2nd Amendment T-Shirt

So my wife found this shirt.  It’s pretty awesome.  Slightly see-through in the right light.  Pro-American.  What’s not to like?

2nd Amendment Shirt

If you want one, you can get them HERE

S&W 22A shoots like a champ

So I have never shot through a “red dot” sight before.  But I know a lot of people like them so I figured I would give it a shot.  I bought a green dot sight (sale price was lower than the red dot) from Natchezz Shooter’s Supply for $17.  I figured if I hated it I could probably sell it for a profit on Ebay.  The one I bought was made by BSA.  I shot a couple groups with my Smith and Wesson 22A without the sight on it.  Not so good.  I can’t shoot a good group worth a crap with regular blade sights.  I threw the BSA Green Dot sight on and WOW.  All of a sudden it was shooting groups better than the guys with Ruger 10/22’s around me.  Granted, those were stock Rugers, but still…  I had to adjust the dot about 1″ left and 1″ up from where it was set to out of the box.  I had the target out at 15 yards.  The wind was blowing about 15-25 mph first from behind, then to the left, the from behind, then to the right.  It also started to rain during all this fun.  So I would have been surprised with any group smaller than paper size.

The way they do the shooting sessions at Lee Kay is 15 minutes of shooting followed by a few minutes of changing targets.  So for one full 15 minute session I shot at one target .  After one clip I adjusted the sight a bit more to the left and a smidge higher.  And here is the result…

Smith & Wesson 22A with BSA Green Dot scope

Not bad for a 70 shot group in high winds.

Book review: Monster Hunter International

Monster Hunter International

I will try to do a review without too many spoilers.  But it’s hard on a book like this.  Monster Hunter International is a book written by a gun nut and a B-movie fan.  And it shows.  It contains many mythical creatures made popular by comic books, video games, and of course midnight cable movies.  The author is Larry Correia.  He is a local guy which is one reason I bought this book.  I like to support locals when it makes sense.  I am usually more of a spy novel or text book kind of guy.  But I get cheap thrills from B-movies every now and then.

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The story starts off in an office scene and takes about a page before it hits you with the action.  The main character Owen Zastava Pitt is working late, his boss transforms into creature full of awesome, and the fun begins.  Once Owen recovers from his injuries he is drafted into service for a group called Monster Hunter International.  Basically, they travel the country hunting nasty critters for gross amounts of profit that is ultimately reinvested into bigger and better guns.

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Owen’s group has a wide variety of backgrounds.  Most of which are pretty entertaining characters.  Some lacked a bit of character development, but it wasn’t missed at all.  And the book is already over 700 pages long, so more character development would have just been pages for the sake of more pages.

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The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking of what a great movie it would have been with Bruce Campbell at his prime in the lead.  It isn’t a super serious book, and I don’t think it was meant to be.  It’s a light hearted sci-fi novel geared toward people that want something a little different out of the typical monster book.  It was entertaining from the first page.  About 2/3 of the way through the book I was finding it a bit slow, but that didn’t last long at all.  And when the action came back, it stayed with me until the end.

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My only real complaint about the book, is it kind of had the feeling to me like it was written, or more likely edited, by 4 or 5 different people.  I can’t give specifics, but it was like a few chapters would have one feel to them, then the next few chapters would have a slightly different feel.  Maybe it was different vocabulary usage, or the type of things the story was focusing on.  I don’t know.  I just know it felt slightly different.  But again, it was still a fun, entertaining book.  It just may not rank high on snoot factor.  But what monster book does?  So if you spend the afternoon sipping latte’s at the local roasting company tweeting about how much swinging you have done from Obama’s nuts, or surfing facebook on your Mac laptop looking down at the passers by through your fat plastic frame glasses, then this book is not for you.  If you are a down to earth guy that can appreciate the finer things in life but can also appreciate a good old fashion joke every now and then, then this book is for you.  Especially if you like monsters, guns, or B-movies.

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Happy Reading

Random Photo, R35 GTR sunset at Buttonwillow Raceway

Here’s another photo I took that screams “GET A BETTER CAMERA!”  But I still like it.  It’s the Cobb R35 GTR in the sunset at Buttonwillow after we blew up the drive shaft on it.  It was the weekend of the Super Street Time Attack.

R35GTR Sunset photo

The Racist President

I will start off by saying, just because someone is black, yellow, green, or pink doesn’t mean they have any more right to be racist than a white man.  And I say “man” because even white women are considered a minority in many circumstances.

So watching Obama spew out lie after lie during his “health care reform” press conference, the final question got me pissed.  I am used to politicians lying; Obama is far from being the originator of that.  He was asked about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. (dumb ass from now on) arrest.  After giving a quick run-down of the few facts he knew about the case, he admitted that he didn’t have all the facts.

So here is the run-down:  Neighbor sees 2 black men breaking into a house.  It’s dark and the neighbor can’t tell who they are.  Neighbor calls police to report suspicious activity, including forcing the door open just as one would do while breaking into a house.  Police respond and hear someone inside the house and ask for identification.  Dumb ass in the house refuses to show identification and accuses the police of racial profiling.  After negotiation, dumb ass shows I.D. to police.  I.D. which has no address on it to prove he lives there.  Police arrest dumb ass because he isn’t cooperating.  Police (including black ones) say dumb ass was angry, belligerent, uncooperative, and support the police officer that actually did the arresting.

Back to press conference…  The President of the United States goes on TV and after admitting he doesn’t know the facts, he says the police acted stupidly and that everyone would have been as angry as dumb ass.  WRONG!  You know how I would have reacted?  “Here you go mister police officer, here is my identification.  Please tell whoever reported it ‘thank you for watching out for me.’”  How did dumb ass react? “Why do you want my I.D.?  Just because I’m a black man?”  What the hell are you talking about dumb ass?  You are pretty fucking stupid for being a teacher at Harvard.  I seriously hope none of my kids want to go to a school employing people with such low limits on mental prowess.

When people have certain positions in life, there thing they just shouldn’t be saying.  In my current job, I shouldn’t tell customers that a Westech drive is better than an Eimco drive.  It isn’t by the way, just using that as an example.  As President of the United States there are some things you should not say.  This includes many things this president has said.  But very high on the list is not calling your police force a bunch of rogue racists when you have very few of the facts, all of which came from left leaning media that tries to put a racial twist on everything.

So the president, our leader, says his police force acted stupidly by doing their job exactly as they were instructed to do.  By following laws set in place by leaders of our states and country which the president just happens to be.  Imagine that, the president that elected a racist to the Supreme Court sided with a racist friend of his.  A friend who happened to only be in trouble due to his racism.  I have a message for all of you that think racism isn’t dead.  You are right; it isn’t, but only because you are the ones still bringing it up not allowing it to die.  There are minorities in every position of power in this country, in every aspect of industry and authority.  I think it’s time for minorities to get off their soap box.  At the end of the day you are just people, just like everyone else is.

Reminiscing Part 4

Here is my last reminiscing post for a while.  This is another project that was pretty fun.  BTW, we both showed up on comparably worn out tires and Sam Hubinette did just as many donuts in our car as he did in the Techart.  But I guess when a car 1/3 the price whoops you, you have to have some excuses…  Especially when the whooping was that extreme.  I designed the coilovers that were on the GTR.  They are just coilover sleeves for the stock Bilstein shocks.  I think most people’s (including mine) favorite part is when the Porsche guy is talking shit on the GTR, but Trey from COBB is very respectfull, then the COBB car absolutely dominates.

Here you go, the COBB Tuning GTR vs. the Techart Porsche GT3.

Reminiscing part 3

Cutler's Performance Center bike brochure

I figured I had posted way too many updates already today.  But I couldn’t pass this one up.  I was cleaning out my office at the house and came across an old brochure for something I designed back in 1997/1998.  At the time I was living in Logan, UT and my dad was living in Sandy, UT about 100 miles away.  Well his snowmobiling buddy Dale Cutler had recently hired a guy named Devin Flynn that was seriously into mountain bikes.  Dale decided to expand his snowmobile business and make a line of mountain bikes.  So on the weekends, I would meet up with Dale and Devin at my dad’s house (he had the SolidWorks) and we would work on a new bike design.  I had been doing this for a while before the bikes while designing an engine for Dale that was a 1000cc snowmobile engine based on 2 Honda CR500 cylinders.

Well, after several weeks of work, we had a final design for 3 bikes.  A cross country bike, a long travel version of the same, and a downhill bike that was vastly different than the other designs.  The unique feature on these bikes was mainly the rear suspension.  That’s the part I came up with.  We used a Garlock bearing (same style that snowmobile drive clutchs use on the outer sheave) that wrapped around the crank shaft.  The arms of both the rear suspension and the shock levers were billet with a significant amount of material cut out of them to reduce weight and try to keep strength at a maximum.   The tubes were welded onto billet lugs.  And the shock mount was a nice looking super light weight billet piece that was welded to the main tube.

The rest of the bike as far as down tube angles, tire sizes, and that sort of thing was specified by Devin.  I just made them fit.  Well, once we were done, Dale and Devin got some big name guys to ride the bikes and race them.  Turns out the bike did very well for it’s short life.  In fact it was so well done the first time, we never even had to make a single revision to the design.

Here is the rest of the brochure:

CPC mountain bike designed by me

Long travel and cross country mountain bikes

Best one is not shown

Well, unfortunately the best of the bunch is not pictured in this brochure.  They did make them, and raced them.  Last I heard, they took it to some bike show in Vegas in 1998 or 1999 and K2 bought the rights to it.  In fact, this brochure was the one they made to take to that show.  I don’t know what happened after that.  I did see a blatant rip off of it made by Ellsworth selling at Dick’s Sporting Goods a few years ago.  I think they wanted something retarded like $4,800 for just the frame.  It looks like Ellsworth has changed their designs a bit since then.  I would hope so, it was years ago…

Reminiscing Part 2

OK, so Nukabe came to us at Cobb and wanted us to make a supercharger for an Eclipse they had been taking to various shows around the country.  Rather than buying a new supercharger, Trey was tired of the Tribeca and ready to trade it in on something new, so we pulled the Rotrex off the Tribeca to use for the Eclipse.

The Tribeca was pretty easy to design the supercharger mounts for since it had a good amount of hood room.  And there was quite a bit of unused volume under the hood.  This is not so much the case on the 4^th Gen Eclipse.  There was just mm’s of clearance to some parts on that car.  There was very little room anywhere under the hood on this car.  I decided to run a shaft drive to operate the supercharger.  And I think it turned out pretty clean.  I went through quite a few rapid prototypes that I made in my office to ensure exact alignment of everything.

COBB Supercharged Eclipse

Supercharger and intercooler

The only pictures I found are some Josh posted on his blog back when he worked for Cobb (he was laid off the same day I was).  These pictures were taken kind of mid way through an install.  So some of the bolts aren’t tight, and that sort of thing.  Pay special attention to the billet piece that actually holds the supercharger.  That thing was so sexy.

Rotrex Supercharger Mount by me

We never did get to find out what kind of power it made since the electronics guys gave up on making an AccessPort for it.  And they didn’t really want to use a competitor’s product.

Reminiscing part 1

I have hit a bit of a boring time on my current project at work.  So I was feeling all nostalgic about my past projects.  So here is a project from a few years ago.  I had to design a supercharger for the Subaru Tribeca.  It utilized a Rotrex supercharger, Audi BPV, Bell Intercooler, and the rest was all custom.  We improved power at the wheels by about 70 HP on just 4.5 psi of boost.  It ran flawlessly.  We drove it to all the shows it did.  No trailer queen here.  It ended up having a better power to weight ratio than any CUV/SUV in it’s class.

Supercharged Tribeca

Tribeca Dyno

We gave the car to Motor Trend to beat up and test for a couple of months.  Here is what they reported for results:

Stock / COBB:

0-60mph: 9.3 / 7.7

¼ mile: 17.0@83.1 mph / 16.1@87.1 mph

60-0mph: 125 ft / 117 ft

Figure 8: 29.0 sec / 27.8 sec

As you can see, there is numbers besides the power numbers.  We did quite a bit to the car.  The Supercharger was about all I was in charge of designing on that project though.  Eric took care of the looks.  Justin picked out the wheels.  Josh did the piping for the Supercharger.  Trey did the tuning.  The brakes were just off the shelf 332mm WRX brakes we had.  The tires were some Yokohama Advan ST’s that we were given for SEMA.

COBB Tuning Tribeca made awesome by me

Even though I had a bunch of requests for that kit, Cobb opted not to make it and we eventually pulled off the supercharger to use on another project (see next reminiscing post).

I think it’s finally time to upgrade to HD

So according to the WRC, Discovery HD will be bringing WRC coverage back to the states.  It will be on their HD Theater channel.  So not only are they bringing WRC coverage back to the states, but they are bringing it in 1080i with dolby 5.1 glory!  Yes, I know 1080p would be better, but hell 1080 anything is better than the fuzzy crap I have coming from my Dish Network setup right now.

I have been considering upgrading to Dish HD for quite a while but with WRC coming to it… It’s time to pull the trigger.