Electric GoKarts for Freelancing Dummies

Electric GoKart

We sure hope it doesn’t look as though we're picking on eHow.com when it comes to dumbasses of the day. Aww, hell, who cares – eHow is what the wonks call a “target-rich environment,” seeing as hundreds of dummies made millions of dollars passing out “information” that was useless or, in some cases, worse than useless. One such example is Jorina Fontelera, in a lovely little article entitled “How to Build a Homemade Electric Go Cart.”¹ We suspect the term “go-kart” is copyrighted, hence the weird spelling.

Anyway, Ms. (Mr? let's go with female...) Fontelera rewarded readers with such detailed instructions as 

(4) Mount the rear axle drive sprocket and brake disc on a compression fitting hub comprised of a heavy chain sprocket and taper-lock bushing. The taper-lock bushing has a torque capacity of four to five times the rater [sic] drive torque through the axle, enabling it to hold well and easy to fit on keyless shafting. Support the axles using needle roller bearings housed in the timber chassis structure. Wow! such detailed instructions, especially given that they were written by someone who had no earthly idea what a bushing is, much less a roller bearing. You can tell that this is just crap reworded from another website (this one, to be precise), especially given that the phrase “torque capacity of four to five times the rater [sic] drive torque through the axle” made absolutely no sense.

Worse, the instructions (in their modified form) are dangerous, especially advice like “Keep the steering mechanism simple using a simple column and lever arm arrangement to steer the front wheels.” They’re incomplete, inaccurate, and riddled with non-sequiturs because Jorina simply did a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” version of something s/he didn’t understand in the least – but she did collect a paycheck for her “work.” Jorina Fontelera, your reward for all that effort is being named the Dumbass of the Day – and it looks great on you!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_5009337_build-homemade-electric-go-cart.html

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