Waldo Says: July 2010

 

     I have been working hard reconfiguring the vehicle to present a better supersonic imprint on the next CFD program. Abe wants to establish a base design and then do refinements but in order to save him time I did a complete redesign. Then I started to mock up the new vehicle and assemble the parts together again.

 

There are photos of the new model in this update.

     The new design looks more like the old Imagine LSRV design because as it turns out it has to look like that in order to keep drag low and get the proper shock placement I am looking for.

     The new design will have a Cd in the .1 range subsonic with a over all frontal area of 11plus square feet. The overall performance will still be the same but the drag reduction may affect that substantially.

      Early this month I was also invited to a big LDRS (Large and Dangerous Rocket Society) and Tripoli rocket meet out on a dry lake near Lucerne California. They have them periodically there and people bring home built flight rockets to test and fly from all over the world. Here is a photo of a Brit with a conical design with a very novel tail concept. I thought it was clever and wanted to pass it on. Photo I don’t know how well it flew but it sure looked neat.

     I was invited to the meet by Ky Michelson and while I was there I ran into an old acquaintance Chuck Rogers (no relation to Buck Rogers) a hard working NASA rocket engineer who has worked on many of NASA’s latest projects. I met him many years ago when he was working on the now cancelled X-33 space plane.

     At that time Chuck Rogers offered to do a computer performance schedule printout on the original Sonic Wind rocket ice racer which I was building at the time. It was a schedule of speed, distance covered and air drag accumulated and graduated into tenths of a second in elapsed time. I gave him the estimated Cd of drag and the vehicle dimensions at a 10 percent greater value than they actually were in order to have some leeway in my future calculations and the data Chuck produced said that Sonic Wind would hit 915 miles per hour at burnout. Here is a photo of Chuck Rogers and his beautiful wife Brenda.

     A year later I ran into G. Harry Stine (who is now deceased) another famous rocketeer who is famous for writing the original bible on home built rocketry. Stine performed another computer analysis and performance schedule for Sonic Wind but this time the data was graduated in 1/100ths of a second. I gave him the exact same dimensions I had given Chuck Rogers and Harry Stine’s data showed a top speed of 927 miles per hour at burnout. With this under my belt I knew Sonic Wind could potentially hit 1,000 miles per hour on the ice. So I finished building her and looked for money to campaign her for over a decade. I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to run her myself with whatever money I could scrounge and save out of my pay as a construction worker.

     Even though I took her up to some very promising frozen lakes and winter locations the weather always seemed to not cooperate and I had to eventually take her back home to California without success. I am hoping that to not be the case with Sonic Wind LSRV the car but only time will tell.

     Later Ky and his son Buddy came over to my shop to look at how Sonic Wind LSRV is progressing. He liked the new design and told me how back when he was designing his unlimited LSR rocket car he simply built what he thought looked right. It is funny that most aerodynamicists come up with almost the exact same design if you were to ask them to conceptualize a rocket powered LSR car. Here is a photo of Ky and Buddy standing by my semi assembled Sonic Wind LSRV rocket car.

      I remember twenty years ago when I met Dr. Greg Winklemans who was working on military projects at the time and who was based at Cal Tech in Pasadena. He showed me his concept for a supersonic car which was the shape of a supersonic bi wedge airfoil sliced lengthwise so that one side of it was flat and the other had the triangular shape. His drawing showed the airfoil lying on the ground flat side down and triangular side up. Sort of like a roof truss section of a standard house setting on the ground  and stretched out. The idea was that the wedge ridge centralized the most prominent shock at the Cg of the vehicle.

     He asked me what I thought of his concept and I told him that there was no room for contact points (wheels) or any type of high performance propulsion system such as a rocket engine and fuel tanks. Even though it had those flaws it was still a neat concept.

     The logic of that vehicle concept always stayed in my mind and my new Sonic Wind LSRV design has added that center shock feature to its bag of aerodynamic design tricks. I also added a T Tail that Abe wanted incorporated but my T tail design won’t develop the Dutch rolling effect T Tails tend to do on aircraft because it is anchored on either side of the vehicle’s Cg rather than in line and over it like on such planes as the F-104 Starfighter and the F-101 Voodoo. I have still retained my canted out rear tails for roll control and shock placement.

     Other than a few other aero changes the vehicle is similar to most of what I have been designing for years. I don’t care much for the Blue Flame looking missile lying on its side concept as the overall design creates more problems that have to be solved. Aerodynamically I must be on the right track though as I see the Bloodhound team is doing similar design, modifications to their vehicle. I hope they get to build Bloodhound as once it is complete I will learn a lot from it and I believe it will be a hell of a land speed car. Here are some photos of the latest Sonic Wind LSRV design.

     Lastly, my life has taken a hit this month as my father Waldo G. Stakes has passed away. He was a great father and a real man who taught me the construction trade, how to fish, fight, how to build anything and automobile mechanics. He taught me how to stand alone and count on no one but myself. He was honest, strong, tough and spent most of his life helping other people and giving most of everything he ever owned away. He was a great father and a good husband to my mother Celia who is shattered by his death.

     Dad served in the Navy during World War 2 aboard the USS NAPA and drove a landing craft putting Marines on the beaches of the islands of the South Pacific such as Iwo Jima. He was wounded at Iwo Jima and sent to Hawaii to recover. He met my mother after the war in the late 1940s and I was born in 1955.

     In the early 1960s he started an automobile car parts company called Tex Mex auto parts with four partners but soon learned the hard way that money can corrupt a partner and that fell apart. Later he put up a local bar or pub in Chicago but the syndicate or Mafia made it hard for him to do an honest business so he sold it. After that time he decided to get into the construction trades and he became a painter. He taught me that trade when I was 17 years old and he helped get me into local 93 of the painters union. I have been supporting my family with what he originally taught me for all these years. Dad also taught me how to rebuild automobile engines when I was 14 years old and in that first year we rebuilt 4 cars.

     When I was only a child he would buy me toys such as the “Kenner Girder and panel set” and the “PYRO design a plane” toy set. With these toys I built small buildings and designed my own fighter jets. Later he taught me how to build flying Balsa and paper airplane models. So it was because of him I developed my skills of creation, design and construction.

     One day after I was telling him about this incredible man named Art Arfons who builds cars powered by jet airplane engines which he calls “Green Monsters” and drives them 500 miles per hour he was reading the paper and said…..” That Art Arfons guy will be drag racing a jet car out in Wisconsin this weekend lets go see what it looks like. We went and I was amazed and this started my life obsession with super powered vehicles. To this day I have always showed my father all my design ideas and asked his opinion of them. I even did this last week with my latest creation. He nodded his approval from his bed.

     My father developed many illnesses after he reached 80 years of age and I took up the battle to keep him and my mother healthy. I would go to their home every morning before going to work and make them breakfast and give them their medications. I took them to countless doctor appointments and my father had a serious heart attack.

      After which he had a quadruple bypass heart surgery and later a defibrillator, pacemaker installed into his chest. There were countless runs to the hospital and things to attend to keeping them both healthy. I fought this fight for four years, everyday. Finally on June 25th while my two daughters were holding his hands as he was lying on his death bed and my youngest daughter was reading Psalm 23 from the bible to him he passed away.

     Coincidently if you believe in coincidences, Psalm 23 is my favorite bible verse and I carry it on a photo card in my wallet with me at all times. I pull it out and read it whenever I am afraid. It is the one that starts with…..”The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want...” As I finish writing this update today one day after he has passed on my eyes are full of tears. I am going to have to pull Psalm 23 out of my wallet and read it……Waldo