Morcheeba !!

Music to seduce girls (or boys) too…… ;-)

What does “condemmed as unsafe” actually mean?

Sounds like “ohh, we can stiff you for a couple of grand to replace a perfectly good boiler with a new one” to me……

F360 any day of the week. Sketchup is a toy by comparison. A basic single seat licence for F360 is about £330 a year currently.

F360 also has a web interface, so your clients can be given access to your work remotely

Blank 20 mph zones simply don’t work imo.

As a driver you drive via two things

1) experience (ie last time i drove down this road i didn’t crash, so this speed is fine)

2) Your eyes – you can have as many dumb 20 mph signs as you like, but in a modern car, on an empty road, 20 mph is slow and feels even slower

The problem is that these long 20 mph zones, in which for the vast majority of the time 20 mph feels to slow to drivers and there is no obvious risk (not the same as there being no risk!), simply re-enforce the “it’s ok to break the speed limit” mantra in drivers heads. They did 30 through here last time, and the time before that, and didn’t have an accident so it’s fine to do it again. Accidents are so rare that the fundamental “normalisation of deviance” factor overides everything.

You can’t convince anyone that it’s not fine to speed because, mostly they speed all the time and don’t crash!

What we need, imo are as follows:

1) limited and very target use of the lower limit, directly at the point of highest risk (ie outside a school

2) smart signs that apply limits when needed and not when not (ie at 3am the limit is 30 not 20, because no-one is around!

3) Proper fines and penalties where the driver cannot avoid or mis-understand their specific responsibility

Just blanketing everything at 20 is the “easy way out” for councils. They can stick so signs up, absolve themselves from responsibility and just blame “irresponsible drivers”

But the fact is, all drivers are irresponsible. When out estate (which is a stupid and completely ignored 20 mph zone) carried out a speed check because residents complained about speeding, something like 98% of the people caught speeding were, der, residents of the estate……

All, please can we use correct units!

Power is measured in kilowatts, which is kW for short
Energy is measured in kilowatt hours, which is kWh for short

Not kilowatts per hour, or kwp or any other nonsense, just kWh.

It’s super easy to do the math, for example

10 kW for 1 hour is, rather obviously, 10 kWh ie 10 x 1

Insolation peaks at around 1.2 kW/m^2 in the UK on a clear summer day at noon, but pannels are only around 20% efficient at converting light into electricity, so a typical solar panel, measuring about 2m x 1m (ie an area of 2m^2), puts out a maximum of approx 400watts or 0.4kW assuming it was perfectly aligned to the sun at all times, which it won’t be.

ok, i’m now totally conflicted! lol! thanks all :-)

Perhaps the sensible halfway is as already mentioned to sell the Hardtails and Dune, and buy a ebike, but keep the zesty for self-powered days out?

If i kept one it would be the zesty! A real do-it-all bike

The 650b forks make no real difference and help slacken and lift the front a bit, they also give great clearance for mud guards and er, mud, when running with 26 wheels+tyres

The Spicy shuttle is shorter, so allows the fitment of a longer travel shock which is what allows for 160mm at the back, so you’d need a shuttle AND a shock to suit, which gets expensive. IME, the extra front travel of a decent modern fork is probably the biggest gain, and i’d happily stay at 140mm on the back

Sounds like you want to basically build my zesty:

2013 Zesty ive had from new (was replacement frame for the 2012’s that all cracked around the BB/rear stay interface….) with 160mm pikes (650b) slackset, BDair rear shock with Spicy shuttle (160mm) 1by at the front with SRAM XX1 cranks, 11by at the back with a 50 tooth dinner plate extender.

It’s my “do it all bike” light and efficient enough to be pedalled all day, strong and capable enough to smash out the downs at a bike park.

Yes, slightly short and steep by modern standards (my other bike is a Mondy Dune…..) but i find it a good compromise for real world tracks and big days out in the hills. It’s done 4 years of summer holiday trips to Les Arcs, ridden over most of North wales including Snowdon and Cadir, done every track in the Peaks and most of the Lakes, and even done laps of Swinley too :-)

With carefull s/h buying, i don’t see why a similar build would be difficult or too expensive?

If you are not actually racing, the only reason to save weight on a mountain bike is to be faster up hill, and er, that’s what the “e” bit in ebike is for already no??

Personally, i build ebikes as heavy and as solid as possible, esp wheels & tyres and drive train stuff, that way you can still ride on the 15mph limiter up all the hills, but you can now smash down them without breaking anything……

commercial operators are desperate to move to EV vans and lorries! no bad press from tailpipe emissions and masisvely reduced running costs and servicing. The odd 20 min fast charge here and there whilst the driver has his lunch is no issue whatso ever if your cost per mile has just gone down by 75% !!!

For most people the EV tipping point is here, because you can now walk into a VW, Skoda, Ford or Peugeot dealler and actually see, test drive and buy a pure EV! I’m seeing a large number of ID.3 on the roads in the last few weeks, because for a huge number of people, that car is simply nicer than the equivalent golf and no more expensive.

Petrol and classics and high performance have years and years left in them though. Just like horse and traction engine enthusiasts,both of which can still be ‘driven’ on our roads despite being a hundred years out of date, ICE cars once they are a minority will be largely ignored by Governments and legislators…..

I wonder how the rear shock gets cooled? Even on my fairly lightweight 180mm “Big” bike, long continuous downhills (alps / bike park) see the shocks get pretty hot to the touch, even with remote resevoir style “one way” oil loops

IME, the average MTB rider is a better road descender because they know how to move their body mass to help in the corners!

The vast majority of (non pro) road riders simply sit on the bike like a sack of spuds, because they are entirely focused on position for peak efficiency and power, and not for peak lateral performance. This is especially true of braking, where moving your body mass makes and absolutely massive difference to how hard you can stop before you get chucked out the front door…….

I drove a s/h 2015 bmw i3 for 5 years. Over that time, the TOTAL cost, including insurance, depreciation and ‘lecy worked out to be £50.41 per month. That’s insanely cheap motoring. Even if i had had to borrow the £15k to buy it, it would have still be insanely cheap, simply because the car didn’t depreciate and cost nothing to run…..

It also had the happy side effect of keeping around 35,000 miles off my 335d touring, which i sold earlier this year, with a lovely low mileage and one owner for about £2k over “top book” to the first person to come to look at it….

Early i3’s have 155 all round, later cars have an asymetric set up with wider rears (and the “s” has 20mm bigger section tyres)

Ok, you can banish me now, because not only is this pic from last weekend, i’m riding a bike without any suspension and funny bent handle bars, and even worse, it’s got a ‘lecy motor on it…… :-)

BTWm it’s worth noting that after aerodynamic drag, the tyres on an EV are actually the biggest “consumer” of energy!

Not for nothing do the more “eco oriented” EVs have specific low drag tyres. This is taken to extreme by the BMW i3, which has 155 profile 19″ tyres, super skinny, all in order to reduce rolling losses as much as possible

(It’s also why the more sporting the EV, the greater its consumption. ie a Taycan S has huge, soft tyres, terrific for pulling your eyeballs out round the bends, but really, realy draggy to push around)

There is one thing i know with 100% certainty, which is that by the time enough people realise with 100% certainty that climate change is real, and must be acted upon, it will be 100% certain to be too late………..

Don’t get an I3 Rex.

Unreliable, poor handling and you’ll never use the motor you’re carting around the whole time!

Get the “big” battery one and just fast charge as needed. The network is expanding rapidly, so for a few times a year that’s really not a problem. Take a look on Zap map or use abetterrouteplanner to input your current typical long range journey and see where the chargers are, filter by >50kW fast chargers only.

(I3s 42kWh owner here….. ;-)

BTW, what was the original use of all that potential energy stored in the big springy things?

Totally the lorries fault for not looking, but for that love of god, don’t sit next to trucks as they always win!

Maintain your safety bubble at all times. If necessary, wait behind and pass positively only when there is space to get fully ahead of the truck

don’t mess around, you need to pin it down.

Buy a cheap fuel pressure gauge and bodge it (carefully to avoid leaks and subsequent firey death obvs) into the fuel system.

If the fuel pressure falls and the engine splutters, then it’s pump, filter, pick up or similar.

But if the fuel pressure doesn’t drop, then you can ignore all that and look for something else

Trust me, guessing and changing random stuff gets you nowhere fast!

£35K ?? pull the other one

a base spec Hilux is that sort of money, made in the millions and able to share it’s development and manufacturing costs with the massive number of other Toyota’s made.

This Grenadire is one vehicle, expensively engineered by an (expensive) consultant, and made in a factory all on it’s own.

At anything less than £55k they’ll be loosing money on each and every one they sell…….

The problem i have with this interior is it is yet more pointless fakery in the name of something that has NO application in a car.

Aircraft have removable instruments that bolt into standard sized slots for two main reasons:

1) The instruments have to be regularily inspected, serviced and calibrated. Soemthing like a radar altemeter must be accurate or you’ll fly into a mountain, so being able to remove a single instrument easily is a real benefit. When was the last time you had the heater controls of your car inspected? anyone?? anyone at all??

2) Aircraft instruments are NOT made by the airframe manufacturers, so std sized bolt in instruments allows an external instrument maker to design a standard instrument that will fit in all sorts of planes. if you make say artificial horizons, then you’ll want everyone to use them, not just one airframe manufacturer. So again, bolt-in standardised instrument is sensible. The controls and displays in your car are (effectively) made by the people who make the car (or by an external supplier to there individual specs). Nobody needs to put say a BMW 3 series speedometer into a Ford Mondeo, and the manufacturers use these instruments as part of their styling and atributes, ie they are NOT standardised

And yet, here are Ineos, doing some naff faux aircraft type mountings, why? It doesn’t even look very good imo, and all those extra fastners are just asking to come loose and rattle.
So, for me, it’s another naff marketing lead load of bull, that adds nothing to the vehicle and is actually counter to the claimed ethos of the vehicle…….

Plug in hybrids have pretty poor consumption compared to pure BEVs because of the extra complexities of having both an ICE and an EV powertrain. A BEV manges between 3 and 4 miles per kWh, but a large PHEV migh only get 2 ml/kWh.

So, 30 miles is say a maximum of about 15 kWh, a 13A plug can deliver about 2.5 kW to the battery, so that’s 6 hours worst case.

In reality, it would probably be a bit less charging time, because you ought to manage more than 2ml/kWh in most cases

I thought the “oh look we have found an exact match between a stone and the hole” to be extremely tenuous tbh!

I bet if you looked at most holes and most stones of this size and type they would “fit” together, given the tollerances involved..

What was insanely clever was dating the soil from the last time it saw light, using Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) which is an utterly brain scrambling thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optically_stimulated_luminescence

HA! Jokes on you sucka!

I’m just catching up with this years Worthy Farm live stream on iPlayer, and currently am totally besotted with Wolf Alice’s stone circle set. For a set recorded in an empty field it’s incredibly personal and endearing :-)

My mid year “summer” resolution this year is to spend more time playing, and doing justice to my Taylor 400 series:

I’ve owned it, nearly 4 years now (i think) and it’s got even better sounding than when it was new, with a slightly fuller note, and i still absolutely love the quality of the laquer on it. Compared to the mexican Taylors, which are great guitars, the workmanship and build quality of this US model is really noticably better, particularly the laquer and fret board

Without a doubt, i am, by far, the weakest link, lol……

How did you know she has a dog? Do most Louises have dogs? (the last one didn’t)

Landing in typical operating areas is realy dangerous, from unseen wires getting wrapped around main or tail rotor, from debris being blown up and ingested by the engine intakes, from ground resonance etc. Unless there was somewhere very, very open and safe to land, and the crims just happen to wait there nicely while you put down i think it would never happen……

No ducking or diving, and ABSOLUTELY no heavy petting……..

It’s like Fight club. The first rule is……..

You sound very experienced with Louises, so i bow to your superior knowledge….. ;-)

Well to avoid calls of sexism against my behalf, i will also say that Robert ( llewellyn) from Fully charge also has a lovely pair of legs too……….

(and he is also a lovely chap to converse with :-)

A Guess: Is there enough time within your tarrif window to charge the battery with the charger power you have connected.

If you have a 7kW charger, and need say 63 kWh, this clearly will take at least 9 hours. If your tarrif window is say just 8 hours, the car will probably start charging immediately to ensure the battery is fully charged

no, sadly not.

She has a Fiesta, which sounds less like the sort of car owned by a professional mentalist

apropos of nothing, but Helen Czer has possibly one of the nicest pair of legs on the telly!

I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk/discuss with her at length on a couple of occasions now for various ends and she is, frankly, wonderful! :-)

Regarding REGEN:

Most of the passcar BEVs ive tested sit at between 68 and 74% efficiency of the regen, when considering just the energy flowing into and out of the vehicles mass at speed (ie the Kinetic Energy).

This does not include the energy flow into, and being irrecoverably lost too, drag at the same time.

Therefor the percentage you can recapture is entire due to how dynamic your journey is.

Take an immaginary constant speed motorway journey, where we accelerate from rest straight down the slip road to 70mph, drive 70 miles at that fixed speed (ie for 1 hour), then leave the motorway, using regen to come to a stop at the end of the exit slip road.

The regen will have recaptured lets say 70% of the energy “loaded into” and “stored by” the vehicles mass at speed over that journey, but because we only accelerated and deccelerated once, the total KE exchange will be almost totally lost in the huge amount of energy we have continously expended against the drag of doing 70 mph for an hour.

For a typical EV, weighing say 1,800 kg and returning say 3.3 ml/kWh at 70 mph, that means:

KE at 70 mph (31m/s for 1.8 tonnes) = 0.86 MJ = 0.24 kWh

total drag energy (3.3 ml/kWh over 70 miles) = 21 kWh

At 70% regen recovery, we’d get back 0.17 kWh as we regen up the off ramp.

So our ratio of recovered energy to drag is tiny, 0.17 kWh / 21 kWh = 0.8%

The opposite case is in town. Low average speed means low average drag and plenty of stop/starting due to traffic features and high traffic density means lots of speed change dynamics. Here, the recovered energy could, ime, get as high as 25 to 30 % of the consumed total energy.

So in summary, any energy balance numbers you see on the display are simply an indicator of the sort of driving conditions at which you are operating your car, and nothing really much to do with the efficiency of the system to recover KE.

(BTW to get these figures we run extremely controlled tests of either cars on chassis rolls (which obvuously includes tyre losses) or of the bare powertrain attached to dyno motors that simulate the roadload, and measure everything! Typically we spend up to 3 months simply instrumenting a test vehicle or powertrain and setting up the test facility, and tests will be repeated over and over until we get a statistically valid result.)