My first remote-controller plane had a small gas engine that I could barely start, especially after I ripped it from its box and proceeded to jam tubes onto whatever pegs seemed likely to need fuel, covered the whole thing in slick gas, and then spent hours trying to clean out the oily dirt from the ridges of the tiny engine block. And it wasn’t even really remote-controlled. You just kicked up the engine and swung it around you in a circle by a cord. The engine might have been for sonic verisimilitude only.
That’s the same sort of nomenclaturely nebulous “remote-control” behind this car powered by nitroglycerine nitromethane, racing around a steel hoop at 200 miles per hour or more, pinioned by a cable in the center of the track as it screams in a blur like the last dancer at a methamphetamine Maypole party. There’s nothing really controlling it except physics and prayer.
[via Jalopnik]
Why can’t I get the image out of my head of the guy at the beginning not jumping up onto the pole in time and getting his leg caught in the wire?
So the great debate between physics and prayer has finally been settled by the RC car enthusiasts. i totally saw that coming.
Am I the only one intensely curious about what happens when there is a failure at full throttle/full speed?
That activity seems kinda pointless, what with the string cheating physics and all, but I guess it’s a way to build very very fast small machines and keep them controllable.
The engineering in the engines must be incredible.
the nitro referenced is nitromethane, not nitroglycerine
…as it screams in a blur like the last dancer at a methamphetamine Maypole party.
The simile is strong with you today.
joel=win
If may estimates of the circumference of the track and the revolutions per second are close, then it’s doing about 240mph. But something seems fishy about this video.
Not that I think the performance is that far-fetched, but I’d like to see some sort of hard-or-impossible-to-fake time reference in the video…who’s to say the playback speed hasn’t been altered?
I want to know what the wheels are made out of. That, and what sort of fail-safe/E-stop those things have. I have this vision of the guy falling off the pole, and the wire getting wrapped around his neck.
This is not an RC car, this is what is know as a tether car, or gas powered car that runs around a pole that it is connected to by a tether.
They have been documented at going 209 mph.
http://tethercar.com/
Check out the way the bird flies at the top of the screen at 50 seconds.
Something’s fishy.