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You might want to treat the roof like a tent, but with a plywood or OSB skin on roof panels undrerneath. If you put ashphalt shingles on the panels you'll never lift them ....

So, either make a series of simple trusses and panel the roof in 4 foot sections, or make 4ft x 12ft (plus) flat sections to span the width of the building and then cover the whole roof with a good tarp, pulled tight. The peaked roof (probably only 3/12 pitch) might be easier to protect with a tarp than the flat one. To move the building, remove the tarp and then the roof panels. The tarp won't work in hurricane or other extreme weather areas of course (Oh dear - you spoke of hail).

A layer of roofing underlay ('tar paper') under the tarp should deal with the inevitable leaks.

(Edit: Maybe a flat roof is better than trusses. I've built roof trusses twice now for home projects - a screened porch and a 14x15 ft shed - and each time I vow, "never again". They go up on the structure way faster than rafters and ridge boards, but what a PITA to build. Picky, picky, picky work. A 12 x 4 ft panneled roof section with three trusses will also be that much heavier than a 4 x 12(plus) ft flat panel, as well as more awkward to move)

Trusses covered with a canvas tarp wouldn't be too bad, or maybe a pergola construction. But I'm not sure anything other than a solid roof would withstand hail.

I had a tooth pulled Thursday afternoon. A couple months ago I cracked the tooth in front of my bottom right wisdom tooth. The wisdom tooth put so much pressure on it that the tooth was forced down and the wisdom tooth was wedging it in place. By the time the dentist could get me in to do the extraction, the tooth had broken three times, losing pieces each time. He pulled the tooth and wants me to keep the wisdom tooth, hoping that it, as well as the tooth in front of the one he extracted will shift a little to make the gap smaller. So for now, I'm taking it easy, rinsing with salt water and taking a Vicodin every six hours.

Alright, so the picture shown below is a pretty standard 442E design. It's drawn out with 1.5" tubing for primary structure, 1.25" for bracing and 1" for the transmission tunnel. If I order steel online, I can get 0.065" wall thickness but if I buy locally, the thinnest available is 0.083". Since I don't pay for shipping, it will cost me 1/2 of what it would cost online, so my car is going to be kind of a heavy dude. I'm still trying to decide how I could make a backbone chassis, and if it's worth doing. Most likely not. I may want to extend the back end out a little to allow more space for a fuel tank. I have a question. The radiator sits out in front of the presently defined area, and can be vertical or tilted back a bit. How far forward does the radiator usually sit?

I've been at my new house for about a month now and have been working on a few minor things in and around the house, cleaning up overgrowth and disposing of abandoned appliances around the storage shed. The previous occupants left most of a 15' trampoline in the back yard. It has no legs, so has been sitting on the ground. It's built in sixteen segments with sockets for legs in every other segment but one, where the socket has broken off, leaving a big hole. After measuring, I learned that the pipe diameter is the same as vertical posts for a chain link fence. I went to a number of yard sales on Saturday and managed to find a pile of scrap fence posts and rails, so bought the lot for $15. I took the center out of the trampoline, disconnecting 96 springs and assembled the frame upside down in my driveway. I don't have a truly level surface to put it on, so I measured the distance center-to-center of all sockets to their adjacent, then averaged the numbers, coming up with an even 64". I cut a new post section for the broken socket and welded it in place. Since the old one broke out completely, taking the weld with it, there was a fair amount of space all around it, so I had some gaps to fill. Users have given me advice before, to slow down when welding. After finishing the task, I realize that you really meant slow down. I thought I was going slowly before and this seemed like crawling, but the result was much better. I'll snap a picture this afternoon. It's not as smooth as the factory that originally produced the trampoline frame, but for my purposes, should be fine.

I cut four fence rail sections to 76" and built a wooden jig so that I can hold the pieces for tack welding. I'll be welding pairs of legs to a 76" cross beam, 6" in from either end, giving me the correct 64" on center. My T-shaped jig will hold the cross beam and the leg in position with a pair of U-bolts for each. As I don't have a tube notcher, or a chop saw, I'm using a paper towel cardboard tube as a template and will do the cutting with a hack saw and a grinder. In 100 degree heat, not a lot of fun, but as long as I have some shade to work in, not horrible. I'm hoping the jig survives working on all eight legs.

There is still a significant amount of space between the posts I'm using for legs and the sockets that they fit into, so I'll be cutting short sections of pipe then cutting a slit down it's length to take up some of the space, then a pair of bolts through each. So, to finish it up, I've got a lot of cutting, grinding and at least eight welds to complete, sixteen if I add segments to turn the leg sections into an octagon, and more if I decide to add angle bracing between the legs and the rail. The trampoline doesn't really need the bracing, but if it provides me welding experience, I'll probably do it.

Whatever you do, after you've welded it all together, don't forget to anchor the thing down to the ground really well. This spring a friend had a neighbor's trampoline blow into the space between their houses after a windstorm. The neighbor, in his misplaced logic, had welded all the joints and added a few extra braces thinking that that alone would be enough added mass to hold it down. It wasn't and the thing got so wedged in between the the houses and tweeked, they ended up cutting it apart to get it out of there!

But then, I don't think it's ever windy in western Nebraska.

I just thought of a potential problem that my heavy Chrysler engine might (probably will) introduce. If the front is heavier than the back, won't it tend to understeer? As an object wants to rotate around it's center of gravity, I would think if the front were significantly heavier than the rear, the car would tend to kick the rear out in the turns and be more difficult to control. Short of moving the battery to the back, I'm not sure how much I could compensate for a 560 lb engine.

Don't sweat (too much) - I seem to recvall that most of the Ford or Chev V-8 Locosts ended up tail heavy with the driver aboard. Check Rod's build, among others. In any event, weight distribution is not the only parameter contolling under/oversteer.

I forgot to take a picture yesterday afternoon. Last night, I dug out the grinder and got to work notching six of the trampoline legs. I ended up not needing to use the plywood jig I made. Instead, I just used two magnetic triangles to hold each joint in place while I tacked it, then went back around and finished them. It was after dark by the time I started welding. I waited until the sun went down before I even went outside to do anything, after the temperature dropped below 90. I have one joint welded for each pair of legs. For the second one, I'll take them down and rest them on a flat surface to make sure both legs come off at the same angle. Tonight, I have two more legs to cut and grind, then up to five more welds.

This one was kind of a nuisance. The hole was pretty wide, up to about a 1/2" gap on either side, so took a little while to fill.



Given the choice, I don't think I would want to weld overhead. It's not so much the bits of crap falling on me, but the fact that metal flows downhill. On a couple welds, I kept generating and chasing holes, following the weld upward until I could seal it. I looked at all of the welds this morning and I left just one visible hole. Since these will be sitting on the ground and I don't want to get water into the pipe, I'll need to close it up.






I'm learning that my son has no respect for his grandmother. Respect or fear, either way, he doesn't have it. After playing outside last evening, he and my mother went back in the house as I finished cleaning and picking up tools. She told him to go wash his hands and he began to argue with her, saying that he didn't need to wash his hands and sticking out his tongue. But just as soon as I walked through the front door, he ran to the bathroom to wash his hands, not another word said. Just before coming up for the summer, my mother broke her wrist when she bailed off a 3-year-old Tennessee Walker when it started to fit and lay down with her, so she's been wearing a cast for the last six weeks. I think my son feels that he can do anything he wants and get away with it, but with me, he does what he's told and doesn't misbehave.

Hmm. To be a System Administrator:
5:15am phone call to reboot a hung server. Remote in and start the server. No sense going back to sleep before a 6:00am alarm. Get cleaned up and go to work. Work through lunch and leave work at 5:00pm.
5:00pm - 6:30pm Play with son.
6:30pm - 8:00 Dinner with friends.
8:30pm - 2:00am Upgrade memory in servers and wait while applications and databases are stopped, servers are shut down, fiber channel cards are upgraded, servers are brought back online, databases and applications are restarted.
2:00 - 6:00 Sleep.
6:00am Get up and get ready to go back to work.

My son went back home on Saturday and I've been kind of down since. I picked up his toys and started working on a bookcase for his room, as well as shelves for the utility room and the house now seems really empty and too quiet. I need to keep myself busy so I don't go nuts.

I started working with SolidWorks 2010, again, and started reading through the SolidWorks 2010 Bible. I completed a tutorial for a 17" wheel ( http://www.solidworkstutorials.com/2009/08/tutorial-15-17-wheel/ ) then started to put tubes for the book frame into SolidWorks. The layout so far is purely academic. I'll have my steering rack and front uprights on August 6th. Combine those with the rear axle components and I can establish where my suspension pickup points should be and design the frame around them.




I have four projects in mind to keep me busy. A 6' high x 3' wide bookshelf in Connor's room, a 2' high x 3' wide shelf in the living room for Battletech miniatures, a 4' x 8' kennel/dog house in the back yard and an in-ground composer in the back yard made from a 45-gallon trash can.

I got out this morning and cut some of the steel for my build table. I got four pieces cut before I broke the hack saw, so I need a new one. I'm thinking that in the near future, I'm going to buy a chop saw because cutting 16ga or heavier steel tubing with a hack saw really sucks. Below is what I have planned, a 4x8 table from 1.5" square tube. The thing is not really very tall, just 28.5", but I figure I may set it on casters or on a wooden frame so I don't want it to be too tall. I went outside, trimmed and welded up three of the pieces I had cut. I started out to simply tack weld the joints, but the tacks didn't look very strong to my eye, so I added more tack welds between those, and might have gone a little overboard. The thing is on one plane and it's square. The width of the base of the legs is off by 1/4", but diagonal measurements are equal.

Once this table is done, will it be strong enough for me to use it as the build table for my frame? It looks light to me.

I'll put this in my build log instead of cluttering up other places. I was given a good tutorial on sheet metal in SolidWorks, so I now know more than I did before. This fuel cell is think enough that it should fit through the top of the boot and past the steel frame. 39" wide. It's 4 1/2" taller than the UCA mount points and slopes back at a 45 degree angle, and should hold a little over 18 gallons. I'll research fuel tank baffles and add to the pictures I've already collected so that I can minimizing sloshing. Of the fuel anyway.

I was curious about what impact the weight of that much fuel at the very back of the car would be. It looks like a tank filled with 18 gallons of gas at a weight of roughly 6.1 lbs per gallon gives a final weight of roughly 110 lbs of fuel. It looks like with a 1450 lb car, 200 lb driver (my apologies if you're not - I just grabbed a rough number) and 110 lbs of fuel, it looks like the fuel only makes up about 6.25% of the total vehicle weight. With that, you will probably feel the difference between empty and full tanks but I doubt the change is enough to be critical to set-up anyplace other than a race or autocross track. Any fuel tank sitting (essentially exposed) at the rear of a vehicle makes me nervous; unfortunately with the seven/locost design there really aren't many alternatives.

I'm wondering that too. I'm not sure what the fuel consumption of my engine is going to be, but on the highway, it would be nice to get at least a couple hours of driving time between refueling. I plan on building a teardrop trailer later on, and for long trips, I could put an aux tank on it for 10 gallons or so. I'm hoping my car is a little heavier, in the 1600-1800 range, and I tend to vary between 150 and 160.

With my Jeep, I definitely know the difference between a full and an empty tank. When I'm low on fuel, the rear end bounces around a lot, but with a full tank, it's much more planted and makes for a smoother ride. When I went to Kentucky, I stopped for gas when I got down to 1/2 tank for that very reason. My concern with the Locost and my engine choice is whether or not I can put the power to the ground instead of just shredding tires. The fuel tank on my Grand Cherokee is right behind the rear axle as well. With no skid plate, the only thing between it and a rear impact is my receiver hitch assembly. Except with it, if a car hits me from behind, it's more likely to lift me up and go under instead of over top of me.

18 gallons is a lot of fuel. If you get 15 mi/gal that would be 270 miles per tank. Figure stopping every 200 miles at 1/4 tank. That is a long way to go without stopping for a break. I have a 5 gal tank and get just under 20 mpg highway. That means stopping every 1:15. That is too often. I think ideal would be every 2 hrs. I'd recommend sizing for that. Having 150-175 miles maximum per tank and stopping accordingly would be a good compromise.

I have a luggage rack off the rear of the car. I can definitely feel the added motion when loaded with the extra 100+ pounds back there.

Of course it is your car.