Welcome. This issue’s cover shows an engine head set up on an adapter plate for an injector bore drilling rest. The engine head, aka cylinder head, sits on top of the engine block, over the cylinders, and contains the valves and spark plugs; in most passenger car engines it also contains one or two camshafts. In the picture we are looking at the combustion face; the four pockets with five-hole patterns are the tops of the combustion chambers for four cylinders, and the four large holes in each pocket are for the valves — intake on top, exhaust below. The holes in the middle with wires stuck through them are for the spark plugs. As a courtesy to other aging headbangers, I note that this is what an actual Motörhead looks like.
The injector bores are tapered bores for the fuel injectors, drilled from the other side and exiting near the intake ports. As a general rule, any tapered bore is a giant pain in the butt to manufacture in volume, especially to tight tolerances, and these are no exception. I think I did injector bore tests on four or five different heads over the years; this particular specimen is from the engine in your Maverick. I was never happy with the results and am still irritated that certain of my ideas weren’t tried in production, so why don’t we just drop the subject.
I run the journal like an engineering project and have several spreadsheets full of numbers, charts, and graphs. I like charts and graphs because they give the illusion of understanding. The graph below shows the growth in viewership for the journal since last year, with the four-month running average for monthly visitors to the site increasing from a little over 200 to well over 400. (I use the running average because viewership spikes when issues are posted. Many of my graphs have these attractive meandering witch’s hat waveforms with four-month wavelengths.)
The increase in visitors has led to a corresponding increase in submissions, which has exacerbated a problem related to my quick response time. The pooled mean and median response times for the first ten issues were 16.2 and 17.0 days respectively, and since the submission periods are about 90 days long, it is never clear how many poems I should accept from early submissions, since I don’t know what’s coming later. I’m thinking of shortening the submission periods to two months to concentrate the workload and reduce the impact of the second problem. But I am not going to do anything until issue 13 at the earliest, since I don’t want to switch in the middle of a yearly production cycle. I’m also reluctant to tinker with the system now that it’s debugged and running smoothly, lest I screw it up. I’ll have a further update in the next Editor’s Note.
The reading period for Pulsebeat 12, which will be posted in September, begins June 1. Until September, enjoy the wonderful poems in this issue.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 