Or... one week in the life of a Rocket Scientist
Once, long, long time ago. Being bored to tears with the
constant Acft. down time during a major flight test program
I was working on, I decided to build myself a tachometer for
my R-69S BMW motorcycle. As the OEM unit was cable drive, I
was not impressed with it at all. So, with wit, wisdom and
a whiz-pot full of donor goodies from dead missiles in hand,
I set about building an inductive pickup, 6-VDC powered tach.
Using a salvaged indicator head (milli-amp meter with an RPM
legend face) as the container. Three days and half a roll
of solder later I had a working unit. Tested it out on some
Zillion dollar lab test equipment/signal generators/etc....
Bolted it on my trusty BMW handle bars; put the hinged pickup
(made from 10-pieces of pencil lead and mile of micro-fine
wire) on one plug wire and Viola! It worked like advertised.
Was really proud of my designing ability. Whizzed over to a
bad-ass friend's house who rode an equally bad-ass Harley.
He was duly impressed also. We headed out for our favorite
watering hole and all hell broke loose. I could not ride any
closer than 10 feet from his Hawg without my tach running wild.
That tach would pickup his ign. pulses and add to mine and I
had a million RPM engine according to the needle. And every
zit faced kid with a ripped up VW with the engine hanging out
in the breeze caused the tach to go ballistic also. Damn good
design. Should of sold it to the CIA for a long range vehicle
detector. Think I over engineered it a tad. Still got it in
a box of 'Collectable Momento's' somewhere. Bummer... Oh well.
Back to the drawing board, someday.
Mr. Shadow (Ret)
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