When it comes to me and cars, there have been two consistencies throughout my lifetime:

1) I’ve always admired the Lotus Seven, a.k.a. Caterham Super Seven.
2) I’ve always wanted to build a kit car.

More recently, say in the past 10 years or so, I’ve also wanted to build an electric car. When I recently realized that there are plans available – for free, no less – on how to build your own Lotus Seven (know as a Locost – combination of “Lotus” and “low-cost”), I thought, “Eureka! I can kill three birds with one stone! I can build an electric Lotus Seven!” And thus some voracious reading and searching began.

At first my only point of worry was whether I’d use a transmission or not. With DC motors, a transmission is retained, and two gears (one for around-town, one for highway, generally 2nd and 3rd) are used. Of course, part of the allure of a Seven/Caterham/Locost is its extreme light weight (a typical weight is around 1200 lbs, or about HALF of a typical small sedan), so I started trying to figure out how to ditch the transmission and, by extension, drive shaft. In my reading on electric vehicles, it seems that the vehicles that use direct drive – that is, the motor hooked up directly to the wheels with no
intermediate gearing – use AC drive motors. Ouch. A good DC motor can be had for $3k new, but the same thing in an AC motor? Triple that.

This lead me to start thinking about the cost of building an electric Locost. Not only would I be looking at either an expensive (DC) motor, or a REALLY expensive (AC) motor, I’d still have to buy the batteries for it as well. I’m still holding out hope for EEstor and their EESU, which promises an order of magnitude of improvement on the weight and cost over a comparable lithium-based battery. My feverent wishes notwithstanding, the EESU is still vapourware right now, so there’s no point in planning a car around it. Thus, I’d be looking at either lead-acid batteries (heavy, and still not cheap), or lithium ion batteries (lighter, but still very, very expensive). Suddenly my electric Locost didn’t seem like the inexpensive way to get into an electric vehicle anymore. (Further realization: NO electric vehicle is cheap to get into right now, if you want highway capability and decent range.)

I started pondering about building the vehicle anyways, just with a gas engine in it that I could later swap out when electric drive trains and batteries are more affordable. This gave new life to my fledgling idea, but presented new issues.

As the Lotus Seven was designed in the 1960’s as a minimalist sports car, it is inevitably a front engine, rear wheel drive vehicle (also known as FR layout). Thus, to make one yourself, you need to find another vehicle of the same configuration to be the donor – you strip everything off the vehicle, and lay it out in the frame of your Locost. (Alternatively, you can get all the pieces you need piecemeal, but that is much more expensive that simply using a donor vehicle.)

Now, if you’ll think about it for a second, you’ll realize there aren’t a lot of FR vehicles out there today, especially with manual transmissions. (I am unabashed in my love of manual transmissions, and even moreso if I’m going to be making a sportscar. Automatics NEED NOT APPLY.) The vehicles that the original Locost was based on were out of Europe, and not available over here. That leaves us North Americans looking for suitable donors, such as old Corollas, Miatas, some of the rarer FR sedans, and of course small pickup trucks and SUVs. Not a lot of choice, and finding a suitable donor at a decent price is a matter of persistence, patience, and luck.

During all this research and donor deliberation, a friend of mine from highschool pointed me in the direction of the LocostUSA forums, where Locost builders of all sorts from across North America (and beyond) gather to share information. Boy, what a wealth of information there!! Not only do they share information about their finished and ongoing projects, but they also encourage “non-traditional” build logs as well. A few such builds caught my attention… and sent me off in yet another direction.

To be continued…

About 36 hours ago, I was getting the kids ready for a bath. For reasons I won’t get into here, there was a half-peeled, half-eaten banana in my ensuite bathroom. Our toddler, Carter, found it and showed me what he found. In what I now recognize as a momentary lapse in judgement, I told him, “Take it to Mommy!”, and he dilligently toddled off.

Only a couple of minutes later did I realize that I had just unleashed a toddler with a banana on the house, and went to check his progress on his mission. I found him on the same level of the house, but without the banana. Uh oh.

While I bathed the boys Isabelle took it on herself to launch a comprehensive search for the AWOL banana. She spent at least 20 minutes searching everywhere – drawers, hampers, under beds, in closets, garbage pails – all to no avail. The search was expanded to the attic and the main floor, but everyone came up empty.

Last night Jannette and I formed another search party and again scoured the second floor. Cupboards, toilets, washer and dryer, piles of clothes and toys, everything was checked. Nothing. The banana has joined Jimmy Hoffa.

So, thanks to my brain fade, we’ve got a fruit bomb somewhere in the house, unless Carter somehow flushed it down a toilet without anyone noticing. I think it’s still around somewhere. I can only hope that it dessicates before it becomes a fruit fly buffet/orgy.

I’m scared!

Have you been wondering where my blog disappeared to? I have! Fifteen is an eternity in the Interblogs, but thanks to the until-today-unbeknownst-to-me Worpress app for iPhone, the long dry spell may be at an end. MAY be. Stay tuned.

Dearest Mr. (Joss) Whedon,

Allow me to start by offering my sincere congratulations for the highly successful release of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Once again you’ve hit it out of the park, much to the great delight of fans like myself. I hope that you are ultimately able to both pay the crew and reward yourself handsomely for such an excellent product.

While the method of releasing Dr. Horrible is obviously successful, it still relies on “push” production: you develop, create, and package entertainment, and then push it out into the market, where it is hopefully eagerly consumed. The risk must be borne by yourself, and the market has little opportunity to provide you (and any intermediate parties) with direct feedback, other than after the fact through grassroots fan movements.

I would like to propose a new paradigm of entertainment delivery that could provide more benefit to both yourself, the people you work with, and your fans. It is a model based on agriculture, of all things; specifically, Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). A typical farm operates on “push” production: a crop is grown, and pushed into the market to be sold. A CSA farm, on the other hand, operates on a “pull” production method, in that it has a membership that is allotted a share of the yields of the farm on a weekly basis. Instead of trying to find the best method of pushing the farm’s yields into the market, the market is already there, waiting for the yields to come to them.

Applying this sort of paradigm isn’t unheard of in entertainment. I personally know a musician, Bryan Moyer Suderman, that has successfully adopted the CSA model to music; he produces music on a regular basis and distributes it to his membership. You can read more about how he, and others, are using this model at CommunitySupportedArts.com.

By now it’s probably no surprise that I propose that Mutant Enemy Productions embrace a Community-Supported Entertainment model. We, your loyal Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dr.Horrible fans, will pay UP FRONT for entertainment you produce. This summer, it was Dr. Horrible via iTunes. Perhaps in the winter you’ll send us a comic book via PDF. Later you could send us some songs you wrote. Maybe Firefly could live on again as monthly episodes. That’s the beauty of it – we get our Whedon fix direct and undiluted, and you have the freedom to create, balancing distribution between traditional marketing and Community-Supported Entertainment.

Please, Mr. Whedon. Allow your fans to support you. Thank you for your consideration.

Regards,
Andrew

P.S. If anyone has the means to forward this on to Joss or his agent, please do so with my blessing.

If you have not yet heard of, let alone gone and watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and you consider yourself even a remote fan of Joss Whedon’s work, GET OFF YOUR BUT AND CLICK NOW NOW NOW!!!

Seriously, folks. He’s put up a 3-part Internet musical that is free for viewing until Sunday the 20th. Acts 1 and 2 are up now, with Act 3 (oh GOD I can’t wait!) coming on Saturday. Later you’ll be able to get it off iTunes or buy the DVD, but this is FREE right now, and it’s GOOD.

Go watch it. Seriously, don’t make me whip out my hammer.

1) If you call and they are interested, by all means call back.

2) If you call back and they have changed their mind, do not call back.

3) If you call back again and they ask to be put on your Do Not Call list, comply.

4) If you don’t comply, and call them back again and they yell at you and again demand to be put on their Do Not Call list, better do it this time.

5) If you don’t comply again, and call them back again, and they scream at you and threaten to call the police, DO NOT CALL BACK EIGHT MORE TIMES AND BE VULGAR WITH THEM.

Unfortunately, the company I got to deal with this evening did not offer remedial telemarketing to their callers. So I had the pleasure of calling the local police and having them deal with the company. The constable in charge of this was very helpful, called me back quickly, found the company’s phone number (which had been obscured from *69), talked to a manager, and said the manager she talked to assured her it should not happen again… but if it does, to call her back to escalate the issue.

Fine and dandy, but we’ve already told these folks not to call… and they’ve called back 10 times. From my research, that should be ten $15,000 fines.

Fuck you, Toronto-based duct cleaning company. You’ve gone from irritant to target.

Gak, what a fortnight it’s been. Our offer was accepted, but then it took almost the entire following week to confirm financing. Once that was done, we set a date for ourselves to get our home on the market (via ByTheOwner.com) and have some open houses.

MAN, what a lot of work. In two weeks we’ve filled a 5×10 self-storage place, cleaned, organized, and staged an entire house (while simultaneously living in said house with three kids – no small feat at all), just in time to show it off today, our first of two back-to-back open houses. This past week has been a lot of stress… I sure hope we can dial it back a bunch this next week.

So for all that, what do I get today? Four visitors. Yup. One of those visitors was a neighbour with the same model townhouse that is also thinking of selling. One of the other visitors called about an hour later and offered a real lowball number. Disappointed? Yeah, a bit… but we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Right now I just want to catch my breath and have something yummy and alcoholic.

As of Thursday, we will be moving. After some fine-toothed combing in regards to the financing aspect, we’ve been approved, and thus removed our last (and only) condition on our offer. So at the end of August, we’ve moving!

Time to panic.

There is SO MUCH to do. First, we have to get the house ready to show. That means paint touch-ups, painting 3 bathrooms (which are still original “builder bone”), finishing the basement (putting up the drop ceiling), decluttering the WHOLE house, and staging and cleaning it. Our goal is to have back-to-back open houses on June 28 and 29. It’s going to be a very busy two weeks.

We got started last night; we cleaned off the shelf in the garage (I built a clear-span shelf across the width of the garage – 12 feet – to store off-season stuff) and put all the boxes of outgrown kids’ clothes up there. Looks much neater, got all those clothes out of the way (but still accessible if we want to whittle them down before we move), and shows how much space is really up there.

The space that was cleared out was in the storage room in the basement, which we did further work on this morning. We realized we have an awful lot of Christmas decorations (an embarrassing amount, honestly) that we just do not need access to, so we decided to get a 5×10 self-storage locker and shove it all in there. Lots more will follow.

It seems that a big part of staging your home to show it isn’t just cleanliness, but making it feel spacious. How do you do that? Move a lot of stuff OUT. So we’ll be taking down the crib (which isn’t really being used, as we’re co-sleeping), kicking the baker’s rack out of the house, removing a bunch of toy shelves from the basement, and who knows what else? I bought boxes on Thursday after work, and I’m not afraid to use them.

The only problem I’ve run into thus far is lumber. I’ve got odds and ends of all the projects I’ve ever done to this place in the garage, all of it useful, but not worth moving. I put a post up on Full Circle (formerly FreeCycle), but haven’t had any takers yet. Even if the ReStore would take it (they won’t – they only take 8′ lengths and only a few piece of what I have qualifies) our van isn’t big enough to take the 4×8′ sheet of OSB that’s in the garage. Hmm… what to do to get rid of it??

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we will not be selling through our real estate agent. With the way homes sell on our street (two weeks or less is pretty standard, and in a few cases next day) I just can’t justify throwing away 5 figures for someone to not really do all that much. We’ll be using ByTheOwner.com, the one with the traffic light on the sign. Of course, first the house has to be clean enough for us to get the pictures taken to post on the website… eek!

Hopefully, within three weeks we’ll have a firm offer and we can pack in a more relaxed manner. That is, until we start looking for tenants to fill our basement apartment in the new place. I’m not going to worry too much about that… as much as I’d like to find someone long-term right off the bat, we can always nab a pair of students at the last minute. Thank God for living on a bus route to two universities, huh?

I’m pleased to announce that yesterday ended at midnight, and I was asleep nearly two full hours before then. So the day that started badly at least ended well enough.

As for my car… well, the good news is that it only required $1400 in service. The bad news would have been a LOT worse. See, turns out the timing belt slipped, thus throwing the engine way out of tune, ensuring it wouldn’t run. However, on TDI engines, if the timing belt breaks, valves slam into pistons and you’re looking at a new cylinder head, if not a new engine outright. That, my friends, would set me back about $4000. So $1400 is good news indeed. And at least I get quite a bit for my money; a new timing belt (so we’re good there for another 120k or so), a new water pump (ditto), and a new EGR valve. With those taken care of, the big nagging worry is gone (the timing belt) and the minor driveability issues I’d been having should be cured.

Of course, I still need to deal with the exhaust issue, but that’s something else entirely.

House: dammit, we’re SO close… the lender wants to do some due diligence because I’m still in my probationary period at work, but otherwise we have it. Until they give the all-green, however, our financing condition stays. And here I thought we’d have it all put to bed on Monday. Silly me…

To end off on a positive note: the kids went to bed without much trouble, and it’s going to go down to 9°C tonight so the house will get nice and cool. (Too bad all the neighbours can’t seem to figure that out – I’m listening to the hum of air conditioners as I type.) It’ll be nice to have a good, deep, cool sleep. Yeah.

I read a lot of sci-fi in my younger days (when I still had time to read for leisure). One book I remember reading was Day of the Triffids. For those that haven’t read it, the two-cent synopsis is that space weapons malfunction, wreaking havoc on the citizens of Earth. Today felt EXACTLY like that.

It’s probably not space-based weapons going haywire, but it may as well be. First, I started getting a migraine over breakfast. It never went away, but after trying for 20 minutes to get my work webmail to actually let me log in to tell my boss I’m not coming in, it degraded itself into just a headache. As I had training to go to, I decided to grimace and bear it. Then I tried to leave, but my car wouldn’t start. Thankfully, we do have a second vehicle, and it wasn’t needed by the rest of the household today so I took it. Then, lucky me, I got to sit through five hours of extremely dry “training”, which is basically getting an overview of Standard Operating Procedures. To say that it was dry would be an understatement – it was an active dessicant, if anything. Then I get a distressed phone call from Jannette telling me the kids are going batshit trying to get her to give them her iPod so they can play Breakout, and completely not listening to her or even caring that they have lost most of their priviledges for the week and being a hair’s breadth from being smacked (from a woman who has never, ever spanked). I’m still waiting to hear whether our financing has gone through so I call the mortgage broker only to find out that his BUSINESS card has his HOME e-mail address on it, so while he received it he doesn’t have it at work and thereby can’t give us an answer until tomorrow. Then I get home to see if there’s something I can do to fix my car, and notice that the exhaust system has been cleaved in two. Calling the dealer, it may be that the timing belt has slipped (only $600 to fix and replace), or I’ve blown a head gasket, or possibly even damaged the cylinder head ($4000). Realizing there is no way around getting a tow in to the dealer, I call to book a tow for tomorrow morning, and the guy shows up 13.5 hours early. And the last insult of the day was that there were no parking spots left at soccer, so I had to park a good long distance away.

Insert a forceful, ear-searing four-letter word of your choice in ALL CAPS here.

So, come on midnight. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with June 10, 2008, but if it was a car it would be a lemon, if it was a toy it would have lead paint and be recalled, and if it was a horse it would be shot. Screw you, today – I’m going to bed soon.