2026-02-14

Last modified: 2026-02-15 16:09:36

• Car sprocket
• Car engine mounting
• RSS-to-magazine

Car sprocket

This is the Z50 29T 420 sprocket. The mono hub has a 40mm diameter spigot so I bored out the sprocket to 40mm on the lathe. I grabbed it in the 3 large holes, which is obviously not ideal but seems to have done the job.

And to expand from 56mm PCD to 58mm PCD I just filed out the holes by hand.

Car engine mounting

I have cut these pieces of angle iron and slotted them into the frame rails. They are ready to be welded I think. Then the engine can sit on top of a 32mm aluminium spacer block, to lift the starter motor protrustion etc. up above the plane of the chassis. And we can bolt through the pieces of angle iron and the aluminium spacer block into the 4 bolt holes on the bottom of the engine.

These holes are intended for mounting footrests I believe, so they ought to be able to take a good amount of load, although not sure how well they will react torque from the gearbox output. I think the plan is just assume it'll be OK for now, and if it proves not to be then make an additional bracket that picks up one or both of the mounting holes on top of the engine.

So next on this will be weld the angle iron into the chassis, make the aluminium spacer block, bolt the engine in place, and then make a mount for the reversing gearbox.

It may be worth working out exactly how much force will be on all of these mounts to see if it seems reasonable.

RSS-to-magazine

Martin had the idea of making something that would scrape all your RSS subscriptions to find new posts from the last month, process them into clean text with some script like Firefox Reader Mode, then concatenate them all together and have some print-on-demand service print it as a magazine and post it to you.

You can imagine having a table of contents with a 1-sentence LLM summary of each post, and some AI art on the cover derived from the content of all the posts inside.

I'm going to mess about in Cursor and see if I can get something that can put together a nice-looking PDF from a bunch of RSS feeds.

OK so findings are:

1. some places only show the handful of most recent posts in their RSS feed, so posts from a month ago may be missing (FT Alphaville)
2. some places gate RSS behind signup (404 media)
3. some places only show half the post unless you pay (Substacks)

All of this means the experience is pretty bad if you are just scraping the RSS and trying to turn it into a magazine.

And after that, it costs like £25 to print one copy and mail it out to one person, so it would be pretty expensive to do.