Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
pictures
To give you an idea…
Nov 9th
just how much water came out of that freeze drying run, here’s the ice chunk from the condenser after several hours of melting
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- From the side
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- From the top
Yes, yes…I know I have webbed toes….shut the hell up.
Freeze drying run complete
Nov 8th
I ended up with just barely a small amount that didn’t get totally dried. All in all, it took 2 days.
How much I managed to do in this partial run
New computer hardware
Nov 8th
Work bought me a new kvm and two new LCD panels this week. The kvm is so I can take one of my old panels and put it on there, that way I have two distinct kvm setups, one a dual panel two machine kvm and the other a single panel four machine kvm. The nice part about the new panels though, and the reason I wanted them, is that I get more screen real estate out of the deal. The two new panels are 24″ 1920×1200 displays. I was able to set the font size on my dual terminal virtual screen back up to 10 point from 7 point without loosing any rows/columns of information. Talk about much easier to read! 
The web browser and the email programs are frikkin’ HUGE now too. That helps keep that long list of mail folders in view without having to scroll though, so that’s another awesomeness about it. I talked work into this upgrade because they had told me I was authorized to get a new laptop. Well, last weekend I took my old laptop, disassembled it, found the short on the motherboard, resoldered the connector that was shorting out, and basically fixed my laptop. Then I told work that given how rarely I travel, my old, newly working again laptop is good enough and that I would get relatively little benefit from a new laptop, but the same money spent on two larger panels for the increased screen real estate and the second kvm would allow me to see productivity gains on a daily basis, making it money much better spent. When I added in that the upgrade would allow me to have a spare lcd panel, which would prevent the same thing from happening to me again that happened earlier this year (which is that both of my lcd panels went out in the same week…I contacted the normal places at work to check on a loaner panel while I shipped these units off since they were still under warranty and no one had any, so I went out and bought two panels with my own money, shipped off the two broken ones, and once the two broken ones finally came back from repair I just gave them away to relatives and kept the two I bought as replacements), that was enough to put things over the top and they approved the purchase. All I can say is I feel like I have an entire wall of computer screens in front of my eyes 
The display wall…
No more itty bitty freeze drying runs…
Nov 6th
Freeze drying is actually an expensive process, energy wise. It consumes large amounts of energy to generate both the cold and the vacuum needed. However, once you’ve got the vacuum and the cold, neither of these items are strongly tied to the amount of stuff you are freeze drying. And the drying process proceeds at a specific speed in the stuff being dried regardless of how much is there. So, the more stuff you can get in your chamber, the less it costs on a per unit basis to do the drying. I’ve been doing very small runs of drying using a bench top freeze drier. It only had a roughly 5 1/2″ diameter tray that could only be piled up with about 1″ deep of stuff. Well, that’s no more. I still have the bench top unit, but I plan on getting rid of it. Instead, I bought and reconditioned a roughly 30 year old unit (that was in fabulous shape for its age…) that has 4 shelves, and each shelf has a 12″ x 17″ x 2″ deep tray for holding material. I fired it up for its first real run tonight. I expect it to take a day or two to complete the run, but instead of having a few tablespoons full of product when it’s done, I’ll literally have multiple cups of stuff.
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- Upper portion of unit with bench top freeze dryer sitting on top for comparison
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- Whole machine
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- Contents of a tray currently being dried
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- An unused tray in my freezer, shows how bif these trays actually are
I’m such a ghetto scientist
Oct 14th
Or trailer trash scientist, call me which ever (I heard that ghetto is now considered a racist term, which is such total bullshit, ghetto is a financial/social slur, not a race slur, there’s lots o’ white folk in the ghetto). I’ve been running my freeze dryer. It requires a cooling water supply to work (the water goes into the vacuum chamber and is used to keep a copper plate cool, and then thermoelectric cooling devices on that plate keep the stuff your are freeze drying 30-40 degrees colder than the water, which is cool enough to maintain a solid, hard freeze, which is needed to freeze dry). Previous to now, I’ve been using a big cooler and I would dump in a bunch of store bought ice, and it would circulate ice water as the cooling water supply. The problem with that is that it can take 24+ hours to freeze dry a sample, and you need the water to stay cool the entire time. That means it sometimes took as much as 6-8 *bags* of ice to keep the water cold the entire time.
So, real scientists use what’s called a circulating chiller in these cases. But, if you go to a scientific shop, they want like upwards of $2,000 for base models. In all fairness, they are intended for exact conditions where the temperature must be maintained to within .1 degree centigrade +- of your target temperature. I don’t need that. I need cold water without bags of ice. So, I went to home depot and bought a $79.99 dorm room refrigerator and a $6 13-liter trash can that had roughly the right shape to fit in this dorm room refrigerator. I brought them home, cut away the molded door panel on the inside of the door of the fridge, disassembled the ice tray so I could reposition it into the trash can, put the trash can inside the fridge, the ice tray (which is where the refrigerant is and is the part that actually cools the inside of the fridge) down into the trash can, then the pump I had from my previous setup inside the ice tray in the trash can, and ran the hoses and the pump power cord out through a notch I cut in the door seal. I now have the worlds lamest, but cheapest, recirculating chiller. Pictures of the slaughter at my personal web server:
Setup from the outside
Trash can, pump, and water/antifreeze mixture (that's why it's purple)
Cut away door panel
Pictures from the WERA Grand National Finals
Oct 20th
These pictures were taken of me racing during the 2000 WERA Grand National Finals.
Race pics from VIR
Oct 10th
These are two pictures of both my SV and my Mille from when I was racing my first CCS event at VIR. This was, obviously, after I got the bodywork for the SV from Ram Racewares. The Mille was using the Aprilia race bodywork, but if you can’t tell clearly from the picture, it is pretty rough after having been down several times  |
That’s all I have from that race weekend….I gotta get a better camera girl so I can have more pictures
2000 SV650 Race Bike
Jan 10th
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- My wife Jessica on her ‘00 SV before I “accumulated” it and got it race ready.
My wife Jessica on her ‘00 SV before I “accumulated” it and got it race ready.
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- This is Jessica at TrackDoD II on her old ‘00 SV after I had converted it for race use. This is the basic shape I ran the bike in during the early part of the 2000 race season. A little later I managed to finally get my bodywork for the bike in from Ram Racewares (carbon fiber bodywork) and finish getting the bike fully race prepped. At this event, with Jessica riding the bike is the only time it has gone down on the track so far :-P
This is Jessica at TrackDoD II on her old ‘00 SV after I had converted it for race use. This is the basic shape I ran the bike in during the early part of the 2000 race season. A little later I managed to finally get my bodywork for the bike in from Ram Racewares (carbon fiber bodywork) and finish getting the bike fully race prepped. At this event, with Jessica riding the bike is the only time it has gone down on the track so far :-P
I “appropriated” my wife’s SV650 street bike and turned it into one of my race bikes. You can see the pictures of the process by going to My Pictures and clicking on the SV650 page. Here’s the list of things I did to the bike to get it race ready:
- Strip off all the street lights and such
- Strip off the stock seat and tail section
- Remove the kick stand
- Remove the chain guards from the swingarm
- Remove the stock handlebars and replace them with Two Brothers Racing Titanium adjustable clip ons
- Add the Scott’s Steering Damper (damper and mounting kit also from Two Brothers Racing)
- Hand drill all the necessary bolts so I could safety wire the bike (this job sucked!)
- Put EBC brake pads front and rear (they REALLY make the bike stop good)
- Put Galfer braided steel brake lines front and rear (get rid of that mushy feeling from the brakes, make it easier to apply the proper amount of brake pressure)
- Replace the stock exhaust with a complete titanium, high exit exhaust system from Two Brothers Racing (some have told me the M4 exhaust makes more power, but I haven’t checked myself to see)
- Use a Factory Jet Kit to get better power out of the motor
- Get a BMC air filter
- Add a Sharkskinz Ducati 916 solo rear tail section and seat pads (this lowers the bikes ride height quite a bit and also makes the foot pegs closer to the seat, don’t do this if you have long legs
- Removed the stock footpegs and replaced them with a set of Vortex rear sets
- Added Ram Racewares (www.rammc.net) bodywork to the bike. The bodywork isn’t bad, but it doesn’t fit all that well as delivered, and the mounting instructions could use a real writer to make them better. If you have the patience to figure out how to mount the bodywork, then it does good. I would try and stick to an M4 pipe with this bodywork though, it doesn’t quite get out of the way of the TBR pipe I have and as a result if caramelized around were the pipe was touching the carbon fiber. I had to cut that section out and patch it back in with fiberglass and also make the fiberglass bulge out to avoid having problems here.
- Remove the stock grips and put some better ones on.
- Add spools to the rear swingarm so you can use a decent stand to lift the bike up on
- Take the forks off and cart them to the guys at Traxxion Dynamics to be re-valved and re-sprung to match my weight
- Scrap the stock shock and replace it with a Penske racing shock
- Scrap the stock tires and get some race rubber (I’m using Metzeler/Pirelli for all my rubber needs)
And these are the things I still have to get done:
- Do a complete 520 chain conversion
- Get enough different sprockets so that I can get the gearing right at each track I go to
- Re-Work the solo tail section’s mounting arrangement, it currently rubs against the gas tank when you sit on it and has rubbed the paint completely off of a couple spots on the tank
- Find some spare rims so I don’t have to remount my rain tires every time I want to use them
- Find a way to get more power out of the motor legally!!