I like this:

"The Missing Key"


DiGNAN

Or perhaps this is more appropriate for this forum:



DiGNAN

Okay okay, but remember, DiGNAN17 started it, not me :-)

FLAME ME NOW :)




btw, personally i think all kinds of Mac's are only for Women

KILL ME NOW :)

I won't even go there (but personally I wouldn't want one) :)
Nice cartoons today!

Laura

I live to launch.

Ha !
I knew that the first comment would come from Laura :-)

Just be sure that my Girlfriend would rip my head off for that picture :)


And my ANTI-Mac Statements are mostly because i have to program on a G4, whether my PC is for playing around :)

But i loved this cartoon so much, i had to post it anyways ...

Nils

P.S. Please Laura, clear up my speech barrier/stupidity/ignorance ...
What does "I live to launch" mean as a motto ( i really have no idea, if i translate it it just sounds ... strange )

Well, you're fairly safe around here, considering the only female on this whole board (that I can think of) has already responded.

And quickly, I might add!

DiGNAN

But i loved this cartoon so much, i had to post it anyways ...

Actually, the one you linked was actually a modification of the original one. The original one didn't say anything about men or women, it just made the connection between the fact that the iron and the imac looked nearly identical. It simply showed the two pictures and had the caption "separated at birth?" above them.

The funny thing is, when that original graphic came out, the photos were taken directly from the front pages of the manufacturer's web sites and were not retouched at all, not even color-corrected. You could switch back and forth between apple.com and rowenta.com and see the effect for yourself.

___________
Tony Fabris

I like this one too.
http://www.millionjokes.com/Funny_Pictures/399.jpg

All programmers out there: can you identify the infinite loop in this picture?

DiGNAN

how about this one ? imac rulez ;-)

Hmm, what can that be? :) To answer what "I live to launch" means, launching out of the starting box at a drag strip or just very fast take offs when the stop light turns green. It's a blast to do and yeah I finally got to take the Nova to the local drag strip to see what it can do. Now I have a few minor repairs to do since I blew out the header gaskets and I want to adjust the shift point of the automatic tranny. But to tell the truth, I have been know to pick up an iron on occasion and use it but only when I have to.

Laura

I live to launch.

Ah yes, the iBrator.

There's an actual movie of that, a take-off of the original iMac commercial featuring the Rolling Stones song with the lyric "she comes in colors everywhere".

Sorta gives new meaning to the lyric, if yaknowhatimean.

___________
Tony Fabris

I'm in the Blue Oval camp, but my love for 'American Muscle' in general definitely overrides my brand loyalty.

What kind of numbers are ya pulling?

What does "I live to launch" mean as a motto

Laura's hobby is drag racing -- a contest of acceleration between two automobiles.

"Launch" refers to the initial acceleration from a standing start at the beginning of the race.

Some of the machinery used in drag racing is pretty fantastic. When you get to the top of the food chain, so to speak, you are talking about AA-Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars that run nitro-methane for fuel and generate more than 6,000 horsepower from a single V-8 engine of seven or eight liters displacement. The engines are overhauled between each run in a time-frame of less than an hour. These cars are reaching speeds of more than 500 kilometers per hour accelerating from a standing start in four hundred meters, taking about four and a half seconds to complete the race. (For Americans... that's more than 300 MPH in 1/4 mile and an engine displacing 450-500 cubic inches...)

Viewing it as competition doesn't excite me much, but I love the machinery involved!

Did I get it right, Laura?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

There was a really fantastic article in Road and Track a couple months back about drag racing. They compared a whole slew of vehicles in quarter-mile tests, everything from slightly-modified stock vehicles all the way up to Top Fuel. They also got into the intricacies of how these cars (and one motorcycle) turn energy into acceleration, and it was very fascinating. Some of the numbers produced by the top-fuelers were staggering in comparison to real-world vehicles. Did anyone catch that article?

___________
Tony Fabris

Sounds to me like you got it right. I certainly am not pulling numbers like that and never will in the car I am running. The best I have done in the 1/4 mile was 14.84 which was about 93MPH. I hope to do a little better than that the next time but without overhauling my new engine I don't think I will get much better than the mid 14's or maybe lower 14's but I am fine with that. I wanted a car that could be either a daily driver or taken to the track. I guess I have always gotten a thrill out of launching quicker at a traffic light than the driver next to me. That is why I seem to go through transmissions on whatever car I have driven. Now I have a car that can take the way I want to drive it :)

Laura

I live to launch.

It's not really the fastest car that wins in drag racing. It is a matter of being consistent. For the races you have to dial-in what you think your car will run and be as close to those #'s as you can. You also need a very good reaction time getting out of the box. Hopefully later this summer I will be ready to run in some trophy classes and next year go out for some money. I really impressed the neighbor of my boyfriend, who has been racing for many years and took the time to teach me how to stage the car and give me pointers, how consistent I was especially being my first time at the track. Maybe I have a future as a driver.

Laura

I live to launch.

Have you seen "Back to the future" Part III (I think it was Part III) and do you remember the traffic-light launch? Hopefully it won't happen to you!

Whooo... I had a similar problem with my motorcycle... good acceleration... but some car drivers seem to be blind... After that I found myself in the hospital... Luckily only with a broken leg and cut-trought muscle...

TeeMcBee

Good luck on that!

TeeMcBee

This got me curious, so I tried a standing quarter-mile in the uber-ugly kit
car on the way back from shopping a little earlier. 17.31 seconds and 86 MPH,
not too impressive. Mind you, it was in the wet, and the wheels kept slipping in first and second gear. I'll have to try it on a dry day...

Thinking about it, the road I used is on a very slight hill as well, which
wouldn't have helped. Oh well. Once we get the 210BHP 24v 2.9L V6 engine in
instead of the ancient 2.8L V6 it has at the moment the acceleration should
go up.

Back to empeg hardware design.

Patrick.

Opinions expressed in this email may contain up to 42% water by weight, and are mine. All mine.

t's not really the fastest car that wins in drag racing. It is a matter of being consistent.

You're talking about bracket racing where each participant has a self-defined handicap. The cars line up side by side at the start, but they do not start together. Depending on the disparity of the handicap between the two cars, one car might get the green light as much as five or even ten seconds before the other. The consistency part is that if each car were to get a perfect start and run exactly at the handicap, or bracket speed, they would finish in a dead heat. If a car goes faster than the bracket speed, it is disqualified. It takes nerves of steel to watch your competitor take off while you wait for your light to go green, and then patiently avoid exceeding your bracket speed all the way to the end.

In "normal" (i.e., non-bracket) racing, it's "run what you brung" with various classes set up limiting what is allowed in terms of displacement, fuel, weight, tire size, supercharger, etc., and let the best man win. Both cars start together, first one to the end wins.

I've never cared much for bracket racing (isn't it primarily IHRA that sanctions that, and NHRA that does more of the "head to head" racing?) but that's just me. As I mentioned before, it isn't the competition that gets me excited in drag racing, but the machinery itself. Why bother to run some flat-out balls-to-the-wall high-tech super-car when you're just gonna get beat by some nice lady in a clapped out Nova with a really great stereo who Lives to Launch and is very consistant.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Doug, I think what Laura meant is that having a driver who can shift and clutch well, and who can do this consistently, will do more for the car's quarter-mile times than a few extra horsepower would.

As Chuck Yeager likes to say, "It's not the machine, it's the man."

Or in this case, Woman...

___________
Tony Fabris

Doug, I think what Laura meant is that having a driver who can shift and clutch well, and who can do this consistently, will do more for the car's quarter-mile times than a few extra horsepower would.

Nope. She's talking about bracket racing. (For the races you have to dial-in what you think your car will run and be as close to those #'s as you can.) Also, Laura runs an automatic transmission in her Nova. (...I want to adjust the shift point of the automatic tranny.)

As Chuck Yeager likes to say, "It's not the machine, it's the man." And Chuck Yeager obviously never went drag racing! In the top classes, the drivers don't shift at all -- they run the full quarater mile in one gear. They don't even clutch -- the clutch engagement is automatic, but not the way you'd think. The clutch consists of a multi-disk clutch pack that engages progressively through very complex mechanical/pneumatic linkages (electronics not allowed in top fuel and funny car) so the credit for a good start goes both to the driver who starts the clutch engagement the instant the light goes green, and just as much to the crew chief who sets the clutch up to get exactly the right amount of wheelspin for the entire length of the track: too much and you're up in smoke, too little and you're giving up acceleration. The clutch setup will vary depending on the temperature, the humidity, the track surface (which is likely to be different out of the "box" than further down the track) and even how many cars have run before you thus laying down rubber (or, worse, oil) and changing the traction characteristics of the track.

This is why guys like John Force spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a top of the line drag racer. For something that appears as brutally simple as a Funny Car, there are an astounding number of variables involved in setting it up for competition, in the end it really is the machine, not the man that wins the race. (OK, assuming some parity in driving skill. Take the 16 qualifiers in a national meet, and there's a good chance the slowest qualifier would win the meet if he could take over the fastest qualifier's car.)

That's not to say there is not considerable skill involved. Imagine driving a top fuel car at 300 miles per hour with steering that is less than one turn lock to lock and so much noise and vibration that your vision is blurred, having to stay within a 40 foot wide lane, ready to lift and then re-apply throttle instantly should the rear wheels break loose... and in the bracket clases, having to nail your starts exactly, not panic when your competitor starts out three seconds ahead of you, shift at precisely the same RPM each time and re-apply the clutch exactly the same (all pretty much as you described above, actually...)

Am I boring people with these discourses on drag racing? Probably most of you know all this stuff already... but since it's one of the few topics I know anything about, I like to talk about it. Say the word and I'll shut up and go away....

tanstaafl.





"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I hadn't caught that point where Laura said she wanted to adjust the shift point in the automatic tranny. And I didn't realize that the Top Fuelers only ran in one gear. Sorry. I'll shut up now.

___________
Tony Fabris

They have so much power that they don't need more than one gear. But because they have so much power (there is no dyno in the world that can measure the power output from those things, so it's a mystery how much power they really make)... -- because of all that power, hence special clutches designed to slip all the way through the race, kind of a controlled slip to maximize traction...

Calvin

Well tonight I got the header gasket replaced that I had blown racing the car last week. This weekend we will be putting in a new vacuum modulator to change the shift point from 4000RPMs to 5000RPMs which should knock off some time when I run it next week. Right now since I am only running the car on Tune and Test nights we run the cars side by side. I won one heat last week because of being faster and one heat because the other guy red lighted his car which I haven't done yet. I also have a couple of people going with me to run against me which should be fun. Serious bracket racers spend big big bucks which I do not have so I am doing it more for the fun and joy of it for now. Maybe next year I will get serious and go for the money. Right now I have no stereo or speakers in the car. I just listen to the music of the engine which is better now that the gasket has been replaced. No more clicking noises. I hope to in the near future be able to start on the sound system but it will depend on the job I end up with and how fast I get out of debt because of the car. I enjoy reading about drag racing and talking about it as if you couldn't tell :) I do want an empeg in the Nova someday.

Laura

I live to launch.

Doesn't that the automatic gear shift do for most of you americans?

What is the reason why most american cars have automatic gear shift? It's much more fun to shift the gear at the time you want it. And it's really fast, too (Maybe not quite as fast as the new register-shift or a motorcycle's gear shift)

TeeMcBee
Reg#948 - already ordered a Mk2.

Automatics are better in heavy traffic or maybe we are just lazy. I am finally learning how to drive a standard pickup truck and I do have a motorcycle license so I do know how to shift. I gave up the bike because it was too dangerous and I never could get it on the center stand :) Drag racing is much safer. You can get shift kits to manually shift an automatic which I might do some day.

Laura

I live to launch.

Yes, motorcycling IS dangerous (had a look at a previous post of me?).
But it is really fun. It's like a fever. Once you got it you get never rid of it.

And launching with a motorcycle is NICCEE!! That's acceleration. There's a motorcycle - it's the Suzuki GSX-R 1300 (also called Hayabusa) - Have you already heared? It has something about 240 kg and 176 HP.
I don't exactly know - but it's acceleration from 0 - 200 is something about 8 or 9 seconds (correct me if I'm wrong). It's top speed is something > 325 km/h (should be something like 203 mph)...

I'd like to ride it one time

TeeMcBee
Reg#948 - already ordered a Mk2.

That is pretty darn fast but it would be hard to find a place where you could accelerate like that around here. I haven't heard of or seen that bike yet. I have been puttering around on a Honda 70 lately. It doesn't go much above 45MPH and if I drop it I can pick it up and my feet are flat on the ground at a stop. I'll stick with that one, it's pretty safe for a bike.

Laura

I live to launch.