Pic of the Day: Chevy V6 Power Wheel

Taking a break from the Lincoln/"The Car" project. But I had this idea for what was going to be a table showing how the four engine cycles (Intake / Compression / Combustion / Exhaust) overlap in the GM 2.8 Liter V6.

Exciting, huh? Gearhead stuff ahead!

In one of my old auto mechanic books, there's a simple illustration of the overlap in a V8. I'd been meaning to do something similar to that for years just out of curiosity. I did scribble a table in my notebook last night, but when it came to copying that to a CAD drawing, I decided on a diagram instead. Think of it as a map of how the engine runs.

For the car-guys-in-training:
Each ring is a cylinder, #1 on the outside, #6 on the inside. This follows this engine's 1-2-3-4-5-6 firing order.

Red represents the combustion cycle (or "stroke"), where power is generated.
Gray is exhaust.
Blue is intake.
Orange is compression.

Each cylinder follows these four cycles (hence "four-cycle" or "four-stroke" engine). Technically, the intake cycle should be first, since everything else depends on that: air and fuel are drawn into a cylinder, the mixture is compressed, then it's ignited, and finally the burnt gases are pushed out of the cylinder.

I put the combustion cycle first on cylinder #1 (closest to 0 degrees) because getting all those things to happen properly depends on getting that cylinder set up properly (Top Dead Center) while the engine is being put together.

The wheel represents two full turns of the crankshaft, since it takes that long for a single cylinder to go through all four cycles--intake and compression in one, combustion and exhaust in the next.

Looking at how the circular markers line up, you can see which pairs of cylinders are moving together: 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6.
While Cylinder 1 is burning fuel, #4 is breathing in--and both pistons are moving downward.
As #1 breathes out, #4 is compressing its air-fuel charge--both pistons moving upward.
As #1 breathes in, #4 burns its fuel--both pistons moving down.
As #1 compresses, #4 blows its exhaust--both pistons moving up.

The other pairs perform the same way, but overlap the rest in such a way that there's always one cylinder firing for every third of a rotation, or 120 degrees.

Project: "The Car" plans in CAD (pt. 5)

This thing's looking more like a car now. I got the peak lines for the rear fenders, part of the rear roof, and what looks like a vent panel just in front of the trunk lid.

Just think...it's taken me something like 20 hours to get this far. And I only have the side, bottom, front and rear views to go!

Then..."The Car."

Close your blinds--it might be out there watching.

Project: "The Car" plans in CAD (pt. 4)

Took about 3 hours from my busy napping schedule to get back on the Lincoln. I made a slight adjustment to the front fender line and placed the rear window opening and a rectangular panel that sits just ahead of the rear trunk lid.

It took several hours' worth of studying all the source pics I grabbed last week to work out just what the Mark III's real shape is. On first glance, it's just a slab-sided brick with a knife-edge fender peak that runs the length of the car. It's not obvious just yet in the drawing, but there's a very subtle "Coke bottle" effect. The front-most point on the front fenders is the widest. The body narrows very slightly just at the rear edge of the doors, then swells just wide enough for the rear wheels before narrowing again at the rear bumper.

So it's a subtle slab-sided brick.

Good thing about CAD is that I can erase lines without messing up the screen.

Project: "The Car" plans in CAD (pt. 3)

Struggling.

Johnny Lightning's Lincoln is reasonably close--well, it's in a ballpark near mine.

Still working on the front end of the Mark III, trying to hash out the shape of the fenders. Had to go looking for more source photos of Lincolns. Ended up at a page comparing the Mark III and its Cadillac competition with lots of usable pics and one hell of a long loading time.

Good thing I'm not on dial-up anymore. That site would have taken days to deal with. Just grabbing the link to paste it here made my computer choke for almost 2 minutes.

So anyway, the Lightning car is somewhere near right for suitably vague definitions of right. Still cheaper than finding a full-scale Mark III to measure.

About the only line I've locked in since the last post is the base of the windshield.

Need more caffeine.

Project: "The Car" plans in CAD (pt. 2)

Moving a little faster today. Ordered a scale modeling ruler from Excel (1/24, 1/25, 1/35, 1/48, 1/72).

Still working on the top-view, going front to back. At the current stopping point, I've gotten the front bumper, grille, and hood roughed-in.

Starting to look like a car.

Project: "The Car" plans in CAD (pt. 1)

1977's "The Car" was a low-budget lift of "Jaws" (interesting discussion of that at the link). The acting and dialogue are laughable in places--hammy, campy and over-the-top.



It's one of those so-bad-it's-good flicks that's worth watching with friends, but not so bad that you'll need extensive alcohol support. Bring your sarcasm along.

(article at Wikipedia)

(The Drew Review: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

The IMDB page.

A little town in the American Southwest finds itself stalked by a mysterious black car.

First, a pair of teens are run down as they ride their bicycles on a mountain highway.

Then, it's a French horn-playing wiseass who, frankly, had it coming. The Car backs over him, then hits him a few more times for good...measure (heeheehee).

As the bodies rack up, the cops try to confront the bad guy only to get wasted themselves. It's up to newly-minted Sheriff Wade and his remaining men--and the county's wife-beating dynamite expert--to try to trap The Car under tons of rock.

The real star of the movie is The Car itself. It started out as a 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III. George "Batmobile" Barris and his guys modified three of them, mostly by adding sheetmetal bodywork over the existing Lincoln panels.

One of them is the "hero car," the main actor if you will, used for the bulk of filming. The other two were stunt cars. There's some disagreement in the various writeups I've seen online, though. Barris' own website says there were four--one hero and three stunt cars. Another source says three, with a fourth "loosely assembled" on a later-model Thunderbird body for the movie's finale, where The Car is tricked into going over a cliff to its doom.

Either way, only one survived filming. It was parked on the Universal back lot for a few years. Supposedly, it was auctioned off in 1984. The auction picture does look like one of the originals, but there are some differences. The hero/shooting car had chrome trim around the windshield; the two stunt cars had black trim and so does the auction car:

The bumper and grille are wrong, too, but the bodywork does look like one of the real articles.

I've scoured the Internet several times looking for source photos, drawings, trivia, the same sort of thing I was doing a year ago working on my build of Revell's 1/96 Saturn V. With that one, I got close to a gig of photos and videos.

With this one...not so much. a little more than 240 pictures and some videos, a dozen conflicting websites.

Guillermo del Toro got his brother to make him one.

This guy's build is much closer, since he started from a Lincoln Mark III. His Facebook page has a ton of build photos and some behind-the-scenes shots of the Barris build and filming.

Ertl made a 1/18-scale die-cast of The Car about a decade ago. I found one of those on Ebay for close to $200. Way out of my price range. I'm not bringing another car home, either, though there are several up for sale...and even more out of my price range.

Tom Zahorsky at Johnny Lightning built a single 1/64 scale Car in preparation for tooling, but the project got axed. The one in his blog writeup is the only complete one.

From here, it gets even more scarce. A poster named "Tom" scratchbuilt one in 1/87 scale. There's a picture of this tiny wonder at 87thscale.proboards.com about a fourth of the way down. He mentioned making copies available in 2008, but hasn't been back to that site since 2009.

Crap.

I took a lot of screen-captures from my copy of the movie, grabbed pictures of Lincoln Mark III's, and dug around online in search of a cheap Lincoln until I finally found this ugly green creature:

This is a '69 Lincoln Mark III from the Johnny Lightning "demolition derby" line. Here it's clamped to a modeler's miter box to give me a good right-angle reference for accurate measuring. Measure twice, draw once, right?

This is me, so you know there was a snag. Johnny Lightning, Hotwheels, Matchbox and the rest sell their cars as 1/64 scale.

I worked on my first CAD attempt for most of Friday night and well into Saturday morning before I realized that nothing was lining up with the real-world specs for the Mark III. Did a little measuring Saturday night and found that the Lincoln is actually closer to 1/72 scale.

Crap, again, and crap.

Scrapped most of the previous night's work--well, 6 freaking lines and a few guidelines--and started mostly over. Since I started with the real-world specs, I kept my basic guides. About all I had to do once I got restarted yesterday afternoon was to move the wheels back a few scale inches.

Here's where it is now, complete with expanded view guides for front, rear, top and bottom. I decided to work on the top view first this time:

So far, it's just the center section of the hood, the grille, and part of the front bumper, but it's a lot more than I had before. Yeah, this is probably the more complicated way to do it, drawing up the complete Lincoln and then drawing The Car over that, but it seems like the best way to get the right results.

No idea when I'll get done, but for now I'm just enjoying the challenge. CAD fort drawings are much easier--lots of straight lines, simple curves, and repeated details. For all its slab-sided, hard-edged looks, even the Lincoln is more complicated than I'd expected, though Barris' Car is going to be much easier. Lots of those straight lines and simple curves.

Bonus cool: Barris is also responsible for the Beverly Hillbillies' Olds truck.

Pic of the Day: Another Satisfied Customer!

I just got an email from a second member of the Citation X-11 Yahoo! Group thanking me for the decals I drew up in CAD.

The first guy did his in grays (it looks like he kept it close to the original colors); this second guy did his in orange and red:

He hasn't put the decals on yet. I love the car's new color!

Pic of the Day: Six Forts, Decades of Advancement

(clockwise from upper left: Ft. Pickens; Ft. Pike/Macomb; Ft. McRee; Advanced Redoubt of Ft. Barrancas; Ft. Point; Ft. Jefferson)

I don't really give much thought to which forts I pick as CAD projects. As it turns out, I've got three of the earliest Third System forts--Pike, Pickens & McRee--and three of the last, the Redoubt, Jefferson and Point.

The Third System commenced in the wake of the War of 1812. The U.S. had learned a painful lesson about protecting its harbors and rivers from enemy ships. Since we didn't like the British anymore, we got French experts to help build strong and modern brick and stone defenses that were unbeatable at the time. The first was little pie-shaped Fort Pike (commenced 1819, completed 1827) guarding the Rigolets Pass into Lake Pontchartrain. This was the first of five forts controlling access to New Orleans and the Mississippi River.

Fort Pickens was the first of four forts guarding Pensacola's harbor and navy yard. Building commenced in 1829 and wrapped up in 1834. Almost immediately thereafter, engineers got to work on the smaller Fort McRee (1834 to 1839), putting it across the channel from Pickens to develop a withering crossfire on enemy ships.

As soon as McRee was done, Fort Barrancas was commenced in 1839 and finished in 1847; a smaller supporting structure, the Advanced Redoubt (1845-1870), was built a few hundred yards to the north. Together they controlled the landward approaches to the navy yard peninsula.

Forts Barrancas and its Redoubt show the evolution of American fortification away from the bulkier and massive (and more elaborate) Fort Pickens toward simpler construction. Curtain walls, casemate arches  and bastions were pared down to essentials. Solid brick walls gave way to inner and outer brick facings with concrete poured between them for strength.

Fort Jefferson (1846-1874) exemplifies this leaner approach to construction. It covers a larger area, is taller, has longer walls, and was designed for more guns than Fort Pickens, but uses 75% as many bricks (16 million vs. 21.5 million).

Fort Point (1853-1861) is comparable in size to Forts Pike and McRee but could mount more guns (126, compared to Pike's 43 and McRee's 110). This was the only such fort built on the West Coast.

Pic of the Day: Fort Point CAD project

I got tired of sorting through and tagging all the pics I took in San Francisco. Decided to draw Fort Point instead.

This little fort's the only one of its type on the West Coast, commenced in 1853 and still under construction when the South's little tantrum began in 1861. Its closest brush with battle at the time was when a Southern ship captain headed toward the Golden Gate only to learn from a passing British ship in August 1865 that he'd missed the war entirely.

Wasn't there a "Gilligan's Island" episode based on that?

Anyway, I went all the way to San Francisco planning to visit the fort and some of the batteries nearby. Saw Alcatraz, Coit Tower, that big red bridge (can't remember what it's called...smaller than I'd expected) and some other stuff, and Fort Point.

Very nice parking lot. Smallish. Fence was kind of rusty. Barbed wire was a nice touch. Closed except on weekends.

This was a Monday. Heh.

At least the National Park Service had their scheduling make more sense than the rubes in Louisiana who made Fort Pike open only on weekdays. Their fence was prettier.

Still, I got close enough to Fort Point to touch and get some pictures. Well, actually only six out of 20 were of the fort. The rest are scenery from the fort. Turns out those six pics did help a little, but not as much as oh, say, actually being in the fort and loading my camera card up.

Here at home I did a good bit of Google-Fu, grabbed a couple hundred megs' worth of photos, and found 3D Virtual Design Technology's website. The company uses laser scanning and surveying to build a computer model of a structure for restoration or renovation (for example).

On the one hand I'd love to have a laser scanning system. Saves a lot of time I'd otherwise use in taking measurements manually. All the hard work's done. But I can't really see myself settling for that. I'd miss out on spending hours just wandering from spot to spot, taking detail photos and sketching, learning about the place. I don't want to miss out on that by making things quicker.

Besides, I've learned so much about how these old forts were built by studying them that when I'm stumped on a project there's at least one other fort I've been to that has some similar structures.

Armed with the plans I found at 3DVDT and a couple of Historic Structure Reports put together by the National Park Service, I ended up with this:

Took five days and two scrapped attempts. The 3DVDT pics don't have enough resolution to make out dimensions and the Structure Reports don't have any technical drawings, but one of them has a writeup of the fort's condition and includes enough measurements that I was able to throw out the second (and horribly inaccurate) version and start again.

Between these, all those photos and the drawing I did of Fort Jefferson (which has some similarities), I'm more than happy with the result. Six "Third System" (1820-1867) forts in CAD...only 36 more to go according to FortWiki.

Pics of the Day: El Mexicano X-11

Back in September of 2012, an Citation Group member wrote a post asking where to find replacement or reproduction decals for his '85 X-11. It occurred to me that any sign shop with a vinyl printer should be able to run off a set. All they'd need is good photos of the originals.

It also occurred to me that I was bored and wanted a CAD drawing project, and that a sign shop could just use the files and save some time and money. I got with the guy and had him send whatever photos he'd taken of his original decals. His shots were just what I needed--big enough to zoom in on the decals and framed with graph paper:

I fired up QCAD, grabbed my dividers, ruler and reading glasses (someone shrunk the markings on that ruler), and got to work. Each of the decals took about an hour, maybe 90 minutes, from roughing-in to scaling up. For the door and spoiler "X-11" emblems, I drew each of the three shades of gray as separate layers and filled them with RGB matches of the colors:

I sent the guy copies of each as CAD DXF and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files and also made copies available to the Citation group...and moved on to other things.

Last week, he sent me pics of his completed car:

Awesome.

CAD Projects: X-11 Decals

In a fit of boredom, I decided to work up a set of decals for a guy in the X-11 Group. Didn't take very long before I'd reproduced the door and spoiler "X-11" and hood "Alta Potencia V6" emblems for his '85 X-11 project:

I'd never seen the Spanish version of the X-11 "High Output V6" emblem before.

It took about an hour to hash out the basics, but I had to go back a few times to fix some things and get the solid color fill worked out in QCAD. I was originally going to export the drawings as Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) files and color them in a freebie vector illustration program called InkScape, but I didn't like the results. Did the coloring in QCAD instead.

I was still bored, so I drew up the "X-11" door and spoiler logos for '81-84 models:

Not bad for a weeks' worth of work. I still need to do the English "High Output" drawing and a "Chevrolet" to round out the '85 decal set. Anyone who's subscribed to the X-11 Group can find copies of the drawings there (under Files in the Members Only section). At this point, the sets are in CAD .DXF and .SVG formats; no idea what formats an actual print shop would want, but they should be able to work with what's there.

Pic of the Day: Fort Pickens CAD pt. 4

I'm mostly finished with the horizontal section view (see Pt. 2); just a lot of little detail work. I got tired of looking at this part of the project (had to go back and re-do some sections several times because something was off) and started doing the top plan instead.

QCAD has turned out to be a pleasant bit of code. It doesn't have all the features of AutoCAD, but the price is much friendlier ($40 vs. $1500 or more) and I don't really need more than what it offers. There are some annoying issues, though:

--Architectural measurements could allow for American-style measurement (feet, inch, fraction). At the very least the manual should explain that QCAD is expecting everything to be in inches. Working in feet and inches this way requires you to type "12*" first (converting feet to inches), so 12' 6 1/2" is typed as "12*12+6 1/2". I had to hunt online for this piece of information. (RibbonSoft is in Switzerland, so it's understandable that they don't normally work in feet and inches like us Stateside dinosaurs)
--The manual should be fleshed out with examples of each command and better descriptions. As written, the description for the command to draw a line at a given angle wasn't very clear. Another online search for that.
--Some of the more frequently-used tools on the Modify menu could be echoed in the Lines menu to make work flow a little quicker.
--No support for graphics tablet input (at least in version 2.2.2.1). Mouse only.
 
None of these is a deal-killer. I survived the learning curve.

Features:
--Main tools are Point, Line, Arc, Circle, Ellipse, Text, Dimensioning, Edit (Modify), Measure, Hatch, Insert Image, Selection, Blocks, Isometric Projection. Each tool button has its own set of sub-buttons.
--You can enter commands from a command line, from the Menus toolbar, or from the button bar.
--Layers. Parts of a drawing can be drawn on different layers, each with its own color, line weight, and line style.
--Absolute and Relative angles and coordinates.
--Works in DXF format (supposedly also works in AutoCAD's DWG format, but I haven't found how to make that happen).
--Export Bitmap, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), PDF.
--Support for a parts library for frequently-used items like doors, fasteners, bathroom fixtures, and such. None are included with the program, but a small set of parts can be downloaded from the RibbonSoft website.

There's a slight learning curve, mostly because of the too-sparse manual, but once I figured out the worst issues everything else came easily. Installation is as simple as unzipping the files into a convenient folder. QCAD runs right from there.

Pic of the Day (again): Fort Pickens CAD--Bastion B

The awesome continues. The single biggest pain in the can in all of Fort Pickens' architecture has been Bastion B, the southwest bastion. The three main rooms are at odd angles to one another, parallel only to their outer walls. There are smaller galleries leading between them and to adjacent rooms in the curtain walls. Lining all that up on paper was maddening, since I didn't have accurate angles for most of it.

I haven't roughed-in the cistern yet (time for a break, after almost 10 hours getting things to this point), but that'll be easy, given how painlessly everything else lined up.

And--as always--the "NCIS" Gibbs-slap montage for taking so damn long to get a cheap CAD program and build the damn fort drawing.

Pic of the Day: Fort Pickens CAD, 2

Making massive progress. So far, I've gotten the inner structures of the eastern half--the north and south walls and the northeast and southeast bastions.

Once the sectional layer is done, I'll have a clean version of the 1869 "Section Through Embrasures" plan that made me want to draw the fort more than a decade ago:

From there, it'll be the roofing structure (the first pic in the June 3rd post) and my first clear look at the cisterns and stairs at the northwest and southwest corners, both of which suffered heavy damage in separate explosions.

The entire northwest corner was destroyed in 1899 when 8,000 pounds of gunpowder went up during an out-of-control fire. Engineers cleared the rubble and left a gaping hole in the fort--the bastion, cistern, and sections of the adjacent walls are gone.

The southwest wall, cistern, and bastion and part of the south wall were heavily damaged in 1916 when engineers dynamited parts of the fort that were in the way of the big guns of Battery Pensacola. Part of the south wall collapsed, the bastion lost its roof, and the cistern lost its front wall. This corner was a mirror image of the other, so there's no complete example bastion or cistern or some of the structures directly adjacent to them.

Pic of the Day: Fort Pickens in CAD

It's about damn time. For about 13 years I've been thrashing around trying to make an accurate drawing of Fort Pickens. I could have bought reproductions of some of the plans--but where's the fun in that? No, you don't get to explore the place if you're just copying someone else's drawing.

I spent a lot of time at the fort with a tape measure and some other improvised measuring tools, sketching and scrawling and crawling all over the place inside and out. For something like individual rooms (casemates), drawing the layout is simple: kind of hard to mess up a rectangular room.

But when all five of the curtain walls and all five bastions are brought into it, things get tricky. At this scale, I'm dealing with 25 brick walls, each at a non-square angle to its neighbors. Because they're brick, you can't really get a true reading on those angles because no given brick is aligned precisely. Measure at different heights in a corner and the difference can be several degrees--and even a small error can become several feet when you're drawing a 350-foot long wall.

I made several attempts over the years and each one came out wrong, so I just put it all aside and stopped messing with it for awhile.

A week ago, I shelled out for an inexpensive 2D CAD program called QCad, finally ready to throw down and get the Fort Pickens project going again, if only for something to do other than reading news blogs and sleeping.

The first draft came out almost perfect! I changed my approach, using a blown-up printout of an 1831 sketch to get those aggravating angles and just plugging in wall lengths from the sketches...

...and the resulting CAD drawing came out only 2'9" off (the corner lines at top above didn't quite meet). So damn close, and so much better than any previous attempt. After a few more hours of troubleshooting the measurements and tweaking the drawing, it's close enough to perfect that I'm just going to stop polishing and get on to adding the innards.

This is pretty much the key to getting all the other views of the fort, from sectionals and cutaways to simple elevations, because everything else depends on this top plan being right. As a bonus, once I've gotten some of the main layers drawn (top plan, horizontal section) I can run it over to Blender for 3D modeling and scenery building.

FINALLY.