Mt. Kato Race Results

Photos to follow...

Sport Class Results:
5/8 age group
40/79 overall


I felt I gave a pretty good effort. I need to work on my warmups- again, after lap one I felt much better and was able to give it more gas. I also rode more conservatively then necessary in the wet and slippery stuff. Hopefully at least one race this summer will be dry. I'm curious to see if everyone speeds up the same amount, and my relative placement is the same, or if I speed up more than the average racer and place higher.

I had a fun time riding, and most everyone was friendly and also seemed to be having a good time- except for one Freewheel rider. Perhaps he was ultra-focused because everytime I passed him (or visa-versa) there was not a word back from my greetings.

The deep muddy puddles were refreshing to splash through.

Mt. Kato

Rain or not, I'll be racin' at Mt. Kato- I'm pre-registered so the money is spent. I didn't get in any great training rides this week, but I was running lots of errands on the commuter bike, including picking up some 44" long blinds at Lowes. FYI you can easily carry that on the bike by duct-taping it to your top tube. While it looks like you are carrying a missile, it is nice and secure.

Runnin'

4.1 miles last night, roughly 9 minute mile average. I left Sophie (the dog) at home because she would have fallen over and died from the heat after the first mile. This was my longest run yet. I felt pretty good, I think I could have easily completed a 10k. However, afterwards I could feel a little ache in the knees- running definitely pounds you more than riding. It was a fun route to run. Highway 101 is currently torn up between highway 6 and highway 24, so it was a bit like running a cross country course. Lots of dirt, large equipment, and holes in the ground to navigate.


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Hopefully the weather will hold out this afternoon for a road ride.

Parkzone P-51BL back in action

One of my co-workers, Alan, received a Hobbyzone Supercub for a father's day present, and I've been doing some training with him over lunch the past two days so he doesn't total it again. He tried flying it himself on Sunday, and it needed lots of glue and tape after that. Alan and I had some good flights today. It was a little breezy, but otherwise very nice flying. After letting him fly two batteries through my Supercub, it was time to break out the mustang.

The P-51 is now officially a monster. (or more of a monster) I replaced the wing servos with some Parkzone 1061 metal gear servos as one of the original ones stripped a gear. The new servos are larger and have slightly longer travel- wow, what a difference. I nearly augered it in before I became used to the faster roll rates, even at “low” rate. At high rate it’ll do at least two rolls per second. It also nicely snaps back to level flight upon releasing the sticks. Hopefully the metal gears will be more durable than the original plastic gears.

It is now powered by a Turnigy 35-36 1400kv motor, as the 35-36 1100kv I previously had mounted went up in smoke a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what the continuous current rating for this motor is, but it seems happy with fairly high current levels for short amounts of time.

Amp meter results:

• 10x7 prop = 64A = 710 watts = 0.95 horsepower
• 10x5 prop = 57A = 632 watts = 0.84 horsepower

I decided to run it for now with the 10x5. That pulls plenty of current, and considering with the previous motor the max current was 43A, adding 32% more juice should up the fun factor enough.

I’ll have to try it with a 9x6 prop to see if I can get a little more speed for the same amp draw. Even with the 10x5 it’s fast, even at ¼ throttle. One problem is that it doesn’t have quite enough elevator throw, which made for some hairy dive pull-outs. I may replace the stock control horn with one that moves the connection closer to the elevator centerline for more travel.

I'm still very pleased with the Parkzone P-51BL. Very fast, stable flier, and fairly durable. It has handled lots of upgrades very well, especially considering these upgrades have upped the weight. It might be fun to build another up, but try to keep it as light as possible.

LSD Road Ride

I took today off work, and after finishing chores around the house. Among other things this included replacing a hard drive in the DNS-321 unit which was A) very easy and B) the failed hard drive didn't cause any lost data or interruption of service.

Finally, after all this stuff that really didn't need to take up time on a day off, I set off on a road ride. I originally wanted to put in 50-60 miles, but since I wasn't able to leave until 2:30 or so, I was running into a later hard stop deadline. So, I played around with google maps until I found a slightly shorter route. It turned out to be about 41 miles, average speed 16.3. It was a beautiful day- sunny, warm, and with a slight breeze.

It wasn't a bad route- basically head west on the St. Boni trail, loop around the SW side of Lake Minnetonka, then head back on the LRT trail, then hook back up with McGinty road and the 494 trail to head back up north. However, the google bike route generator has some missing data- just FYI the County Road 11 between St. Boni and Victoria has basically zero shoulder. The bonus surprise was jumping on some trails again at the Lowry Nature Preserve NW of Victoria- very nice and scenic park from what I could see from the trail.

Unfortunately, just after I turned around at the farther point out near St. Boni, poof, the rear tire blew out. Very fast deflation, and it took a small chunk out of the tire. It looked like a staple or nail hole, but the offending party didn't stick around for me to see. I rarely get road flats, so this was actually the first time I had tried my birthday present from several years ago out- a nice looking Serfas carbon tube mini-pump. Once I figured out that I had to remove the little plastic component inside of the pump head for it to fit right on the presta valve stem, it worked fine. I was probably able to get it up to 80 PSI or so for the ride home, no more problems.

My legs felt pretty decent until when I turned north on McGinty road and the bike trail north of it- there are some big hills, and my quads were pretty much done. I'm going to have to crank up the road mile volume fast.

Goals: 2000 miles road & 500 miles dirt before the Dakota Five-O. I'm currently at 465 / 118 so I have a ways to go. There is 12 weeks left before the big race, so I'll have to average 128 road miles and 32 dirt miles every week. I think the road miles might be do able, but the dirt will be tough or impossible. A good goal, though....  In past years I've averaged about 1700 miles per year, so these goals are a significant increase.


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Road Ride - finally!

 After slacking on the riding for what feels like months, I finally made time to get out on the roadie. I think this is my first ride to "ride" (other than riding to work) for a couple weeks. I did a nice loop around the west side, 20.6 miles, 16.8 mph average. Not blazing fast, but I was only planning on a nice, moderate paced warm up the legs again ride. It was a great night for riding, plus I tailed a gigantic wild turkey on the Baker Park trails for 25 yards or so. Those things can run!


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My legs felt pretty good. I could tell I hadn't been seriously pushing pedals in a while, but the running definitely helps. Where it really makes a difference is standing up and jamming up hills. No issues there at all.

The weather looks promising for tomorrow- I may take part or all of tomorrow off and put in a 50 or 60 mile LSD ride.

Running Shoes & Nike+

I'm now sporting a new pair of Nike Lunarglide+ shoes. My old pair of Asics was getting very soft, and I could tell the heel wasn't providing much in the way of rotational support. One very interesting observation is just moving the Nike+ sensor from my old shoes to the new ones resulted in slightly different (faster) speed & (farther) distance readings. I had the sensor taped in the tongue of the Asics because they didn't have a dedicated sensor pocket. I'm guessing the impact force readings are much different in the floppy shoe tongue versus the sole of the shoe. Or maybe the new shoes just make me faster!

I've been running 2 -3.5 miles perhaps three or four days a week now, mostly just to try and keep our dog somewhat tired out so she won't rip the house apart when I am at work. I've also been hitting the weights during lunch with the guys from work with a pretty intense program. I think this running and lifting will help my bike performance, but I don't think it's a total substitute for miles.

I'm starting to get a little concerned about the Dakota 5.0, I think I need to put together a honest to goodness training program to prepare.

More IT Schtuff

Over the weekend I purchased a DLink DNS-321 network attached storage device and two 1 TB Seagate Barracuda drives. Microcenter had great deals on all three, $20 rebate on the DNS and 1/2 off on each of the drives.

Anna's parents were in town, so Alan and myself went to work running some ethernet cable in the house. I now have a nice "IT" closet set up on a shelf in the laundry room. The cable modem, wireless router, and DNS box are all tucked up out of the way. We ran cat 5e cable from there to the office, and to both the upstairs and downstairs family rooms for use by the Xbox. The cable will provide faster access to the DNS box from the office desktop. The Xbox 360 doesn't have wireless built in, so it needs hard wiring to access the internet. We use it often to watch TV / movies from Netflix- which is a fantastic service.

I started copying all my photos, music and video over from my desktop to the DNS, but I started getting some drive errors from the DNS. The DNS continued to copy files, but it notified me via a polite e-mail that the right hard drive failed. So, it looks like I'll be heading back over to Microcenter to replace that drive. It'll be interesting to see how the DNS accepts the new drive. In theory, it should automatically recover from the error with no data lost or hassle other than popping out the old drive and inserting the new one.

The DNS seems pretty cool. It shows up on your network connected computer as a network drive, and you can also log into it via a web page to look at error logs, run diagnostics, etc. You can also set it up to e-mail you when a drive has problems, overheats, gets full, etc.

NAS Backup / File Sharing?

On a totally different subject, I'm doing some research on how to best accomplish the following tasks on my home network:

1. Provide a central file location so I can store my photos, video, documents etc, access them from any of my PC's without having to leave one of the PCs on all the time to act as a file server
2. Provide automatic backup of the PC's attached to the network

We are all building libraries of personal photos, videos, all sorts of data that we do not want to lose. One of my co-workers recently lost nearly all of his kid's baby and toddler photos- ouch. Just because of this risk, it is probably a good idea for everyone to have some sort of redundant backup of their data.

After doing some research into options, it seems like a NAS box (network attached storage) is the way to go. Basically, the NAS plugs into your home wired network or wireless router and acts like a file server. The question is, which one to choose, and how not to spend a ton of money making it happen.

Critical features seem to be:
1) RAID 1. This is two drives mirroring each other, to provide redundancy if one drive fails. I don't want to accidentally lose all of my photos
2) some way to backup the NAS box easily. Currently I'm thinking that using a web backup service would be the best and most secure option. One of my co-workers recommends IDrive- $4.95 / month for up to 150 Gb of backup.

Most of the NAS boxes out there also have other useful capabilities:

• iTunes streaming
• web access to data
• etc

Contenders:

1) D-Link DNS-321

Another contender. Spotty reviews, although mostly positive. I've had good luck with Dlink products and I think this would be a top choice.

There is also a $20 rebate on this at Microcenter right now.

1) Buffalo Linkstation Duo

This seems to fit the bill- although as with everything else there is a wide variety of reviews- both good and bad.


3) HornetTek Mobile LANdisk

Seems generic and I haven't found much in the way of reviews... At least Microcenter has a good return policy. This is distant third.

Speedwing Update

Last weekend I joined John for an afternoon of RC flight. Well, the Speedwing still isn't ready for prime time. I adjusted the thrust angle so it is parallel with the wing chord, so it no longer tries to bury itself in the dirt the second you throttle up. However, now when you throttle up it almost instantly rolls over and tries to fly inverted. I think I'll be taking John's lead and move the motor so the thrust axis is directly on the wing chord instead of above it.

Basically, as I've been making modifications the wing is getting closer and closer to the super easy to make and cheap folded blue foam wings, except that it has taken many, many hours of construction. At least it's still cheap!