Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The Lord is my Shepherd

Another from my great grandfather, L.J. Schlattman's book of poems "Gleanings from Life".


THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall never want,
Green pastures He spreads for my need;
I drink of the font, He supplies every want,
To waters so still He doth lead.
He restoreth my soul, leads me true with his arm,
For His name's sake He keeps me from evil and harm.

Though I walk through the valley, and shadows of death,
Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me;
No evil I fear, Thou ever art near,
No harm can befall me with Thee.
Thou prepareth my table in sight of my foe,
Thou anointeth my head and Thou stillest my woe,

His goodness and mercy, doth ere follow me,
My cup, full of joy, runneth o'er;
All the days of my life, He easeth my strife,
As His name in His house I adore,
The Lord is my shepherd, my stay and my guide,
I am safe in His keeping, with Him I'll abide.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Dual Carbs - Vintage Style

Exotic carburation! I have to plead guilty to having always been a sucker for it. It may have begun when, as a teenager, I bought an Offenhauser 4 barrel manifold for my Studebaker from a local junkyard for $7. Things didn't change much when I moved on to Harleys. I vividly remember how cool those SU carbs looked on Pans and Shovels with the forward swept elbow.

Of course later when I got into drag racing Knuckleheads, dual carbs became more a necessity than a luxury. But when it came to a street bike, the traditional modification of the heads to hold two carbs held a drawback; that being in the form of a big lack of leg clearance.

Despite this leg clearance issue, the first dual Linkert setup I built consisted of one carb on each side. I used a pair of Linkerts (one on each side of engine going into a common manifold). I ran an M35 (1-1/8" venturi) as the primary carb, with an M74 (1-5/16" venturi) on the other side. I made up progressive linkage so that the M74 didn't start to open until the M35 was at half throttle, but they both reached WOT at the same time. It worked extremely well. Better gas mileage from doing most of your running on the small carb, but when you accelerated you could feel the second carb come in just like the secondaries on a car with a 4 barrel.


Dual Linkert - One Carb Out Each Side


The only downside was that the carbs I used had some wear so that too much air leaked past the throttle plates causing it to want to idle too high. I solved that by putting an auto advance distributor on it (the idle would slow when the weights came back retarding the spark). I think I could have solved the idle by using better carbs, or maybe by disabling the idle circuit on the second carb, but never tried it. Of course with the length of the Linkert, there still were leg clearance issues on the left side carb.

Perhaps a better solution is the method I used on my second foray into dual Linkerts. This manifold is based on a vintage "aftermarket" dual Linkert manifold that I have (and have seen other examples of). This vintage manifold is cast aluminum, and was designed to fit as a plumber manifold. My guess is that the aluminum would not have held up very well with brass seals and plumber nuts, but that is beside the point. The manifold is set up to take a pair of 3 bolt Linkerts, and has individual intake tracts; in other words the front carb feeds the front cylinder and the rear carb the rear cylinder. This coupled with the space limitations for such a design mean that the runners are extremely small, and thus extremely restrictive. The longer "tuned length probably would have given great throttle response and very low RPM performance, but I would bet that a stock 4 bolt Linkert would give better overall performance.





Vintage Dual 3 Bolt Linkert Manifold




Still, this vintage manifold is cool looking, and more importantly served as the inspiration for the next dual Linkert manifold project that I undertook. This next one was at the request of my friend Elmer. Elmer is world famous (seriously) for his Harley restorations, however, some time back he began to get a little weary of building the same bikes over and over. His solution was to start building a few "period correct" bobbers. Dual Linkerts were just the ticket!

Dual Linkert Manifold - Plumber Style

So I built another "prototype", and not just for looks either. I did flow bench testing to confirm that the manifold would be beneficial in the performance department, as well as the aesthetics side. I built it to use plumber fittings, at Elmer' insistence, so that it would be period correct for the original Holister event. It worked out very well, though the one thing I would change would be to cad plate the finished product rather than parkerize it as I did.

Flow Testing Manifold

This was all quite some time ago now (as evidenced by my old Superflow 110 in the picture - I upgraded to the SF600 about 7 years back) I have just now finally started on an aluminum version of this manifold set up for O-rings. Is the world ready for such a manifold, or am I the only sick one out here? I guess that remains to be seen!

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Chief of Sinners

1 Timothy 1:15 This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

It is not often that I find a point of disagreement with something from my Pastor's sermons. This morning, however, I did find one area that we did not see eye to eye on. We did get a chance to discuss it after the service in a mutually edifying manner.

In preaching on "The Grace of our Lord" from 1 Timothy 1: 12-16, Pastor Voigt confirmed Paul's view of himself being the chief of sinners. He backed that up by referring to passages in Acts showing how Paul (when still known as Saul) persecuted the saints and tried to stop the growth of the Church and spreading of the Gospel.

My disagreement with this making Paul the chief of sinners stems from the fact that the Bible says that Paul did these things in ignorance and unbelief (1 Timothy 1:13 "Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.") In fact Saul, being a Pharisee, thought he was serving God. He would have believed himself righteous by way of keeping the law of Moses.

Now lets look at my life before salvation. I knew enough of the law, and even enough of the Gospel, to know that I was a wicked sinner. And I willfully continued in open rebellion against God for years upon years. In my book, that means that I far surpassed Paul as the worst of sinners. How do you see yourself?

Friday, September 5, 2008

Please Pray for Valley View

The Church where my wife and I are members is facing somewhat of a crisis. Our pastor, who has been there for over eight years has answered a call from another church. We will miss him and his family, both personally and as a congregation.


While we wish Pastor Voigt and his family all the best in his new ministry, it does leave our congregation in a precarious position. We are a very small church, and have struggled financially for some time. I have heard voiced the expectation that some families will use this as an excuse to leave. It is also questionable that we will be able to attract another pastor. To add to the uncertainty, there is also a rumor that one of the Twin Cities' mega churches has plans to expand to our town.


My hope is that any of you who follow this blog will pray for Valley View Baptist Church.