So, what’s up with new trend towards mid-engine performance cars? There’s mumbo jumbo about weight distribution. But no one has mentioned Polar Moment of Inertia. I’ve been watching films of race cars spinning out. Some recover quickly, some do not. Comments?
I was talking with my rat rod builder neighbor about the fallacy in the definition of “Roll Center”, and I showed him a procedure for calculating roll forces (see sketch attached). He looked at it for a couple of minutes then said, “Oh, the suspension linkage on each side is just a compound...
They are promoting the construction of granny flats in San Diego. They have a pre-approved plan you can use for easy permitting.
To quote:
“These are plans designed by a certified architect that they’re making publicly available,” Elyse Lowe, the city’s development services director, told the...
I’ve been undertaking a hydraulic study of some canyons in San Diego and I have found a structure on Google Earth that is not there in reality. It is located at Google Earth Coordinates lat. 32.786860, long. -117.137290. I live across the canyon from this building and it is not there! If you...
Is anybody exploring this? Seems better than a retainer. Seems to be working for all the software providers. Like us with our software, if clients have no choice, they will follow.
I've been fabricating prototypes with water jet cut plates. I have been specifying holes to be drilled to the usual drilling tolerances. A water jet shop suggests water jet cutting the holes and then reaming them to size - it is substantially cheaper.
Does anybody have experience with water...
Any standards in the industry? Local suppliers give me different answers. I submit dxf files and tell them what I want but that doesn’t seem to reach the machine operator. Any standards here I should know about? Thanks.
My best Christmas present ever when I was a little kid was an old carburetor my grandfather cleaned up and gave me along with a little set of tools to take it apart and put it back together. He included a jet driver which he insisted I use on all the jets, and I still use one today.
This is relative to my investigation of the Ariel Atom chassis:
A Flexible Chassis is Slow.
In my quest to understand the importance of chassis stiffness of the Ariel Atom, I was talking with some off-road guys. We have a pretty big off-road community here in the desert and they’re a pretty...
A member on a car forum sent me some dimensions for the chassis for an Ariel Atom for me to run a structural check on. Has anyone else done this? This chassis is torsionally very flexible for a performance car (under 1000 ft lb per degree). Is a torsionally soft chassis now considered better?
I’m working on a drainage basin project in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California and I have come across a dam and reservoir that no one seems to know about. It is not on the list kept by the California Division of Dam Safety. Google Earth coordinates for the dam are Lat. 37.116474°, Long...
I have to design some shock bumpers to stop an 8000 pound X-Ray machine that has to be repositioned frequently to accommodate odd-shaped parts. We will move it on air bearings.
But I will need some means of knowing how fast this thing may move. Before I come up with a fancy engineered...
I read about engineers having problems with clients and contractors. Some of these problems seem best solved through contract termination. What termination clauses does everyone use in their contracts? I use a modified AIA clause which is more specific than the AIA original, but I have never...
I’m working on an FAA Exemption for a client to fly commercial drones. A typical FAA requirement is to fly no faster than 100 mph and no higher than 400 feet above ground level. Also, your operational boundary has to be 500 feet away from someone you don’t want to hit. Before I do the math...
