My discovery of high-end online auto racing came at a very opportune time as I find myself inexorably drifting towards the hostile shores of Boredom Island as I impatiently await the arrival of the RV-12 engine kit. It helps too that I've had some measure of success at it, with the most recent victory surpassing the first in terms of both excitement and satisfaction. The satisfaction comes not only from winning the race but also in no small measure from the fact that this is the first race I've won that didn't require cars in front of me on the track to wreck or spin out. In other words, this was the first race that I won completely on my own merits.
I am the 1%.
The excitement came in the last six laps of the twenty-five lap race. I qualified second, but the pole winner was positioned on the outside of turn one. All I needed was a good enough start to get up next to him and I'd beat him into the first turn and grab the lead. And that is exactly what happened. The next nineteen laps were simply a matter of keeping him a second or so behind me, and as pulse-pounding as those laps were, they were nothing as compared to the finish of the race.
On the nineteenth lap, the guy that had been pushing me from the start must have had a momentary bobble because he was suddenly more than four seconds behind me. Having held him off for more than a dozen laps with him as close as a tenth of a second behind me, I figured it should be a simple matter to cruise through the final six laps to an easy win. I figured that the only things that could derail my victory would be a horrible choke on my part, or an unfortunate encounter with a back marker.
And, as we've all come to expect, merely thinking it was enough to instantiate it. I believe it was only one lap later when a back marker spun right at the apex of a hairpin turn. I can around the turn and plowed right into him. With my nearest competitor only four seconds behind me, there was no time for niceties - I just kept banging on his car until I moved it out of my way. That took just long enough for a car to get caught up with me and pass me as I pushed too hard into the next turn. I resigned myself to a second place finish, but within a lap I had found a weakness in his lap; he was slow into the last turn before the long straight. I leveraged that weakness on the very next lap, but he aggressively moved to block me. Rather than simply fall in line behind him, I braked late and remained on the outside line into the turn at the end of the straight, which allowed me to get up next to him on the inside of the next turn.
All went well for one lap, but on the next lap he got his nose inside of my left rear quarter panel. I couldn't see him there, and by rights he should have dropped back as we entered the turn, but he didn't do so. As I entered the turn, he clipped me and spun me at the apex of the same turn the back marker had balked me in. Luckily, as I spun right in front of him, he tagged me on my left front and turned my car back to the direction I needed to go. Perhaps self-servingly, I took his aggression as a tacit permission to race him a little more roughly than I might normally have done. This amounted to nothing more than a couple bumps against him as I passed him two laps later. After that, it was just a matter of surviving the last two laps.
There. Now that I've provided the narrative, you can see it for yourself in the recording that I made of the race. Note that eighteen of the first nineteen laps have been excised - they'd be pretty boring to watch.
I haven't been completely remiss in my RV-12 work. Here too I concentrated on curves: I sanded down the curved areas on the canopy fairing.
I can't honestly say that I have always known that I have racer's blood in the same way that I can quite forthrightly say that I've always known that I was destined to fly, but the memories of the symptoms are still available as I reflect back on what I can recall of my long ago pre-teen years. In the summer, it was home made carts based on scrap wood and retired roller skates. In the winter is was sleds and anything else that would slide on ice or snow. That was all good, clean fun, but I shudder when I reflect on my first years behind the steering wheel of a real car!
I even went through the karting stage when a track opened in Circleville, just a few miles south of Columbus. I learned a few things about racing over the three year period when I was racing karts:
- I'm a middle-of-the pack guy.
- It's a lot of work and very time consuming.
- It can be very frustrating.
- Money matters, and there is no shortage of people that either have more or are able to apportion a large percentage of their disposable to it. And those are not mutually exclusive, either. There were plenty with both.
- Patience is critical, and I hadn't developed it yet.
- If you don't go home tired and bruised, you aren't doing it right.
What finally got me out of kart racing was fear. There is no roll-over protection in a kart, nor are there any restraints to hold the driver into the seat. Frankly, when speaking of the risk elements, kart racing is closer to motorcycle racing than it is to car racing. Fear made me quit racing, but it didn't cure the itch. Every now and then, I'd go off on one of my research binges where I would dig into a particular marque, thinking that just maybe I could get into racing a real car. There are a number of (what appear to be) relatively low cost options:
Spec Racer Ford is a class of racing car used in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and other series road racing events. The Spec Racer Ford, manufactured and marketed by SCCA Enterprises (a subsidiary of SCCA, Inc.), is a high performance, closed wheel, open cockpit, purpose-built race car intended for paved road courses, such as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Buttonwillow Raceway Park, Road America, Watkins Glen, and many other tracks throughout North America. With more than 871 cars manufactured, it is the most successful purpose built road racing car in the United States.
The Spec Racer Ford would be raced at a racetrack like Mid-Ohio, which is only a little more than an hour from home. Cost for a ready-to-race used car would be right around $20,000.
Legends car racing is a style of race car, designed primarily to promote exciting racing and to keep costs down. The bodyshells are 5/8-scale replicas of American automobiles from the 1930s and 1940s, powered by a Yamaha motorcycle engine. The sanctioning body for Legends car racing is called INEX.
Legends Cars are a "spec" series, meaning all cars are mechanically identical, with the exception of 3 styles of car (Standard coupe, 34 Coupe, and Sedan) available with 10 types of body styles. (New cars are currently offered with only 7 body styles, however many used cars exist with the "older" styles)
Legends cars are raced at the Columbus Motor Speedway, right here in town, and at the Kil-Kare track in Xenia (where the Schmetterling Aviation sponsored NASCAR modified driven by my brother races) about 45 minutes away. A brand new Legends car would cost less than $15,000.
Formula Vee is a popular open wheel, single seater junior motor racing formula, with relatively low costs in comparison to Formula Ford or Formula BMW.
On the international stage, Niki Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi and Keke Rosberg, all Formula 1 champions, raced Formula Vees in Europe or America at the beginning of their careers. In Australia, V8 Supercar drivers Larry Perkins, Colin Bond, John Blanchard, John Bowe, Jason Bargwanna and Paul Stokell were also graduates of Formula Vee.
The class is based on a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, utilizing a collection of the stock parts to form a competitive race car around a purpose-built tube frame and racing tires. The VW engine, transmission, front suspension, brakes and wheels are stock or modified stock parts. The chassis is a tube frame design and the body is fiberglass or carbon fiber. The intention of this class is for the average person to build and maintain the car.
Primarily a class in the Sports Car Club of America many other organizations have adopted the Formula Vee as a class. Over the years, the rules have evolved to improve performance, lower cost, or to allow replacement of discontinued parts.
The Formula Vee would be raced at the same tracks as the Spec Racer Ford. That would mean either racing exclusively at Mid-Ohio, or travelling hundreds of miles for each race. The cost for a Formula Vee car would depend on the vintage - they've been around for a long, long time. A reasonably competitive car would be between $10,000 - $15,000.
So, what's stopping me? Well, it's fear of injury, but not, as you might think, a fear of injuries resulting from racing accidents. No, it's the fear of what the CFO would do to me if I suggested the adoption of another expensive and time-consuming passion. When you factor in the truck and trailer needed to haul the car, storage for the hauler and race car, tools, maintenance costs, safety equipment, tires, and a nearly endless host of other things, the costs would end up exceeding what it costs for me to fly.
Interestingly, with regards to racing this puts me in the exact same position as the thousands of people that lust for flight but are unable to attain it. It is no secret to software developers such as Microsoft that these people will "settle" for a virtual equivalent in large (and profitable) numbers. With more than 10 million copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator sold, an entire industry has sprung up around what is essentially a computer game, albeit an extremely sophisticated one. There are even groups of hobbyists that act as a global air traffic control system, groups that have organized and manage virtual scheduled airlines, and as many physical accouterments to support the simulator as there are for that most gadget-hungry of breeds, golfers.
The (relatively microscopic) equivalent of the Microsoft flight simulator for the Walter Mitty auto racing crowd is iRacing.
iRacing.com is an online, subscription-based racing simulation service for Microsoft Windows created by iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations. In addition to accurately modeled vehicles and tracks, iRacing provides servers on which to race and practice and a sanctioning body to organize and oversee competition within the service.
From the start, iRacing has been marketed as both an entertainment service and a training tool for real life racers. They have established numerous partnerships with real-world racing organizations and series, including NASCAR, GRAND-AM, IndyCar, V8 supercars, the SCCA, the Skip Barber Racing School, the Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, the Star Mazda Championship and Williams F1 among others.
The service was launched to the public on August 26, 2008. As of December 2010, 40,000 individual member accounts had been created.
The iRacing company aims to cater both to real-world racers and racing simulation enthusiasts by offering a realistic simulation of motorsport with accurate track, vehicle and physics modeling, and with all of the cars and tracks officially licensed. iRacing can only be driven online on servers run by iRacing.com, and participation requires a subscription to the service. The subscription package includes a basic set of 10 tracks and six cars with which to practice and race. Additional cars and tracks are subject to additional one-time charges. Vehicles in iRacing are divided into classes which correspond to the identically named driver license classes, except for the two different Rookie car classes which can both be driven with the same Rookie driver license. iRacing creates each track using proprietary Exactrac laser mapping technology to replicate the tracks with millimeter precision.
It is primarily the subscription model that elevates iRacing from 'game' to 'simulation.' There is no shortage of racing games that have an online component that allows for head-to-head racing mano a mano, but the low acquisition cost of those games and the lack of a sanctioning (managerial) body leads to nothing but anarchy on the tracks. Also, games need to sell in large volume to create a return on investment for the developer, and large numbers of people are not going to be attracted to a high-fidelity racing model because the learning curve is far too steep. There are developers that come close, such as Simbin, but none can afford to dedicate the resources to attaining nearly absolute reality in the way that a well-funded subscription-based organization can.
With iRacing, racers have money on the line even to get into a race. That alone tends to influence good behavior on the track, but iRacing goes a few steps further. Because they know who you are (you pay via Visa or other easily identifiable mechanism), they are able to track your behavior by attaching different categories of 'performance points' to your account. These points display to the world whether you are a dangerous jerk or a safety-minded and/or clean racer. A driver's overall safety rating is used as a measure of ability, and this measure determines which of the racing licenses a driver will hold. Everyone starts in the Rookie class, and (hopefully) progresses through the D, C, B licenses on their way to the coveted A license. The license a driver holds determines which racing series he can enter.
Misbehavior in races results in point penalties. Getting too many penalties can cause a driver to lose his license and be returned to the next lower license. It is very, very easy to get negative points, but much more difficult to get positive points. Negative points are assessed for something as simple as getting a couple of tires off track, and progressively more points can be taken for spinning out or having contact with another car. Note that in the latter case, iRacing makes no attempt to determine blame; it doesn't matter if you hit another car or get hit by another car; all cars in any contact incident get penalized equally. The net result of this kind of value rating is similar to the very polite crowd behavior one sees at a gun show: everyone behaves well because the penalties of not doing so are painful.
Positive points are awarded for finishing well in races, and by "well" I mean "better than someone with a lower handicap." Beating higher handicapped racers doesn't do the trick. The license and points held by a racer are often used to ensure that the racer is entered in races against racers with similar rankings. This is smart in a number of ways. First, it encourages newer, less skilled racers to keep racing since they won't be continually demoralized by losing to vastly more experienced drivers. Conversely, it gets the less experienced drivers out of the way of the veterans who would soon become frustrated at tripping over rookies while in a heated race with peers.
Note that I said "often," though. It is not guaranteed. Races are typically started at top of each hour and, despite the international nature of the participants, there can be times when a starting field is too small to allow for a good balancing of participants. For example, consider a race that has only twenty entrants. I don't know the exact algorithm used, but in this hypothetical case, the iRacing system may throw all twenty cars into the same race which could put A license drivers in the same field as rookies, and every skill level in between. Conversely, if there were sixty or so entrants, iRacing could create six 10-driver fields with each group being more closely aligned in skill and ability.
Pricing starts at $12/month, although generous discounts are available for longer subscription terms. No matter the length of the subscription, all services are available. The subscription cost is just the beginning, though. While the entry-level racer has a garage of six cars and nine available tracks to race on, iRacing's financial goal is to sell access to more cars and tracks. This is accomplished by the formation of racing series that use faster, more advanced cars and race on multiple tracks for each scheduled series season.
The six cars included in the base price are:
Note that three of those should look familiar: the Legends car and the Spec Racer Ford (SRF) are in my bullet list of dream cars detailed above. More importantly, note the presence of the Miata. The Miata is a recent entry to the stable and that, combined with this year's Black Friday price reduction of 50% off of a one year subscription, was enough to entice me to sign up for a year. Also, two of the nine included tracks are Lime Rock Park in Connecticut and the world-renowned Laguna Seca track in California. These two tracks are in my list of top five tracks I would love to race at. The remaining three are Mid-Ohio, Watkins Glen, and Elkhart Lake. Those are available for purchase at $14.95 each, and someday I may consider buying them. For now I am still racing with a D license in the rookie series and the tracks required for those series are all included in the base set.
I started with the Spec Racer Ford at Lime Rock Park, partially because that was the car that was scheduled at Lime Rock first. The other reason was because, of the available tracks, Lime Rock is the one I know best, having driven hundreds upon hundreds of laps there in other racing games. The SRF is a purpose-designed race car so it has a multitude of adjustments that can be made to it, but I thought that given my rookie status it would be best to race with the default settings. It's a well-balanced car, which eventually will be a good thing, but it means that it will also be somewhat unforgiving for people used to the forgiving nature of street cars. In other words, it will spin easily.
In the following video, you will be able to see this propensity for rookies to spin the car. You should also note the following:
- Note that I start 4th, make a pass in the first turn to get to 3rd, then relinquish ten positions rather than lose the points that would have been taken for hitting the car that spun in front of me.
- Note that the guy behind my while going into the first turn in lap three was not as careful.
- See how the steering wheel responds to bumps in the track? I have a force feedback steering wheel that uses electric motors to mimic those forces in the physical world. in other words, I can feel every bump and sway in the track.
- Watch how the shadows shift as I go around the track. Also note the reflections in the glass of the tachometer. Cool!!
What the video can't show you is the affect these realistic elements have on me. For the first lap or two, my pulse is well into the hundreds, my hands are sweaty and shaky, and I'm as twitchy as a Chihuahua on an Espresso binge. By the third or fourth lap I start to settle into a slightly more relaxed posture, but that is not to be confused with "calm." The level of concentration required to just keep the car on the rack is intense; get into a bumper-to-bumper race with another car (or group of cars), and the pulse shoots right back up into the triple digits. The races are lengthy, typically running close to thirty minutes.
It feels like five.
Frankly, this online racing, which to the casual observer would look completely sedentary, is the best cardio workout that I get these days.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for my regular readers, having found the SRF to be too stressful I am now almost exclusively racing the Miata. As I was going through various wild scenarios of ways that I could keep my beloved (yet airbag-less) Miata, I briefly considered re-purposing as a race car because the first step in such a conversion is to remove the air bag. That idea didn't even last as long as the discovery of the leaking head gasket but even if it had, the head gasket problem would have spelled doom to that plan. Anyway, the Miata is much more forgiving than the SRF, but it is certainly still possible to spin it. I find it more common now that I've had a few weeks to practice to not spin out of races, but to just lose positions by not hitting the apexes of the turns correctly and thereby losing enough speed to give an advantage to the guy behind me. That, and slowing down to avoid the shenanigans on the rookies that have yet to learn that you need to slow down to go faster.
Another neat thing is that you can customize your paint job.
This scheme has the red of my old Miata and the blue of my soon-to-be new Mustang.
The concept of slowing down to go faster seems odd, doesn't it? It took me awhile to figure it out. I would look at other driver's lap times at Lime Rock and figure that my average 1:02 would leave me distantly behind those guys doing a minute flat. Such has not turned out to be the case. It seems that they are attaining one fast lap for the record books at the cost of dozens of spins and crashes. It's a tortoise versus the hare kind of thing to a respectable degree. In my most recent race, I qualified sixth in a pack of ten. It was a prime time race, so the entry list was long enough to allow me to be paired with nine other drivers in the D and Rookie classes. Those gridded ahead of me had qualifying time in the 1.00.xxx range, while my mid-pack time was something like 1:02.xxx. I figured on starting and finishing mid-pack based on the qualifying times of those in front of me. As can be seen by this results graph, that was not the case.
I got a good start and was able to pass two or three cars going into the first turn as they failed to slow sufficiently to account for cold tires. I worked my way up to the lead, mostly through mistakes made by the impatient cars in front of me. I eventually made a mistake of my own by ignoring one of my personal rules, which is to not try to improve my racing line while in a race - that's what practice is for. I got a couple of tires in the dirt on the outside of turn one and that caused enough loss of traction to get me all the way off the track and into the dirt. While tenderly working my way back to the track (it takes a deft hand to avoid spinning in the grass), I lost four positions, putting me back to 5th. I worked my way back up to 3rd, but couldn't make up the four seconds that separated me from the car in 3rd. Having re-learned the lesson of patience, I was loath to throw away a pretty good finish by trying to drive beyond my normal pace.
I had resigned myself to a respectable third place finish, but as I came around the fastest turn on the track, I saw my opponent sliding through the grass and impacting a wall at a high enough speed to completely flip his car. I never saw what happened to the car that was in the lead, but he must have spun out too; with two laps to go I was back in the lead. This is when the nerves took over again and I had to really work to remain calm. I actually slowed down a little bit, but as the car behind me started getting bigger in my mirrors, I had to step back up to my previous pace. Despite the sweaty hands of a teenager on his first date, I managed to hold on for the win!!
My nerves can only stand one of those a day, so once sufficiently unwound I proceeded on to working on the canopy. Having marked the fiberglass for cutting, I thought it would only be a few minutes work. Unfortunately, I broke the Dremal cutting wheel (again!!) before I was even a tenth of the way done. I decided on a trip to Lowes for new cutting wheels and to see if I could figure out why I keep breaking them. It turns out that I have been using the wrong mandrel. Easily fixed for less than $4.00.
While we were out, Co-pilot Egg had me take her to the thrift store where she hoped to find a suitable garment for "Wear an Ugly Christmas Sweater Day" at school. As I was wandering around the store waiting for her, I came across a beautiful leather jacket in my size for an astoundingly low $30. I snapped that up in a hurry - I've always wanted to have a leather fighter jacket with a cool picture painted on the back, but I never wanted to risk ruining an expensive jacket. For $30, I can roll the dice. Now I just need to come up with a good RV-12 related design, and find someone to paint it for me.
I've done fiber glass work in my basement before, as can be seen by the beautiful kayak that I built as a "Yes I CAN Finish Things" prover project:
This is why I knew that even simple cuts were going to create a lot of dust
See?
Fortunately, I've also learned to never bring that dust upstairs!
First possibility: I've crossed a line in the arena of marital infidelities: I am now sneaking around with a car dealer. Yes, my unbridled lust has led me astray. I have to cleanse my conscience with a full confession: I test drove a Mustang. As thousands (if not millions) of men that have gone before me have rationalized, how can something that feels that good really be wrong?? So what's "cool" about that? Well, this: that car goes like stink! The dealership I went to is so large that you don't have to test drive on public roads; rather, you go to their test track where, in the words of a very naive salesman, you are "free to drive it any way you like." I'm not sure he knew who he was talking to... 85 mph down the straight and hard on the brakes into the hairpin turn, the smell of a brand new engine baking off whatever anti-corrosion gunk they put on there pungent in my adrenalin-flared nostrils, Co-pilot Egg screaming in fear as her woefully short life flashes before her eyes... now that's a test drive. And the best thing about it? That would have to be that I was not driving the car that I will eventually buy! I'll be ordering mine from the factory.
But that's not what's cool. Here's another possibility: I ordered the powerplant kit and it should be here in no more than three weeks! All I have to do is finish up the fiberglass work on the canopy and I'm ready to go!
Cool, yes, but still not what I'm referring to in the title. As it turns out, I'm referring to "cool" in a thermal sense, as in "it sure has gotten cool outside." So cool, in fact, that I've run into a problem with the fiberglass work. I discovered the problem a few days ago when I went out to the hangar to sand off the umpteenth filler coat and found that rather than generating a fine white clinging powder, the sander was actually just moving goopy epoxy/microballoon mush around. The epoxy hadn't cured fully after two days! Too cold, it would appear. I gave it another day, but to no avail. I failed to get this job done before the end of the fiberglassing season.
Truly unfortunate, that, and by no means cool.
In the hippy sense, not the thermal sense.
There was nothing to do but remove the canopy and take it back to the subterranean lair for further work. I had thought getting it broken loose from the airframe might be the hard part of the job, but the liberal coating of wax did the trick. The real difficulty was drilling through the fiberglass to get at the pivot bolts. The problem there was Van's instructions regarding the method for doing so: drill a 3/8" hole centered over the bolt. This is, of course, impossible because as soon as the pointy end of the bit breaks through the fiberglass it runs into the unyielding head of the underlying bolt. What I had to do instead was to use a #40 bit to drill holes around the bolt head and then use a pointy sharp grindy thing on the Dremel tool to finish cutting off the resulting cap.
After that it was an easy job to load the canopy up in the trusty Vera Cruz and haul it to the basement where it sat for a couple days while the fiberglass steadfastly refused to set. Why? because it's too damn cold. Why? because the furnace picked that very day to stop working. Because of that, the last couple days have been filled with my ham-handed attempts to wrestle the furnace back into compliance. The problem appears to be with the ignitor, the replacement of which in a customer-friendly world would be as easy as replacing a light bulb. After all, they know that these things wear out every 3-5 years, so why put a bunch of steel pipe and some kind of electronic valve right smack in the way of removing that stupid ignitor?
I eventually managed to get the thing out of there and a replacement ordered, but even with $40 of Next Day shipping charges I won't have it until tomorrow, at which point the furnace will either be fixed or will have to wait until Plan B a day later, which the confidence-depleting Co-owner scheduled in advance with a professional repair outfit. Actually, I think that was a great idea - if I manage to fix it, she'll just cancel the appointment. If not, we will get to test the theory that I used to talk myself into attempting this repair in the first place: no matter how badly I mess up this furnace, I can't do any damage that sufficient money can't repair.
Hey, it's just a theory!
And when you get right down to it, the indoor shop isn't a bad place to work, really.
Except for being in the shadow of this %$#@* piece of *#^!
I might even say "gorgeous." Wonder why I didn't choose one of those to build?
I'll tell you later.
One of my weirder personal traits, at least on the topic of my ill fit into the world of Corporate America, is my tendency to forget to use my vacation time. Before I know it, it's the end of the year and I have a bunch of vacation days left. In the new "use it or lose it" world that many employers have adopted, this causes me to bundle up my remaining days around the holidays, thereby using the holidays as a kind of multiplier. So, over the next couple of months I will have a total of 29 days off. Still without an engine to install, I'm soon going to run out of work on the -12.
But....
Not soon enough.
You may have noticed that the time between work sessions has notably grown longer - this is mostly because I'm not super enthusiastic about the current job. To put in bluntly, I am not enjoying the drudgery of "filling sanding filling sanding filling sanding.... repeat as required" on the canopy fairings. And this is why I didn't build a Glasair: the entire airplane is fiberglass.
Still, it needs done and with the next nine days yawning emptily in front of my like a great chasm of potential boredom, it's time to get back to serious effort. Pete has missed the work too, near as I can tell, so we arranged for a Saturday morning session. He arrived at the house bright and early and ready for action. Just not exactly the kind of action I was expecting. He suggested that we swing by Edwards Meats on the way to the hangar to pick up some of their wonderful smoked beef sticks. I had no objection to this in general, of course, but I did have to note that the airport is only slightly more than a mile from my house and Edward's is, well, more than a little out of the way:
There also the question of whether or not Mr. Edwards will deign to show up and open the shop on any given day, but the unique nature of freshly smoked beef sticks and, if you're lucky, freshly smoked bacon too, justifies the risk of a wasted trip. Well, "wasted" is too strong of a word; the scenery down in the southeast corner of the state makes for a nice morning ride either way.
We were in luck - the store was open!
This is the Bring Your Own Cow entrance:
They had no bacon, but I was able to get a pound of BBQ and a pound of Pepper Jack Cheese beef sticks, along with a pound of sliced jalapeno trail bologna. Yummy!
As we were headed back, I was inspired by the fact that one of the biggest Ford dealerships on the planet actually was on the way to the hangar. And I kind of wanted another cup of coffee. Hmmmm.... Do you think this place might have a Mustang on the lot?
Yep! They had a dozen of them. None, unfortunately, were convertibles, but they did have a coupe in the model and color that I'm after.
The miraculous new V6: 50% more horsepower and 25% better gas mileage than the old V6:
I suspect that the airspeed indicator is somewhat optimistic for the V6:
It's probably the same indicator that comes with the beautiful V8:
The salesman, who I had hoped to avoid because I'm not a serious shopper at this point, turned out to be quite a bit of help. You have to appreciate just how big this dealership is - they actually have two stop lights on the premises to control the traffic. Had the salesman not intercepted us, we would have trudged around for miles looking for the Mustangs. He was able to whisk us directly to them in a golf cart. That's pretty good service! He was very low pressure and seemed to enjoy just standing there jawing about Mustangs, and he was far more knowledgeable than the lackadaisical dinosaur I had encountered at the first dealership that I had tried.
It's good that I liked the salesman because I actually don't like the guy that owns the place. I used to race against him back when I raced karts and he is a rather unpleasant fellow on the race track. Far too aggressive for what was supposed to be fun, gentlemanly racing. Still... if they will cut me a good deal, I have no problem with buying from his dealership.
We finally did make it to the hangar where I sanded off the rough edges from the last filling session. It's actually starting to look pretty good. All it needed after this session was some light filler. Next time I sand, it will be with a finer grit paper. I'm pretty close to the point where I can put on a few coats of thin epoxy and call it done.
I had thought that it would be emotionally difficult to sell the Miata, but as it turned out in the event it was something of a relief. In fact, I think I dodged a bullet. It started when I received a notification that I had an interested buyer responding to my ad on cars.com after only a few days running. The first email was pretty much along the lines of "Hey, glad you still have it, is there anything horribly wrong with it, and by the way your asking price is about $600 over blue book." That last part came as no surprise; I had pulled the $3,850 asking price out of thin air. I'm surprised it was even that close, to be honest.
After a reply that all of the major deficiencies had already been disclosed in the ad and the inclusion of an internet link to a few more pictures, I received a missive that positively exuded enthusiasm for buying the car. All that remained to be accomplished was the securing of a loan and a test drive. A visit was scheduled for a couple of evenings hence. On the eve of the test drive, I decided that a better impression would be made if I brought the car back home (it's been stored in the hangar with the RV-6 - its corpse wasn't even cold before an opportunistic Co-pilot Egg laid claim to its bay in the garage) and washed it up. After a good scrubbing and a drive around the block, I arrived back at the hangar and was surprised at being greeted with the smell of antifreeze. It's never exhibited that particular odorous trait before, so I was concerned. Things that I'm trying to sell have a long and sordid history of breaking at the last minute and I was afraid that the unfortunate trend was to continue. Story of my life, in glorious 3D and Dolby surround.
I didn't have time to diagnose the problem at the time, so I decided to contact the presumptive buyer and ask him to try to come a little earlier than we had arranged. I figured I'd tell him that there might be a problem, then drive around for fifteen minutes or so to get the fluids hot and pressurized; surely if there was a leak we'd be able to find it. I was hoping for a loose hose. After a nice drive through the country, we arrived back at the airport and popped the hood. I looked all around the radiator and the various hoses running to and from it, but was unable to find the leak.
"Here it is," said the buyer. "It's leaking at the head gasket."
"Ohhhhh, nooooooooo!" I thought. Having recently spent something on the order of $1,500 having a head gasket replaced on one of my other cars, I figured this was the end of the deal. With blue book at $3,200, I figured I'd be lucky to see $2,500 in light of this revelation. He hadn't walked away yet, though, and he wanted to talk price, so I steeled my nerves prior to hearing how bad it was going to be. I figured whatever he offered, no matter how low, I was going to take it.
"So," he said, "what with the air bag being broken and the head gasket leaking, I don't think I'm going to be too close to your asking price. How does $3,300 sound?"
At which point I opened the trunk, pulled out my sombrero, and did the Mexican hat dance.
Well, not really, but I was having a hard time adopting a stern, pensive face while I pretended to be reluctantly deciding whether or not I could live with such a ludicrously low offer.
"Well," I said thoughtfully, "I guess that's fair."
So, it's on to the replacement. There's been a rather interesting development on that front as well. I had been planning on finding another relatively low budget convertible, as you may recall, and had briefly considered an eight year old Ford Mustang. I wasn't thrilled about the comparatively high fuel costs of a heavy car being dragged around by an anemic V6, though. A discussion with the Co-owner on the topic has shifted my viewpoint.
Having used the Miata to keep 44,000 miles off of our "good" car, it is in great condition and has far less that the 101,000 miles on it than it would have had without the Miata bearing the brunt of my daily commute over the last four or five years. Having recently bought a nice, comfortable SUV, we no longer really need the four door car in the way we did before. The upshot is that she suggested trading it in the low-mileage sedan and getting a new sporty car rather than another old beater that would inevitably face the same end-of-life issues that claimed the Miata. With that in mind I started researching newer cars. As it turns out, Ford replaced the old V6 engine in the base model Mustang for the 2011 model year. The new engine puts out 50% more horsepower, yet improves the EPA mileage from a measly 24 mpg to a respectable 31 mpg.
Wow!! Mexican hat dance! Where do I sign??
So here's what I'm thinking about now:
Of course, I'm not going to do anything until 1) after winter, and 2) the RV-6 is sold. But it sure is nice to have a plan!
With all of that going on, plus being weeks overdue on a couple of game reviews for Gaming Nexus, I haven't done much on the airplane. As you may recall, I had slathered on a bunch of cake icing around the canopy to fill in the low areas of the fiberglass. I also mentioned that I'm not very good at icing cakes. That was no false modesty:
Well. That's really going to take some sanding, isn't it. Good thing I have a machine for that!
Even as I was sanding I could see that I'm going to need at least two more filler coats of icing. I did manage to scrape up a spare half hour to get a batch mixed up (thicker!) and spread on. I hope to get out again soon to give the new batch a light sanding prior to applying yet another batch. For as long as this is taking, I'm glad I decided to hold off on ordering the engine. I had thought this would only take a couple of weeks; it's shaping up to be harder that I had expected.
That kind of outcome was bound to come around again, eventually. Story of my life.
It's not that the Ohio weather was any great shakes when I departed for southern climes on a business trip early last week, but the weather that I returned to is worse yet. Not worse in the sense that inconvenient forms or precipitation are covering the roads and making things slippery, but that isn't for want of sufficiently low temperatures. Let's see.... a quick glance at the internet thermometer shows 28F on the other side of the walls. Brrr!
Having suffered the indignities inherent in modern air travel (up to and including a seat-kicker behind me and a top-of-lung non-stop screaming diaper-filler right next to her, both accompanied by the type of negligent parent that ensures no improvement in their behavior in the foreseeable future) and the inconveniences of hotel living for nearly a week, I needed a couple of days to recuperate and regain momentum on the sundry initiatives that laid fallow in my absence. It could have been worse, I suppose. As I was sitting at the gate in Atlanta waiting for my flight to depart (three hours!!), a pilot walked by who was seemingly engaged in some form of remote-parenting, more than likely of a teenager. What caught my attention was that he had a cell phone up to his ear and he was yelling, "Look at me! LOOK AT ME!!" into it. I was not alone in breathing a sigh of relief when he continued on past our gate; none of us were thrilled with the idea of our lives being in the hands of a pissed-off pilot that doesn't know that he can't be seen through a cell phone.
Having rested, recuperated, and re-engaged in routine requirements/recreations, I resolutely returned to the regrettably repetitive work of filling the gaps in the canopy fiberglass. This requires the mixing of a filler called "micro balloons" into a cup of epoxy.
MICRO BALLOONS
Glass and quartz bubbles also called micro balloons used to add to mixed epoxy and hardener. Totally non-structural and very light, with a texture and color approaching talcum powder they are used to thicken epoxy.
The 'talcum powder' comparison is spot-on. The powder is so fine that it behaves almost like a liquid when you're stirring it, with one critical difference being that it also likes to blow out of the cup as a fine dust. Considering that this dust is comprised of such lung-unfriendly materials as glass and quartz, you can imagine the pains I went to in order to avoid inhaling it.
When thickened enough to resist against the unwavering pull of gravity, the mix takes on the consistency of cake icing.
Unfortunately, I am not very good at all at icing a cake. I ended up just smearing on as much as I thought it would take to level out the transitions from one area of fiberglass to another. Sanding will have to smooth it all out.
The stuff is reportedly very easy to sand, but I suspect that it is going to generate copious amounts of the very unpleasant dust that was floating around as I was mixing the batch. So there's something to look forward to!
As I'm sure we all know, fathers are put on this planet for one, and only one, primary purpose which is, of course, to embarrass our children whenever and wherever possible. This is a functioncalling that I answer with the utmost dedication and diligence. Opportunities have arisen far less often as Egg has grown to an age where she pretty much has a life of her own and doesn't accompany her old man with the frequency of past years, but events transpired this week such that we found ourselves doing some shopping at my favorite bulk food warehouse, Gordon's Food Service. As we were making our way to the checkout, Egg grabbed a little plastic cup containing a free sample of some form of candy product. Happily munching away as I took care of the purchases, she started chatting with an idle cashier who shared that it had been her that had to manually fill all of those little cups with candy.
"Don't worry," she assured young Egg, "I'm sanitary."
To which I replied, "What a coincidence! I'm sterile!"
Perhaps you can imagine the mortified look plastered on young Egg's face, but I tend to doubt it.
Now, you may be tssking in disapproval this very moment, but you have to know that Egg will not rest until she gets even. In fact, I'm pretty sure she did that every evening. As we were driving home, I heard the unmistakable tacky tacky tacky of her exchanging text messages with someone. I asked her what was going on and she told me that she was telling one of her girl friends about the manner in which I had ensured that she could never again shop at GFS.
"I don't get it; she thinks you're funny," she said with a confused tone.
"Well, I've always felt that she is mature beyond her years."
A brief pause.... two hands cupped over an area in which young women seem to have great deal of concern about physical development....
"You mean here?"
Me, every bit as mortified as Egg had been just a few minutes before, "NO!! I meant her sense of humor!!"
I'm pretty sure that was a cunning and deliberate payback.
Egg was always a pretty fun child to hang around with, but it just keeps getting better and better. I'm sure going to miss her next year when she goes off to college.
That eventuality is what ate up most of the weekend. Rather than watch football or work on the plane, we made a trip down to Lancaster to look for a place for her to live next year. The college she will be attending there is too small to have dorms, so we need to find an apartment for her. Preliminary internet searches did not bode well - it seems that there are no apartments to be had there. Fortunately, we were able to drive around enough to find a few promising locations conveniently located near the school. We also found the mall. Wherein we found a dress shop. Wherein we she found a dress.
Between finding housing and clothing, we both found the trip to be eminently satisfactory.
Sunday morning was also devoted to a road trip, this time to a car dealer about eighteen miles west of Columbus to look at a potential replacement for the Miata. It wasn't a Mustang, though. At the urging of Co-pilot Egg, I have agreed to consider a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible. This trip, alas, was a complete bust. As it turns out, the car dealer in question is not particularly diligent about keeping their online inventory page up to date.
It was after 3:00 Sunday afternoon before I was able to make it out to the hangar, despite the fact that I had been itching to get out there all weekend. Sure, I'm just going to be sanding and sanding and sanding for the next few weeks, a job that typically holds no appeal whatsoever, but this time is different: I had a new tool that I was desperate to try out.
One of the challenges of sanding along the front of the canopy is that the area needs to be formed into a curve with a roughly 2" diameter. Van's suggests using a block of round wood or something to attain that shape. "Bah!" says I. I intend to use something far more sophisticated. I hereby introduce you to the Skil Octo(tm):
I hear you. "Calm down, Fella, it's just an electric sander!"
Well, true, but note this: it has a dust collector! That's a pretty big deal when sanding fiberglass in the hangar; if not captured, the dust will migrate into the adjoining hangars and get all over the neighbors' airplanes. To which I'd normally say, "Yeah? So??" but it's different now that I am my own neighbor. I don't want to have to be dusting my RV-6, after all.
I hear you. "Calm down, Fella, it's just an electric sander with a dust collector!"
True, but check this out: it has a collection of attachments. First, and most important, the 2" radius:
And for those tight areas, the pointy-skinny attachment:
Cool, huh?
It came with a bunch of sandpaper, including a nice 60 grit perfect for the first rough sanding. I knocked that out in about an hour, but it soon became apparent to Pete and me that this job was going to require more than sanding; there was also going to be quite a bit of filling. The worst parts are along the top of the sides and the trough along the front of the canopy.
We had plenty of time and thought we'd mix up a batch of filler to apply, but we ran into a problem. The plans tell us to mix up a batch of filler using epoxy and micro balloons, and we have no micro balloons. We have flox, but that's not the same thing. That was it for the day; I had to place an order with Aircraft Spruce for a pound of micro balloons. The picture in the catalog looks like a hand-filled bag - I sure hope whoever fills it is sanitary!
I made an offhand comment about the pending loss of my cute little red Miata (lovingly nicknamed "Ernesto") the other day which has not gone unnoticed. So, in acquiescence to popular demand, I shall attempt to explain what has transpired.
The air bag warning light has come on, and stayed on.
No, it doesn't sound like such a big deal at first blush, but...
Edmunds provides an appraisal value for private sale of $1,699. Now I consider this to be ludicrously low since I can easily find contemporaneous models with asking prices approaching $4,500, but I don't know whether they're selling at that price. Mine has fairly high mileage at 117,000+, but it also has fresh paint, a fresh top, and some wicked nice wheels and tires. I figure that the $4,000 region is more accurate, but all of that is moot: fixing the airbag is at least a $1,000 job, and I'm afraid that if I throw another grand into, something else will break and I'll be right back to where I am now. And $1,000 is the bottom line estimate; the Mazda dealer (I know, but small shops want nothing to do with this kind of work) wasn't even sure they could find the parts.
Your first reaction will be, "So? Drive it without the airbag. Even in that state, it has to be safer than a motorcycle." Well, yes, but there's a reason that I don't ride a motorcycle. You have to understand that Ernesto is my drive-to-work car, and my drive to work is 35 miles each way of moderately dangerous highway driving. I've seen too much mayhem in my fifteen years of traversing the city every day to be comfortable with driving a protection-impaired car. If Ernesto was just a "take a nice drive on a pretty day" car, I might feel differently. He's not, though; his entire raison d'être was to provide an economical means for getting to and from work without running up the mileage on our "good" cars. I cheated a little bit with the selection of a Miata for that task since it was really only useful for 3/4s of the year, but there was a little trade-off for having a car that helped to make the normally onerous commute enjoyable.
So, here we are. It doesn't make any economic sense to repair Ernesto. He is to be sold off to the highest bidder, and it is questionable as to whether his role as "enjoyable ride" will be filled with another vehicle. There are a few reasons why a replacement may not be possible: 1) I'm leery of buying another fifteen year old Miata lest a similar mechanical situation arise, 2) I can't afford a newer Miata, 3) the only other affordable convertible (a convertible being an immutable requirement) I like would be a 2004-ish Ford Mustang (appox. $8,000 - $10,000) and it has a six cylinder engine, which flies in the face of the "economical" requirement, and 4) the mileage on the "good" car has reached a level where the idea of keeping it low seems silly. So, it comes down to whether I need a sports-ish car, or whether this is more a case of wanting a sports-ish car.
The saddest thing about all of this??
It's the fact that "need" has entered into my financial lexicon.
I'm not sure how or when that happened, but there it is. I'm not sure which is the more depressing, the loss of the Miata, or the realization that I might not be able to talk myself into replacing it.
2004 Ford Mustang - asking $9,850 (18 city / 27 highway)
Work on the RV-12 slowed again this week both because of all of the other unrelated work that has been piling up and because the next step, as with the last, requires a fairly big commitment of time. Van's says three hours. I believe them.
I met with Pete today for a brief preparatory session. The next job is more fiberglassing - this time we will be laying down thin strips of glass across the area where the canopy bubble meets the forward top fuselage. The preparation came down to cutting ten 36" long strips of various widths, ranging from 2 3/4" wide down to an absurdly narrow 1/4" wide.
We would have gone ahead with the epoxy work too, but it was only 50 degrees in the hangar and the West Systems 206 hardener I bought requires at least 60 degrees to work properly. We're hoping that it gets warm enough later in the day to proceed.
