Excited that this is finally happening. On Sept. 1st my friend and I did a high altitude balloon with our wives and kids. In addition to the radio telemetry equipment we put a Lego astronaut in the payload for each of our kids. My kids are watching the Stratos project closely but they all wear a smirk because they…

More importantly, who took that picture? It's subtly fantastic.

I prefer automatics in utility vehicles and for primitive trail off-roading, but for performance driving I will never drive anything but stick. Why? It's simple. I have eyes. I can look ahead of the vehicle and anticipate what gear I need and when I will need it. An automatic transmission is a blind co-pilot. It is…

That we are mouth-breathing idiots with no concern for the environment. What you drive is not the full measure of your impact on the environment. It's what you do with it that matters most. I'm a gear head. I have 2 project cars that are highly modified and my daily driver is an E36 M3. I've had more than one…

Just at the tip. The portion of the foil that is supersonic will not produce lift, but the rest of the length of the foil will work just fine. A lot of fixed-wing craft have props that take the tips supersonic. It's annoying but it doesn't cause mayhem.

Well, choppers don't have to follow roads, so there's that. But if you're talking straight-line shootout you don't have to go very fast. Few helicopters can go much over 150mph. They can't be because of simple physics. The main rotor generates lift by moving air over it's surface. The faster the air moves the more…

Don't mess with heavy truck tires! I was sitting in an open jeep in heavy traffic next to a loaded dump truck and it blew a rear tire about 8-10 feet from me. I thought a bomb had gone off because of all the flying gravel and dust (and also because I was in Manila where there were bombs going off)

My favorite Hotwheels are Matchbox. : P Cartoons are for Saturday morning TV.

That's the first thing I noticed as well. Think of it like safety wire on a nut. Any rotation should tighten the tether, not loosen it. Good call.

Guys, guys... why can't we just get along? Matchbox and Hotwheels are both great. Some people like accurate to-scale reproductions of actual vehicles, and others like vulgar off-scale made-up fantasy shit. It's all good and we should be more accepting of one another.

"Air pocket" is what you apparently tell the non-aviation public when you A) try to take off in an overloaded plane at high altitude on a hot day B) Do not abort the take off when the thing plops back on the ground the first time you rotate C) Do not abort when you get it in the air and can't climb D) Do not abort…

It's silly to think that someone saying "work on it yourself" means do every conceivable repair yourself. Can the average Joe fly-cut their cylinder head or mount tires? Of course not, but he can do the simple stuff like change a water pump. The simple stuff is 80% of the jobs. When you need your rotors or flywheel…

I absolutely HATE keys. To trim the fat I made this to hold my 6 must-have keys. 1/2" wide, 1-5/8" long, holds all the keys and a USB drive nice and flat in my pocket. The keys and drive swing out like blades of a pocketknife. I filed 1 or 2 notches in the top edge (side away from the lock pins) of 2 of the keys and…

Nice! I'm looking for one too. I have ebay alerts, notifinder (craigslist) alerts, and autotrader alerts currently running for an FJ80.

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Not profits. Revenue. Huge difference.

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I am not a Texan, but I have met and gotten to know many Texans. Each and every last one of them has been friendly, courteous, and genuinely thoughtful.