Update. More than a week of dry dock should be ending, passport should be arriving.... time will tell if a gigantic stabilization of this vehicle, durability, reliability, just took place. The odds are pretty good but the unknowns are there also. Why have these panels been failing? In Prior posts I've discussed that I think I know why, flexing primarily, but every variable I can see beside Ultra fragile design of the panels themselves have now been guarded against very substantially.
This is not how I wanted to spend 8 or 10 days. But it has been very gratifying. My engineering skills have been honed over a lifetime, and specific to this vehicle have been honed over the last couple of years and they all came together on this project.
It turns out that one can get data signal strong and still be considered roaming for phone calls. This accounts for the telephone blackout at such a dreadful time during this Dry Dock project.
With phone restored it now seems nearly certain that the passport is being shipped today for arrival at a local post office on Tuesday and upon retrieval of that the voyage North toward Vancouver and the grin Technologies manufacturer of the vehicles electronic propulsion systems are there with some interest in seeing the vehicle. But my motive is they are a pivot point on this industry for the world and it is important that they see this vehicle, that the seed gets planted in their mind. And it does seem that they have some interest, to my surprise.
If the passport is received as I expect, that in no way guarantees that I'll be allowed out of the states given my Decades of aggressive activism. But that will be interesting to see.
More than a week ago the plan was to spend time up at Mount Hood studying in the Magnificent forests up there and what materialized instead was 10 hours a day of working on the vehicle. Not complaining just observing. But if the vehicle cooperates as I expect it will the next 3 days waiting for the passport to arrive will be spent up in those woods, south of here by about 15 or 20 miles.
The founder and chief engineer and his number 2 are in a cross-continental Asian solar bicycle event until the 19th they tell me, these of grin Technologies, so that will yield about 2 weeks of travel time, a little bit less, which would be about 40 miles a day.
Five or six or seven people are the wind under the wings of this 2 year, 16000 mile Voyage at critical junctures each at their own time. The Pair of Hands that out a week ago was the difference between implosion and launching forward.
James
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