Rocketships, Inc.

Writing about what I’ve learned

KZ305 Carburetor Removal and Inspection

First, a question and an answer. Is it safe to use red Permatex to seal a carburetor? NO IT IS NOT. This tutorial details the removal and inspection of carburetors from a 1982 Kawasaki KZ305b LTD. This is the carburetor. Remove the seat. Remove the air box and tool...

Ideas

A business making custom bushings for cars. It's possible to get bushings that aren't quite right for 12 bucks, so why not sell bushings that are perfect for 24? A site that sells women's jeans. Most women's jeans on the market have unusuable pockets, bejazzling, and...

Sell me this

Solution: A metal board, similar to a whiteboard. Strongly magnetized so that nuts and bolts stick to it. Grease pen to label nuts according to where they came from. Problem: While doing an engine swap on a 1984 Corolla hatchback this weekend, I kept misplacing bolts....

Look, I made a thing!

Racing cars is a lot of fun. What's less fun is doing arithmetic by hand for an hour to find out how well people did. Fortunately, we now have the technology to ease this pain. This guy I go out with, Quinn, is into drift racing. When he doesn't have a car handy, he...

Getting Started With CakePHP

Here's a couple of things I did wrong when trying to use CakePHP, for your benefit. Several months ago I applied at a company called Radar Hill, which uses Cake as their main framework. Naturally I set about learning how to use it as soon as possible. I didn't do very...

Here’s What You Should Do This Weekend

Take a rusted, rotten shell of an old car. Source Remove all the junk from inside of it. Source   Set it under a nice maple tree. Source   Bolt in a racing seat. Source   Remove the steering column, and replace it with a laptop desk on a swivel. Source...

Things No One Tells You

You have to reach down to loosen the strap on clip-style bicycle pedals. Who knew. No one ever mentioned this to me - they either weren't aware or didn't know. "Google it" isn't a helpful answer. It never even occurred to me to ask the question. I found out by...

Confess

I have to confess. I'm too lazy. I should be working on finding a co-op position for the summer. Last year, my cousin was in the same position, and he didn't find one. He left it till too late. I sneered at him behind his back. Earlier in the year, last quarter, I was...

How To Use Compression Ratios

An automobile manual will provide you with a list of numbers about your car or motorbike. One of them is the compression ratio. In the case of of my KZ 305 LTD, that number is 9.5. The number that my compression tester gives me is 145 psi in each cylinder of the...