Struggle Sessions

Currently struggling with multiple distractions meant to pull my focus away from my real problems, like finding a job in this economy. 

After a year and a half of aquiring a pile of Vespa moped parts, and an additional bike, I still do not have a bike that can go down and back the block without falling apart or stalling. Last year I assembled a complete Vespa Ciao with tires, new brake cables, a working electrical system, and a bunch of new parts. I was going to test if the thing actually worked by putting gas in the tank, and when I did a bunch came pouring out the bottom from a bunch of pinholes. The gas tank is welded into the frame of the bike, which means that I can't use this frame. I disassembled the other Vepsa Ciao frame I had lying around and filled the tank with evapo-rust to prepare it for assembly, only to find that it too had a leak. 

That left my 3rd Vespa, the Vespa Bravo, which I was saving for later because it needed a complete overhaul to work, so I started on that. I redid the wiring, put new tires and brake cables on it. I have 2 engines, and this is the part that gets complicated and I'll get very technical in explaining. This is going to be long.

The Indian motorcycle company Kenetic cloned the Vespa design to make it's TFR moped. These bikes are generally garbage but they will fit Vespa aftermarket parts and two parts of the bikes are worth salvaging: the engine case and the igniton system. The iginition system is a CDI and uses a hall effect sensor to signal engine timing, rather than a points system from the dark ages. The problem is that even though it bolts directly to the engine case, it still has to be manually timed.

In order to time the bike I had to get a timing light, which flashes when the spark plug is triggered, and a drill so I could spin the engine in place. You find the top dead center of the cylinder and mark a point on the flywheel and case. Then you spin the engine and shine the timing light to see at what position the ignition is being triggered. Then you mark that on the engine case, you set the cylinder to top dead center, then you rotate the flywheel to the point you marked on the flywheel and, in theorey, you have a working engine. 

The problem is that in order to do this I had to remove the crankshaft's woodruff key, a small bit of metal that keeps the flywheel from rotating on the crankshaft, it kept falling off any time I put any torque onto the crankshaft so If I tried running the engine it would lose the timing instantly. I thought I would need to install a completely different transmission in order for it to work, so I grabbed my other engine...

The vespa mopeds have a specific part called the "top hat washer" that goes between the flywheel and the clutch. If you put it on the right way it sticks out enough so that when you tighten the clutch down the outer part will spin freely and the inner part will be attached to the crankshaft directly. I put it on THE WRONG WAY, so that when I tightened the clutch to the crankshaft the entire thing would lock together. I thought something was wrong with the clutch. 

I was able to start the bike exactly once and felt satisfied that I had made some progress after going through 3 frames and 2 engines. When I tried starting the bike again it wouldn't work. It was getting spark, air, and fuel, but it wasn't working. I suspected that there was something wrong with the ignition so after 2 days I had to take the engine out. Because I put the top hat on wrong, the clutch was on wrong and it put too much torque on the flywheel and the woodruff key broke in half, knocking the timing off. I didn't figure this out until I took the engine apart. 

Once I figured out I had put the top hat on wrong, I found another woodruff key and another flywheel, and re-assembled the bike to try again. It started but it ran like garbage, made way too much smoke, and despite making a lot of adjustments and changing jets it would never run correctly. I got it to ride down the block once at maybe 5mph on it's own power, but after that nothing I did could get it to idle or run correctly. I also had a problem where the lighting coil wouldn't put out any voltage, this puzzled me because it's just magnets over copper and i should be getting something. 

I was looking at getting new coils and I discovered that Vespa in all their wisdom updated the points system for european bikes sometime in the 80s with a new flywheel and coil design. My bike had the european coils, but had the US flywheel, so even though it kinda worked I wasn't getting enough voltage to the spark plug to burn all the gas/air mix, which made it run like garbage. This also explained why I was getting nothing out of the lighting coil. 

So I took the engine apart AGAIN and then found some old style coils I had lying around, tested it on my test bench, found that the ignition didn't work but the lighting coil I found did work now, found ANOTHER coil, and that one worked. I reassembled the bike for the 5th or 6th time and it finally ran properly. 

On it's maiden voyage I made it a few blocks going roughly 25mph, which is slow even for a moped. It has an aftermarket cylander, carburator, and pipe, so in theory it should spin faster. I would have to adjust the carb to maybe let more air in, but I wouldn't have a chance to. On my way back the clutch fell off the bike, in my haste and excitement to get the bike to finally run I don't think I tightened the clutch down hard enough and it got loose. When it got loose the crankshaft ate away at the inner race of the clutch basket, ruining it. I put another clutch on it, but it wouldn't engage, and I put the bike away where it remains.

The main problems with the vespa design is that it's possible to assemble the bike wrong, and as a result the bike damages itself or doesn't run right. Good mechanical design can only be assembled in one way, because the person working on it will not look up any documentation or will not have access to an expert and so will just be flying blind trying to get the machine to work. The vespa design requires the engine to be removed to access the ignition system, which adds considerable time to fixing and troubleshooting and requires a mechanic to have a test bench setup. This is the worst shit I've ever worked on. 

And then, Overwatch had a fucking update

i have been working on a little top down racing game in Godot. It was fun. I had a system to make tracks easily, I got bot driving behavior working, it was set up so that I could build out a track in about 15 minutes. It was fun to play around with. I got a little dialog system in it, that I found a bug in and filed a bug report for, and in the process of updating the dialog system I discovered that nothing would download or load anymore in the project, then I discovered the hard drive my project was on was full, and it was because Overwatch decided to update itself without asking me, and instead of failing to update because the hard drive was full it just filled up the rest of the hard drive.

I have not played Overwatch in years, I uninstalled it and left a negative review. If you work on this "game" I have no respect for you. Overwatch feels like eating styrofoam. I have never played a game where winning and losing feel exactly the same.  

When this happened it dereferenced a bunch of things in the open Godot project, so levels wouldn't load and scripts wouldn't load. I tried rebuilding parts of it but so much was dereferenced it made more sense to start over from scratch. I was able to copy over the most important scripts, but my track tiles were gone and so was the dialog system. So I'd have to rebuild that for the 3rd time, and I did put the project on github, which I had been planning on doing anyway. I was about to go out of town for a week, so that totally killed momentum on the project.

I was hoping to do a few small projects to get over my burnout and see what resonated with people, and maybe do a full release to earn some kind of income, but losing a week worth or progress and then another week due to being out of town really sucks. So I have to build that up again, somehow. 

My dreams are like this, I have something I am trying really hard to accomplish and it literally falls apart in my hands, in the dream I am checking every possible thing for failure but miss something that causes catistrophic failure. If I get too excited and enthusiastic something will go wrong that I don't anticipate and then...well. 

At least Alaska was nice.