I'm asking Bay Area M.G. owners (MGBs specifically, though I'm
negotiable) for some assistance, in return for fame and fortune
(well, fame, anyway).
I mentioned some time ago that I was almost finished with a book
(Multimedia Authoring: Building and Developing Documents, AP
Professional, due in the stores March 1). Well, I'm done now,
except for the on-line examples.
Basically, I'm doing a HyperCard stack that shows a few of the
MGB tuning tricks that we've talked about here. I've done the
stack (at least for purposes of the book -- it would need more
work to be really usable for M.G. owners, but it's a good proof
of concept for my book's principles), except for recording a
few bits of the soundtrack.
Here's the rub: one of the great purposes of multimedia would of
course be to *hear* the sound that a car makes when you do the
various things to the SUs -- too lean and it sounds like this,
too rich like that, just right like the other.
The problem is, The Green Car's replacement HS4s don't have the
fershlugginer lifting pins.
So I *could* rip the damn air cleaners off and record by frobbing
the piston directly with a screwdriver. And I will if I have to.
But I don't want to, because we got it just right with the Colortune
and I don't really want to risk screwing it up, or even just undoing
work. (I don't have the money or the disk space to include actual
video, so looking right doesn't particularly matter.) Or I could
fake the whole thing by frobbing the idle -- hey, as long as it
sounds right, that's what matters. (I've even thought about using
the Volvo -- hey, 1800cc pushrod four with dual SUs, close enough!
But somehow... that wouldn't be Keeping The Faith.)
Or I could see if someone out there would like to have his or her SU
carbs personally inspected, protected, dissected & rejected for posterity
and the chance to see your name if not in print (the PostScript files are
long gone), then at least in a HyperCard stack that (one hopes) many
thousands of book buyers will find incredibly enlightening.
An *extra* brave soul would also let me record the sound of valve float;
my valves won't float on this motor, at least not below 7000 RPM, which
is as high as I want to take it with this crank. A stock MGB of 1972-1974
vintage will float at 5500 RPM or so, well before anything bad happens.
I'd love to capture that sound, if possible.
Oh and by the way: I got written up in the New York Times (The Nation's
Newspaper) today, in an article on CD-ROM cookbooks (the other example I
use throughout Multimedia Authoring, not surprisingly). I was gratified
to note, as was Kim, that they used a true SFisherism: "Pouring sauce
Espagnole into your Macintosh isn't likely to improve either the sauce
or the Mac." (The book is dotted with little bits of that, which should
surprise no one -- "that" being SFisherisms, not sauce Espagnole.)
There's something of a time crunch on this; I'd love to get this recorded
over the weekend so that I can include it in the HyperCard stack and FedEx
that diskette to my publisher on Monday so that they can make 4500 copies
to ship to bookstores on or before March 1.
And as I've been telling all my friends and family, "Visualize eleven
printings"...
--Scott "Even two or three would be nice" Fisher
|