3/10/09

Right after I signed off of the rant yesterday, I got another e-mail from the dude selling the Dessert Eagle. He had another offer of $1,200.00 and wanted to give me “first refusal.” I really appreciated that, even though I'd pretty much already decided I was going to have to pass. I was just waiting to try and think of a way to back out gracefully. Fortunately the situation worked out and all will be well. Oh, I'll have a .50 caliber pistol someday, be it a Dessert Eagle or that Magnum Research BFR at Academy. The BFR is about half the price and I know I can get 500 S&W ammo at BloodBath and Beyond. Damn, now I want to go buy the BFR. Perhaps I'll go look at it again some evening. I need to take the Space Gun out and put a few rounds through it. I think I might have to do that this weekend. Perhaps I'll bring it with me to the shop tomorrow evening and… no, we need to work on Roku-Hyaku some more. Although, what are we going to do? I suppose we could get the studs into three of the corners and have at least that much of the suspension “done.” I don’t know. Oh, I told y'all I sent some Craig’s List finds to John yesterday, right? Well, he selected a few he thought looked/sounded good but we still kind of left everything up in the air. We did discuss orienting the engine as it sits in the bike and going with the Northern differential again. The current thinking is that a small displacement (600-750cc) four from a bike isn't going to make much more than fifty foot/pounds of torque so hopefully the $100.00 differential will work. I'd much prefer to have the cylinders facing the wind than turn the thing sideways anyway. I also think we could probably get away with a “naked” Datsun differential. Here’s what I mean by that. If we were to take the differential unit out of a Datsun axle, replace the ring gear with a sprocket, and mount that out in the open with CV flanges sticking out from the spider gears, it ought to work. Well, I know it would work, but how long would it last? That is the question. I suppose some sort of “case” could be fabricated around the differential cage and filled with oil if we thought the car would see much wet weather duty (tee hee, I said doody!), but I don’t know how we’d seal the output flanges. It could be packed with grease instead of oil, that would take longer to pookie out of the splines of the spider gears, I would think. We might want to replace the support bearings with sealed units too, but that shouldn’t be too big an issue. We can get those at McMaster-Carr, moist likely. I think if the $100.00 differential from Northern ‘splodes, we have an option before jumping straight to the $2,500.00 Quaiffe differential or welding the thing solid. Well, it’s a thought at least. I don’t know. We need to talk it over some more and/or bite the bullet and buy a bike. Hopefully we’ll have some more ideas tomorrow evening at the shop. We’ll see. Feh, I think I'm going to call it a rant as I seem to be just rambling on about nothing now. I'll talk to y'all again Thursday.