Dalek building is surprisingly straightforward, thanks to the community at Project Dalek. Plans for all types of Daleks are on this site with accurate dimensions, compiled by properly obsessed British loonies.

The only part of Dalek building that filled me with trepidation was the dome. It is big and round and has flattened sides. Usually Dalek domes are made of fiberglass, which involves buying all the fiberglass materials and tools, then working a lot in a well ventilated area, and the making the thing no less than THREE times – first the plug, then the mold and then the dome. Once you have made one, it is possible to make more domes and trade them on the Dalek black market – but watch out for the BBC copyright police.

I have never done any work with fiberglass so I read up on it and started worrying a lot about how many weekends it would take, how much money it would cost and how much my good wife would complain about the smells. Then I read alansdalek’s STORM neck-ring construction method which uses conic sections made from thin Dalekanium  (known to earthlings as Medium Density Fiberboard or MDF). Lightbulb Moment. Could I use this method for a dome? Some quick math suggested that if the conic sections were 1″ wide then the raised edges between them would be only a tenth of the thickness of the MDF. The ridges could be easily sanded without compromising strength. Nothing to lose in trying (ok, $12), so I gave it a shot one weekend and ended up with a dome which looks pretty good. With the lessons learned, I think a second attempt would be near perfect.

I took pictures along the way, for your edification.

The first step was to map things out. I drew this on MDF as I thought I would cut it out as a template, but then I didn’t.

Then I marked around the radius at one inch increments starting one half inch from the edge. This represents the center lines of the individual conic sections. I then took the framing square and lined up one side from the center point to each of these points and read off the length of the tangent up to the center line. This gives me the radius for the center of each conic section.

Then I made up rafters for the inside, to fit the inside of the dome, and mortise jointed into the dome base. If I was doing this again I would make up a round piece of 3/4″ MDF for the center, turn the top of the dome on it on the lathe, and mortise the four legs into it. This time one of the butt joints came loose and finishing the top of the dome was a pain (see later). Also the supports for the eyestalk should be built in at this stage. I didn’t think of it at the time and regretted it later.

Then I started cutting my conic sections out of 1/8″ MDF using the usual method. In this case I predrilled all my centre holes at the measurements take earlier, and placed the drywall screws one half inch either side of the zero. Hard scribe on both sides then once each side with the Stanley knife and the hoops pop out.

Break/cut each hoop and pull it in to about the right diameter then warm with the heat gun to help it set there. It is very hard to get these to stay in the right place without some toasting. Once persuaded to the right shape it is easy to nail gun, glue and trim with pull-saw.

In retrospect I should have done the base first (see later) as it would have given a more solid base to work from.

Work your way up, clamping at each level and waiting enough time for the glue to set.

The last, smallest ones were the hardest to get to lay down, so perhaps a solid turned center would have been better. Wonderful stuff, bondo

That was day one.

Day 2 was the base (which I should have done first).

The outer radius for the section was calculated from the plans – it is a 3:1 gradient, with a 10″ radius, so the height would be 30″, so the hypotenuse through Pythagoras is the square root of 1000 – and the inner is nine-tenths of that. This needed another 4′ sheet of MDF to make two more-than-half circumferences, so I needed to join them together.

I did one joint at a time, backing them with some spare MDF….

and squishing it in with a big clamp to make it flat at the join for the second.

This distorts the flatness in a worrying way, but it works out when it is un-squished. Lots of heat gun use is needed to get this to bend. Take it easy or the MDF will crack.

Once that is set up, I glued it to a base disk. This gets mostly cut away at the end.

Then attach it to the top of the dome. This would have been much easier if I had not made the top of the dome first – I could have just dropped the base of the top of the dome in through the wide end of the base before putting the base of the base on. (hope that makes sense)

After the glue set up I cut  the base disk out again so it fits over the neck bin. It just cleared the top of the neck struts after need some tweaking.

Mounting the eyestalk involved retrofitting the supports – that should have been done at the rafters stage. It pivots on short bits of lamp rod that are screwed in with the very tips of my fingers.

I chose to push my Mini indicator lenses through holes cut from the inside. Lenses are cheap – whole indicator assemblies are expensive. I drilled pilot holes and bolted and glued in small MDF disks before applying the hole saw. This strengthens around the hole. The cable for the eyestalk control is an Ariel girder fork front brake cable that is about 2″ too short for my forks/handlebars on the VB.

Not bad for $12 of new MDF plus scrap!

Place this in the various template php files right after the entry utility links:

<?php do_action( 'addthis_widget', get_permalink(), get_the_title()); ?>


Place this in styles.css to suit your template. The following worked for fatscotsman.com which is based on the WordPress twenty-ten template.

div.addthis_container {
display:inline;
vertical-align: top;
position: relative;
top: 1px;
}

display:inline; is the important one, the others are just minor alignment tweaks to get it to line up nicely with the font – adjust to suit.
For this site I used:

div.addthis_container {
position: relative;
float: right;
bottom: 16px;
}

You will need to adjust to suit, and some tags seem to be overridden by the AddThis code – height, for instance.

(July 19, 2009 - Photo by Bauer Griffin - from zimbio.com)

Ariel committed all of their wartime production to the W/NG. The primary difference between the NG “De-Luxe” model and the sportier NH “Red Hunter” model was lower compression ratio with a nearly flat piston crown, cast iron flywheels instead of steel, and black paint instead of red. The W/NG differed from its clivilian forebear by the slight lengthening of the forks, and a simplified design on several other comonents. The tank top dash is not present – the speedometer is on the forks mounted by two pieces of bent strip metal and driven from the front wheel instead of from the gearbox. Internally the piston oil ring is replaced by a third compression ring.

Ariel W/NG motorcycle near Dunkirk WWII. From www.volny.cz

The handlebar is solidly mounted to the fork eliminating the rubber mount. Almost all the chrome is gone. Many of the tanks have the indentation for the tank badge but no tag with screw holes to mount the badge. The footrests are all metal eliminating another rubber component. Additions included pannier brackets and a field stand.

I don’t think the sidecar would have been standard issue in the war years, but all Ariel frames come with sidecar mounting lugs standard, so that was probably added for the movie or post-war by the current owner. With only 17HP the 350cc Ariel engine would not make a great sidecar hauler, though it is possible they have upgraded that bike to a VH 500cc engine.

As a 350cc owner myself I have found the supply of NOS war surplus parts very handy. For a long time I was running on W/NG pistons as the world supply of oversize NH pistons had dried up, and my VB has a brand new set of W/NG forks on it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3UyikYKLjQ&w=420&h=261]

Ariel NH Chopper from BSH

What to do with that spare engine….

via Plum Krazy 1958 Custom Ariel.

• Power down the VM
• Go to another windows VM and add a hard disk
• Select “use an existing disk” and browse the data store for the VMDK you want to fix.
• Use the normal windows storage management tools to expand the filesystem.
• Remove the disk from the second VM.
• Power up your modified VM and Bob’s your Uncle.

Devotion To Duty

 http://xkcd.com/705/

This bike looks pretty complete and the numbers match.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260555028199

Update: bidding closed at US $26,900.00

Jings!

It has been noted that Lucas components are possibly more prone to electrical leakage than Bosch or generic Japanese electrics. Experts point out that this is because Lucas is British and all things British leak. British engines leak oil, shock absorbers, hydraulic forks and disk brakes leak fluid, British tyres leak air and the British defense establishment leaks secrets…so, naturally, British electrics leak smoke.

(anonymous)

Letter codes are a prefix to the number which is usually 4 digits. Engine numbers are typically on the left hand engine case just below the barrel. Frame numbers are usually under the seat on rigid and plunger models and below the steering head on swing arm models. All numbers are stamped and indented.

Two strokes are at the bottom.

Note- 1941-5, 350 W/NG. Some of the machines made for the Royal Navy had engine prefix letters NBH, and some of the machines made for the Royal Air force had engine prefix letters RBH. There was no record of this in the Despatch Books. In both cases the numbers were in the main BH sequence.

Ariel Two Stroke engine and frame prefix and suffix letters.

Note:- the two strokes all left the factory with the engine number the same as the frame number. One series of numbers was used for all the two strokes, prefixed T-,the model being indicated by the suffix letter.

/A = Early Leader
/B = Late Leader
/S = Early Arrow
/T = Late Arrow
/G = Arrow SS
/H = 200cc Arrow

Early Leaders and Arrows ( /A and /S ) are those up to and including 17440.
Late Leaders and Arrows ( /B and /T ) are those17441 and higher.
The earliest Arrow T- 8701/S
The earliest Arrow SS T- 20384/G
The earliest Arrow 200cc T-33701/H

This list originaly compiled by Roger Gwynn and Ralph Hawkins in September 1989, corrections to February 1993.

Merged in model letters and bore/stroke info from Accessory Mart.

All reproduced with permission.

Ariel tended to mix things around a bit so the line from one year to the next is not clean, but was around August. For definitive dating of your machine contact the AOMCC or Draganfly. For a small fee they can look up their microfiche copy of the factory despatch books. Each bike received a handwritten entry with other info included such as special options and date of despatch and where to. That’s how I know my bike’s birthday is May 31st!

Virtuozzo makes status information available in /proc/user_beancounters. The different fields are pretty cryptic – their meanings are described in detail here.

The attached zip file contains two cacti template exported from Cacti version Version 0.8.7b, a snippet to add to the snmpd.conf on the server and a one line shell script called readbeans which is called by the snmpd agent. Deploy these latter items on your GoDaddy VM and suck the templates into Cacti. This will give you a “Virtuozzo Beancounters” data query which you can add to your device which should give you access to 20 graphs (don’t check resource, that one is bogus).

I found that building a compound graph like this brought together the most interesting values:

This long term graph shows where I implemented the crude but effective solution of restarting various system processes nightly (snmpd, httpd, mysqld, named and Plesk), some of which were gradual memory hogs.

Download this template