stainless steel and gas tanks must be plastic? Gas has been seeping out of my tank for the last 3 months because it was all rusted up, how many other cars are there in the same condition? How many gallons of fuel and oil leak out of rusting cars every day? If congress legislated non-corroding materials appropriatley, not only would pollution be reduced but lower income families with used cars would have fewer large repair bills. Certainly automakers would never make this change on thier own, because in most cases it adds no value for the original customer, aside from possible resale value.

If you have a car with 150,000 miles on it and all the fuel and brake lines are leaking then you might as well throw it out if you can't fix it yourself because it's hardly worth fixing. What's better, a 100% recyclable car, or one what you can afford to fix and keep driving?

I would appreciate some comments on this, does it bother anyone else?

Neon Engine Removal

So here is the rest of the account of the Neon engine removal. We had an early spring here in Buffalo this year... yard work, mountain biking, and beer making have taken up all my garage time.

I rented an engine hoist for a day for $25, and it was well worth it. Everything came out without too much trouble. My friend and singletrack riding accomplice Travis Slagle was a huge help. He and my wife handled the picture taking as well. Here are some pictures.