Daily Hillclimb Build (s30)

[The Engine Room]

I can't say I wouldn't have just formed up and poured a dead-flat concrete pad right there.

[drummingpariah]

I had considered it. We're doing that for the lathe right now, but this floor is really terrible. It looks like the underside of the building was once packed dirt, but now several sections have eroded away and they're hollow under the concrete. As such, several sections of floor have shifted by as much as 1/2" in just 6 months. This table can be level no matter where I put it, and has the added benefit of getting my work off the floor, and even allowing me to weld the underside of the work.

 

Also, welding is fun. I had to shake the rust off my welding skills, and this was a great  excuse.

[drummingpariah]

This project is definitely slow-moving, but I managed to finish the chassis table up within 0.01° (the most precise measurement I can takeand am extremely happy so far. I have a few weeks before my tubing bender arrives, so I'll probably add some 1" square tube reinforcement to keep it rigid no matter what.

 

[Stoney]

People often wonder why projects can take so long, and it's making things like this that draw out the process, new garage, new hoist, custom tools for a specific job, car rotisserie, spray booth, saving up funds to buy a welder/tools/parts etc, however it's the side projects like this, that often return just as much satisfaction as the finished result or add to it further.

[drummingpariah]

That's a big part of why professionals can apparently work so quickly. When you're already tooled up for a job, you can just do the job. In software development, we often refer to this process as 'shaving the yak' - taking care of all the related projects that need to be wrapped up in order to do the main project.

 

Speaking of yak-shaving, I was hoping to get a new software project released at work this week, but was disappointed that it's getting pushed off to next week (for good reasons, but it's still disappointing). I ended up taking out all those feelings on the chassis table, and added some leg reinforcements to it.

 

[LTJ]

Wow, great thread, enjoyed reading through it.

Shame there has been so much hassle getting the Datsun done, but I am sure it will be awesome when it does get there!

 

Nice work on the jig table too!

[drummingpariah]

Thanks mate, even with the setbacks I'm having a great time with this project. Last night's big project was to get the lathe motor on the lathe and put it on the pad we poured last week. Unfortunately, the motor sticks out farther than the measurements we had, so we're going to have to stitch the pad to be around 4" wider. Womp womp.

 

 

The second fail was unboxing and locating the tubing bender. I'm all set to set the concrete bolts, but it looks like the 1.5" dies weren't shipped at all. I only got  the 1.75" dies. It isn't enough to stop me outright, but that's going to push back a lot of the reinforcement/rigidity upgrades on this.

 

[LTJ]

Any updates on your build?

[drummingpariah]

I'm not QUITE ready to post another update, but I've gotten a fair amount done, yes. A lot of my time recently has been moving things around, getting stuff in storage for winter, and getting the tubing bender set up and tuned.

 

 

Stay tuned, there's more coming soon.

[LTJ]

 

Stay tuned, there's more coming soon.

:thumbup:

[drummingpariah]

Here's how it is. After realizing that I couldn't make it to enough hillclimb events to be in the final points standing, I decided to focus on prepping for 2017.

 

Beater with a Heater
I haven't really worked on the CRX lately, and just got a couple motorbikes running. They've treated me great throughout the winter, and I have no complaints there. However, we'll have a bunch of snow soon, and I don't really want to crawl under the CRX. Instead, I picked up this $750 WRX. It needed some rust cleanup (the spare CRX quarter panel I had became a WRX quarter panel), and an o2 sensor, and it's been great for the past week.

 

 

The Taller Hauler

While the Datsun will be driven daily, I want to make sure I can bring sufficient race spares, tires, and a trailer to bring it home if/when I throw it off a cliff. I purchased a 2000 e350 with a 7.3liter turbodiesel and 100k miles for $2600. It should have no problem hauling whatever I put behind it.

 

 

Trailer

I can just barely fit a car into the 16' box, but it's a tight fit and I really want to use that box for sleeping/cooking/parts/workbench/etc. Instead, I asked around and found that a friend had a free open trailer rotting away on his farm. I put some fresh tires and wires on it, and hauled it home to the Makerspace. I'm just getting ready to order some replacement fenders, clean up the woodwork, and por15 the frame, then I can call that done as well.

 

Driven Daily Datsun

The frame table is done, the front suspension jig is in place, and I've done some test bends on the JD2 bender. It's coming along, but I don't really have anything new to show for it (yet).

[LTJ]

Looks like the pieces of the puzzle are lining up for next year!

[Stoney]

As you said so perfectly, Shaving the Yak

[drummingpariah]

Further yak-shaving got the trailer deck removed (which sucked), then I cleaned and sprayed a few coats of por15 on it. It came out great, but they really seriously aren't kidding about how tough that coating is. I had to throw a paint gun away; Acetone, thinner, a few different types of acid, and a wire brush couldn't get this stuff out. Also, my hands will be black for the next week or two.

 

I completely rewired, heat shrink'd, loomed, and grommet-ed, all of the wiring, and I'll get some replacement fenders soon (maybe swing-down fenders to make loading/unloading easier).

 

 

Slowly. Surely. Things are coming together. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to replace all the decking planks or not. It'll depend entirely upon how much replacements would cost (it might save me a bunch of work, and give me a better quality result).

[Laecaon]

Fyi, por15 isn't 100% UV safe. It will discolor in sun light.

[hobospyder]

Can't you paint on top of por15?

[drummingpariah]

Fyi, por15 isn't 100% UV safe. It will discolor in sun light.

The instructions are pretty clear about it. I'll have it all covered in decking though, and may coat it if I have some spare paint left over.

 

Can't you paint on top of por15?

Not only can you, it's recommended.

[drummingpariah]

I've done a bunch of test bending, and started putting together the start of the tube frame. Tying it all together requires some more measurements, so I tossed the body back together for the night.

 

Here's my 'measuring stick' for the bender, indicating how much material I need to have, and gives me a good cheater mockup to ensure that bent tube will fit in 3 dimensional space.

[LTJ]

:thumbup:

[drummingpariah]

Tangent time!

Updates are going to slow down a bit now. You could say that work has been busy, but that doesn't begin to describe things. Essentially, I work for an internet performance company, and one of our key products is Dynamic Name Resolution (DNS). DNS is like the phone book for the internet: You ask where John Smith lives, it gives you some addresses to send your messages to. The difference is that you ask for a URL and it gives you the internet address in response.

09:32 $ dig +noall +answer community.ratsun.net
community.ratsun.net.	42012	IN	A	216.70.109.209

Your computer now knows to say,

Hey 216.70.109.209, can you tell me what the content for "/topic/57360-daily-hillclimb-build-s30/page-10" is please?

 

The ratsun forum software then figures out what page you want to view, and ships this whole page that you're reading back to you. Some implementations are more complicated than others, but that's essentially how the whole internet works. Every server has a limit to what it can handle though, and all the pipes leading to each server have their own limits.

 

This weekend, we were attacked (different from being hacked, btw) by a bunch of fridges, phones, traffic lights, and baby monitors. Here's how an attack works. Think of the internet as water. Most computers drink from the internet like dogs. They throw out their tongue, and hopefully some internet splashes into their mouth. Big servers are fancier, they have straws so they make sure they get as much of that internet in their mouths as possible. This weekend, someone (I have no idea who or why, but see your local conspiracy theorist for some colorful ideas on Clinton, Trump, Putin, Korea, and/or Aliens) turned a fire hose in our faces.

 

 

We spilled some water when they first turned it on, but through an heroic effort from many smart and dedicated engineers, we're mitigating this attack (which is impressive, for a variety of reasons) and have figured out how to drink from that firehose fairly comfortably.

 

This is one of the few things in life that takes higher priority than the car, and that means it's going to be ignored for a week or so. As far as I'm concerned, this is what war looks like today. Instead of bombing factories or railroad tracks, the new infrastructure to attack is the internet. It's the most critical piece of infrastructure we have today.

 

If you'd like more facts on what's happening:

http://dyn.com/blog/dyn-statement-on-10212016-ddos-attack/

[DatMo]

I'm intrigued

[drummingpariah]

http://dyn.com/blog/dyn-analysis-summary-of-friday-october-21-attack/

 

^ Much more information, if you're interested in how the internet works, and why it sometimes doesn't. This was the first time we've ever had a service outage, so it was a pretty big deal for us.

 

As that event cooled down, I managed to get into the shop for a little more work. I'm averaging one major tube per night right now, which is a great pace given the lack of time and minimal measurement tools. I've been getting away with a 4' straightedge, a tape measure, a marker, and my cellphone (as an angle finder/protractor). I can really appreciate the amount of work that goes into A pillars now, I can definitely say that.

 

This was some of the most difficult math I've ever done with a sharpie, having to figure out exactly where each bend would start and end on each tube. Overall, I'm making good progress and am well ahead of schedule for the time being.

[drummingpariah]

One more unit of progress. Slow going, but I'm also prepping for the next 'major hurdle' as I have time.

 

[Draker]

Wait, you work for dyn?

 

The place work get hit on occasion and we have a fairly large backbone on the West coast. That being said, I would assume Dyn has a much bigger pipe that we do. I reported this outage in the Cuz Merica thread. Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack and they announced before the second round happened. The focus being, media (Twitter, Reddit, ,etc) censoring users. At least that's what they reported. 

 

DDoS attacks are a bitch, but so is internet (media) censorship.

[Draker]

Also, I'm sure you know... you'll never find the person who sent the botnet orders.