Music to my Ears

Sometimes, my hobbies converge. My interest in music and audio has me using the little Sansa MP3 player when I exercise and the bigger Cowon player in the car and on trips. The headphones in the picture are my favorite cans for airplane travel. Notice the cover art of the Drysdale motorcycle on the Cowon screen.

The other day, I was working out and listening to music in random order, when a recording of the Drysdale 750 V-8 racing bike came on the player. Only 12 seconds long, but I smiled and smiled. It was preceded by nice little folk song and followed by a drummer from Mali and it fit right in.


I couldn't figure out how to put a sound file into the blog on it's own, so I put a few pictures of the bike together with playing the 12 second sound file twice and put them all into a short video.



Just in case you want to explore, a short trip to the Drysdale Home Page

http://home.mira.net/~iwd/

Simple Solution

At the warehouse open house, one of the cars in the aisle was a licensed sports racer looking car with a bike engine. The owner called it "Piontek" and said that this was the latest built and number 6. A beautiful car with lots of interesting ideas, the one that struck me as a clean and simple solution was its reverse drive.

Lots of bike engine cars use a starter motor as an electric drive reverse gear. In this case, he simply had starter gear teeth cut into the outside of his inboard rear brake disc. Add a couple of brackets for the starter motor and you have an elegant solution to reverse gear in a bike engine car.

Blog Echo

This blogging business is interesting. Most people come home to a spouse and family who ask, "How was your day, dear?", and listen to the highlights of your day or not. It is these people, truely in your life, that you share those things which you find interesting in life.

Since there is nobody but me at home, I find that I sometimes use the blog to tell the stories from the day. I put something out there, most of the time without feedback or comment, and if someone reads it and enjoys it, great. If no one reads it, I don't know about it. So most of the time, blogging is a release, occasionally a creative one, that I do and forget.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a visit from Greg and Bruce, old friends from racing days gone by. I hadn't seen them for several years and somehow expected that I would be catching them up on some of the stories in my life since I had last seen them. We had a really good time and talked about everything from airplanes to machine tools. The weird part was when I would start some story and I could see from their face or by their comments that they had already read that one on the blog.

Even more interesting was when Bruce came up to one of my motorcycle where my Helimot gloves were sitting. "Oh, are these those custom gloves you had made? So they really use kangaroo skin for the palms."

All I can say is, it's great but it's also a little bit weird feeling.