Tell me/ us an interesting fact we might not know. I’ll start.

In US films and TV shows someone always shouts ‘Somebody call 911!’ instead of just pulling out their phone and doing it themselves. This done deliberately so that everyone knows the number and it presses home the first thing to do in an emergency. Of course everyone knows it now but it was more important when the number was first created.

911 has become a by-word for emergency services so that in some of the Korean TV shows my wife watches they sometimes translate the emergency number as 911 when it’s actually 112 in Korea. And 112 works all over the world on GSM networks, which is good to know.

999 was settled on for emergencies in 1937; the powers that be decided against 111 because it could be triggered by a faulty line, and 222 was the number for the Abbey exchange. 000 couldn’t be used because it went through to the operator

Yeah. They wanted something that could easily be dialled blindly on a rotary phone (ie, if the room was full of smoke). 0 is the easiest number to find (next to the finger stop) and 9 was next to it. There used to be PSAs on TV telling you how to find it.

But 999 took so looooooong on a rotary phone!

What everyone with a car knows as a shock absorber actually doesn’t absorb the bumps at all, that’s the job of the spring. The spring is then controlled by the damper

The spring and the damper together are known as the shock absorbers.
I’m not sure anyone is talking about just the damper and ignoring the spring that surrounds it. They’re describing the elements as a whole.

A combined unit is known as a coilover which is a spring and damper unit. The spring and damper can be totally separate or combined. This was all explained to me by a person who worked for one of the eminent suspension companies in Motorsport when I was studying engineering (note I am not an engineer!) saying if you went into a Motorsport or even an OEM design setting and used the term Shock Absorber to mean the damper you’d be quickly corrected. It took me a while to ‘get’ it, even arguing with them about it for a while. But they were right.

Yeah but talking about Joe Public which was hinted at in the original ‘fact’ (‘what everyone with a car knows as a shock absorber….’), that’s what they mean.
I’ve never heard anyone except people who are really into cars say coilover.
A lot of general public terms break down when you approach the geeky level.

If you’re a layperson, it’s a term used to describe the collection of parts that stop the car falling to bits over rough roads.

Definitely a common language thing rather than technically correct, even the MOT Inspection manual refers to springs separately to “shock absorbers”, “A shock absorber must be rejected if negligible damping effect…”
The common language extends to “MOT”, we haven’t had a Ministry Of Transport for 50+ years

@kayak23 Did you get your fog lamp sorted?

Try driving a car without just one ‘shock absorber’
It is genuinely shocking

@kayak23 Did you get your fog lamp sorted?

I’ve got a wiring kit with a switch and an led bulb that’s supposed to go in a reverse light holder.
Not summoned up the gumption to tackle it yet 😂

The wings of the space shuttle are so small and stumpy that it can’t technically fly due to the lack of lift they provide. On re-entry and landing it’s more of a controlled fall/crash landing then a flight.

The average of all the numbers is zero.
Ergo, there are as many numbers below zero as there are above.
Theoretically…

I’ve never heard anyone except people who are really into cars say coilover.

I asked someone who is really into cars what he’d call a spring and damper collectively and he said “a coilover.”

I then explained the context of the question. He replied, “If someone said to me they were replacing the shocks, I’d assume just the shock, not shock and spring. ‘Dampener’ sounds like a regional / personal preference thing. I mean, that is what it does, but wouldn’t be my first choice of term. Might be more prevalent in the US? Boot / trunk… bonnet / hood, etc etc”

I then explained the context of the question. He replied, “If someone said to me they were replacing the shocks, I’d assume just the shock, not shock and spring

That’s where having more knowledge can sometimes cause a little misunderstanding.

I am forever getting people ask me if I could cut them a ‘piece of wood’.
Usually what they mean is ply or mdf, usually worked out from the dimensions they give (in inches 😂)

This, to most people is a shock.

Both of these are generally just called ‘shocks’, though usually with the added ‘coil’ or ‘air’ to differentiate amongst people that would know the difference.

On a car, ‘shocks’ are generally a catch-all term for folks that don’t know or care that they can be separate components in a system or different variations of something that does the same thing essentially.

https://www.sachsperformance.com/en/blog/zf-motorsport-f1-sachs-shock-absorber

The MOT reads: “… suspension (including springs, shock absorbers, and suspension arms and joints)…”

Coilover is a type of shock absorber assembly, it’s a collective term for the spring and damper assembly, i.e. the coil(spring) sits OVER the damper.

Everything we’ve ever built doesn’t exist.

S

There is a vast amount of empty space in an atom, the distance between the nucleus and the protons/electrons/neutrons is reletivley vast, it looks more like the solar system with planets orbiting the sun, rather than the compressed diagrams we see in textbooks.

Therefore there is no such thing as a solid object, for example the coffee table you put your coffee on is mostly empty space.

Therefore there is no such thing as a solid object, for example the coffee table you put your coffee on is mostly empty space.

Theres a nice illustration of this with liquid helium. As it approaches absolute zero the liquid suddenly just falls straight through the solid vessel its in its in as if it isn’t there.

There are at least two sizes of infinity. The number of fractions (rational numbers) is provably smaller than the number of irrational numbers (decimals that can’t be expressed as a fraction), but both are infinite.

3rd Infinity – The number of ways I can be wrong according to MrsWCA

I’d assume just the shock, not shock and spring. ‘Dampener’

Suspension uses a damper, not a dampener. There’s no requirement to make suspension slightly wet.

Different kind of spring 🙂

That was likely a typo on my part.

According to a Bill Bryson book I read years back, when you sit on a chair you’re not actually touching it, rather the atoms of your backside are slightly repelled by the atoms of the chair, so you are hovering just above it. I assume it’s the same with everything else that we think we’re in contact with.