The Quarky Engineer

Something fun this way comes…

This billet Subaru block is downright beautiful! The surfaces and contours provide rigidity improvements, and the closed desk design with ringed sleeves will provide support for much higher combustion pressure. Block clamping is significantly increased with second main bolts and much thicker mating surfaces.

Manley Crank, Steel O-Ring Head interface, 14mm head studs, Cosworth Valves, Springs, and Cams. Michael Roark and the guys at Extreme Turbo Systems will provide the 4″ Intercooler and their kick ass precision 6870 kit.

Thanks to Myles Kerr and Lucas English and English Racing, Rick Arbogast and the guys at IAG, Martin Donnon and Willall Racing Pty Ltd, and Perrin Performance. (and Darton Sleeves) Timothy Bailey and I will be cranking on the Cobb for this one.

I don’t think I’ll be able to match the 1130whp of my GTR, but we will give it a shot. 🙂

This will be a great daily driver setup, especially for those rainy winters here in Portland.

Anyone have an opinions/experience with any particular multi-room audio controllers (with or without amplifiers)?

I have mapped out speaker locations in our new house, and it looks like I will have a total of 20 zones (40 speakers), give or take a few. Routing all of the speaker wires to a central location is easy, and I would like to have in-room source and volume control (but not passive).

For example the Russound CA66 is a 6 zone controller that supports inroom keypads (over CAT5) and handles source selection. You can bridge them together to get more zones.

The MCA-88X is a better alternative, as it does 8 zones, and also has much better API support , plus better direct streaming support. The downside is the CA66 can be purchased directly, while the MCA-88X is a ‘certified installer only’. I don’t mind purchasing the gear from someone, but I really don’t want them configiuring the gear, and I highly doubt that would be able to do the things I want to do. ( Aside from the standard music stuff, I want to integrate it with my security setup, as well as the home automation system ).

(For example: https://www.russound.com/products/audio-systems/multi-room-controllers/mca-series-controllers/mca-88-8-source-8-zone-controller-amplifier#overview )

Progress – Thanks to Eric Rosenberry for his tree cutting expertise…. Forms and rebar incoming.

A few new toothpicks..

It is interesting to see the correlation between the outdoor air quality ( measured in downtown Portland , in RED), vs the PM2.5 as measured by my in house monitor ( BLUE ).

Both periods are the same ( the month of August ). The measurements are the same unit, so the inside air quality is much better than outside air, but as the outside quality really gets worse it propagates inside.

It is not uncommon to see time-lapse construction videos, and they offer a really cool view of a house being built. I wanted to extend on that a little and do a time-lapse rotating drone footage video of my house construction.

The Mavic Pro drones have a waypoint mode that allows you can program a flight path and camera direction, and I used that mode to record a flight path panning around the build site. I have done three videos of that flight path so far, and here is a merged video of those three.

I’ll do this same flight path every day, then once the house is done I should be able to build a single video that shows the house being build while also panning around the site from the air.

At least that is the theory.

Dirt.

It has begun!

For the curious – the lot we are building on has a set of 48 3 foot diameter concrete and rebar pillars that go 50 feet into the ground each. (Yes, that is a LOT of concrete and drilling). They were put in my the previous land owner as part of his house construction, as it was a house with a 40 foot cantilever design. The house was never started, but the pillars were installed. Some of the tops of the pillars are in the way of some of the footings, so we need to break apart the tops and then cut off the rebar (down a couple of feet) of some of them. That is the work in this video. 1 done, I think 10 more to go.

If there is ever an apocalyptic flood in Portland, I’m good until it reaches 1100 feet. The blue represents water at that level, and it just reaches the bottom of our new house location. The lot is the pink (and purple) outline, and yellow is the house itself. The rest of Portland would be sadly swimming with the fishes.

At least the cemetary across the street will last a bit longer.

In case you are wondering what is in the long list of what is wrong with our government –

“21 USC §352, 333 & 21 CFR §333.250(d)(1) make it a federal crime to sell athlete’s foot cream without telling users to “Pay special attention to spaces between the toes.”

“21 USC §§331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §101.17(a)(1) make it a federal crime to sell food in a spray can without warning consumers to try and avoid spraying the food in their eyes.”

“21 USC §§352(f), 331, 333, 21 CFR §§876.5020 & 801.5 make it a federal crime to sell an over-the-counter penis pump without adequate instructions on how to use it. ”

“15 USC §§70b, 70i & 16 CFR §303.9(b) make it a federal crime to sell a textile product with a name like “beaverton” that sounds like, but isn’t actually, a fur-bearing animal.

BUT NOTE: under subsection (c), it’s okay to call your textiles “kitten soft.””

Yes, this is a federal government at work. This is why every law or code should have a forced expire date of 10 years or less.

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