Limitations

["Keith Turk" <kturk@ala.net>]

Seth and I had this wonderful conversation yesterday about limitations...
where there are no gray areas...  I've always believed that life is about the
skills you currently employ and as you increase your knowledge and test your
limits.... you turn things you couldn't do into things you can.... so
basically you have Black and White.... we live in white areas under the
curve... and once in a while we venture into the black side.... and once we
recover from it we've created more white area's for ourselves.... in my theory
there is no room for gray...

In Flying this is absolutely true.... normally when we want to increase our
personal limitations we have someone who is more qualified teach us.... and
because they have more white area's they can expand ours safely...

Here in LSR we don't have the luxury of someone else aiding us in expanding
our boundry's... so we take it in steps... sometimes they are baby steps and
sometimes they aren't...  Look at the lic. proceedures.... classic example of
forced graduations....  In Seth's case we talked about top speed of the
Lakester and how he'd been 280 in it before Tanis took it up to 307... she'd
tested that black area and the car was great... And then Seth took it up to
315 with no problems.... it was that next 5mph that was the black area where
the car exceeded it's limitation and became unstable.... ( this was his
opinion )

The reason I'm bringing this up in this manner is Both Seth and I have to make
the decision about who's going to be in the car when it's in a black area...
and what kind of things we can do or monitor to determine it's safety as it
ventures into the next phase of black areas....

One of the things we talked about was,  what was the actual  lift or downforce
on the nose of our cars... and how we could measure it with a strain guage....
he talked about wanting to do that but deciding not to because there didn't
really seem to be a reason to.... the car was stable and doing fine... so it
wasn't an immediate need.... the project didn't seem nessesary...  now in
hindsight it might not have mattered...because of the car's stability.... but
it would have been interesting to see if it was getting lighter on the nose as
it was gaining speed in the upper regions...

somehow I'm going to figure out how to mount a set of strain guages to
determine what's actually going on at speed....

Just thought I'd share some bits of that whole conversation...

Keith