Food For Thought

Here's a couple of things from the race at Terre Haute last weekend I found interesting.

Here's a way to locate the rear end under your old race car - or under an old boat trailer. Surly's got an old trailer that needs some work. He's planning on converting it to some kind of bike/utility trailer but the axle is located by a rod that runs from the top of one frame rail to the bottom of the axle on the other side. When the suspension compresses it swings the axle through an arc and ended up cracking some things. We might be able to incorporate something like this into the design. I was thinking Watts linkage or go with a 4 bar set-up and a track locator bar dragster style. Just kicking ideas around for now.

There were several different kinds of front suspensions on the cars.

A few different types of torsion bar set-ups. The top photo is like the old Indy cars - torsion bars with shocks. The lower photo has a similar type of suspension but uses coil-overs.

This one uses a straight axle, 4 bar and coil-overs. Pretty much identical to the type of set-up you would see on the rear end of a drag car/hot rod. Again, just making some mental notes. 

I came across a couple of other things I found interesting lately not automobile related, both from the Wall Street Journal. The first one is from an editorial concerning an elementary school in Mississippi. 

"Disappointing results with other approaches, such as hiring reading coaches or setting up model classrooms, convinced the Barkdales that you couldn't change a school without changing its leadership."

No kidding. Never would have guessed that, says the man who has witnessed that first hand more than once.

The other item is an editorial about a "documentary" dealing with the subject of autism and vaccinations. I have no idea if there is any link between the two but according to the article, "The frequency with which autism is diagnosed in the U.S. increased from 1 in 2500 in 1985 to 1 in 68 in 2010". Regardless of the cause, that's a big time scary increase that's going to cause a lot of problems in the schools, as well as for everyone else involved, of course. If it's not a result of vaccinations, somebody needs to figure out what's causing it.

All for now.