Honda RC211V

2001 Honda V-5 Motorcycle Racing Engine

Idling away, watching YouTube videos, I came across one that mentioned Honda's V-5 racing engine from 2001. Being as I had just concluded the engines with an odd number of cylinders would spin more smoothly, I was intrigued. This engine came about in response to a rule change. Honda had some success with this engine in the 2002 season, but the rules changed again, so it was only campaigned for a couple of years. I guess spinning smoothly isn't that important.

Dr. Jazz

Babylon Berlin

The Atlantic has a great story about Dr. Jazz. Reading through it I encountered a bunch of songs and a couple of movies. I had never heard of most of them. In any case, I looked up what I could find and put them in a YouTube playlist.

Here's are links to some relevant Wikipedia articles:

• Artie Shaw
• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
• Breathless (1960 film)
• James Bond Theme

The introductions, at least, make some interesting reading.

Babylon Berlin has appeared here before.

Via Borepatch

Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks-Canned Music

Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks-Canned Music
Here's a blast from the past. I don't think I've even heard mention of these guys since I left Texas back around 1985. They were great. Borepatch reminded me. He notes that it's a little hard to slot Señor Hicks into any particular genre. Wikipedia expands on this:

Writing about Hicks for Oxford American in 2007, critic David Smay said, "[T]here was a time from the ’20s through the ’40s when swing—'hot rhythm'—rippled through every form of popular music. That’s the music Dan Hicks plays, and there’s no single word for it because it wasn’t limited to any one genre. Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers and Spade Cooley and Hank Garland and the Boswell Sisters and Stuff Smith and Bing Crosby all swing. You can make yourself nutty trying to define what Dan Hicks is. Then again, you could just say: Dan Hicks swings."

BLACK TEXT MATTERS

I don't know what is wrong with some web page designers. Maybe they're racists. Maybe they want all colors to blend together. White backgrounds are becoming less white and black text is becoming less black and more gray. If they have their way eventually if will all blend into a gray fog and you will have to imagine what the text says. Of course, some people apply their own filters to whatever they read. You may as well run the text through a blender before you give it to them. They are going to twist it to their own purposes regardless.

Never-the-less, anytime I come across a page with gray text, I fire off a nasty gram telling these nincompoops to get their act together. Use BLACK not gray for text.

XB-70

XB-70

An old photo of this airplane showed up today and it just struck me that this was like peak Air Force dream time. I suspect the blue fire from the jet engines in the above image were added, but it does look pretty cool. Wikipedia has a good summary of the airplane:

The North American Aviation XB-70 Valkyrie was the prototype version of the planned B-70 nuclear-armed, deep-penetration strategic bomber for the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command. Designed in the late 1950s by North American Aviation (NAA), the six-engined Valkyrie was capable of cruising for thousands of miles at Mach 3+ while flying at 70,000 feet (21,000 m).
At these speeds, it was expected that the B-70 would be practically immune to interceptor aircraft, the only effective weapon against bomber aircraft at the time. The bomber would spend only a brief time over a particular radar station, flying out of its range before the controllers could position their fighters in a suitable location for an interception. High speed also made the aircraft difficult to see on radar displays and its high-altitude and high-speed capacity could not be matched by any contemporary Soviet interceptor or fighter aircraft.
The introduction of the first Soviet surface-to-air missiles in the late 1950s put the near-invulnerability of the B-70 in doubt. In response, the United States Air Force (USAF) began flying its missions at low level, where the missile radar's line of sight was limited by terrain. In this low-level penetration role, the B-70 offered little additional performance over the B-52 it was meant to replace, while being far more expensive with shorter range. Other alternate missions were proposed, but these were of limited scope. With the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) during the late 1950s, manned bombers were increasingly seen as obsolete.
The USAF eventually gave up fighting for its production and the B-70 program was canceled in 1961. Development was then turned over to a research program to study the effects of long-duration high-speed flight. As such, two prototype aircraft, designated XB-70A, were built; these aircraft were used for supersonic test-flights during 1964–69. In 1966, one prototype crashed after colliding with a smaller aircraft while flying in close formation; the remaining Valkyrie bomber is in the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.

It was quite the aircraft: Mach 3 at 70,000 feet in 1961. The Russian Tu-160, which is the nearest commie plane I can think of, only manages Mach 2 and didn't fly until 20 years later.

The Tu-160 has appeared here before, but this is the first post for the XB-70. The Unwanted Blog has several posts about the XB-70.

Oscillating Parasites

Hacking off the crankshaft webbing: how’ll that affect engine operation?
This video was on my mind while I was working on my previous post on the subject, but I ran out of steam, so I called it good and went to bed. But now I've had a day to think about it, and I've decided it needs to be here.

I've watched a few other Garage 54 videos. They are mostly pretty silly, but sometimes they have a kernel of real information. I suspect they are somewhere in Russia, the Lada is a Russian car and they seem to have an endless supply of them.

I'm surprised the engine ran as well as it did. Balancing the crank has been an item of religious devotion among car guys since forever, and here it looks like it is nonsense. Of course, you can't really tell what kind of vibration you are getting from the video, and we don't know how long the engine will last without the counterweights, but I have to give the guys credit for even attempting this.

I was thinking about the bit about "parallel twins with crankpins not at the traditional 360 degrees, but separated by 76 degrees". That would be optimum for one case, but each piston comes to a stop twice in every rotation. Each time it reaches the top or bottom of a stroke it stops, just instantaneously, but it stops. To minimize the transfer of momentum you would want to space the crank pins 90 degrees apart. It wouldn't be optimum for that one case, but it would apply equally to the four times pistons would stop. That should help smooth out the crankshaft's rate of rotation. It might make the idle a little lumpy, and who knows what would happen at speed. Someone should try it.

Then I thought a little more and I realized any engine with an even number of cylinders is going to have this same 'transfer of momentum' problem, so an odd number of cylinders might be a solution. There have been a number of three cylinder engines like the Kawasaki 500 two-stroke, Triumph motorcycles and Geo Metro cars. Audi even had a five cylinder engine. I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to measure the variation in crankshaft rotational speed as an engine completes a single cycle. Who am I kidding? Of course they have, it just hasn't found its way to my computer screen.

Writing

Cloud City

I'm not much on cooking. I operate the grill at our house when I need to grill some hamburgers or steaks, and I bake the pizzas I bring home from Papa Murphy's, but that's about it. Oh, I will make a bowl of instant oatmeal in the morning using hot water from the hot water dispenser, and on occasion I will heat a bowl of soup in the microwave, but that's not really 'cooking', is it? Other than that, it's fast food, sandwiches and eating whatever I can grab out of the fridge.

This morning I decided I needed to cook some sausage patties. They've been sitting in the fridge for a few days. I could freeze them, but then they would likely never be seen again. And I really like fried pork sausage, so I got out the frying pan, fired up the range and set the sausage to sizzling. Now comes the hard part, waiting for the sausage to cook. It doesn't take long, about 12 minutes, but I am not really good at standing around doing nothing. I could play solitaire while I am waiting for the timer to expire (3 minutes, 4 times), but maybe I could work on a blog post while I am waiting. My trusty laptop is sitting on the kitchen table, so let's see what I can get done.

Turns out, not much. In 24 minutes (two batches of sausage), I wrote a thousand characters which is roughly 150 words. I was surprised by the timer every time it went off as I had only written a single sentence. Near as I can tell, this post to this point has taken me about 15 minutes. Oh, well, speed isn't everything. If you disagree, you are wrong. This is my blog and I'm write, er, right.

Anyway, I came across a short blog post yesterday that said, in essence, that some people think in words and some people think 'natural thoughts', or something like that (I looked for it but I can't find it, it didn't strike me as important at the time). In any case, they don't think in words. My wife and I are good examples of each. My wife remembers what people say, and when I tell her something that I heard from someone else she inevitably asks me what they said. I have no idea. I parsed the words they spoke, extracted the information from their message, stored it in my brain and discarded the words. Yes, maybe I have spent too much time working with computers. Or maybe computer systems have evolved to mimic natural thought.

P.S. 'Cloud' uses the same letters as 'could'. The brain works in mysterious ways.