Pic taken about 200 yards away from my pic earlier in the thread! I’ll keep an eye out for you zooming off in the distance on your motorbike next time i’m there! :-)

Super dry dusty and blown out in the woods at the moment, some berms you can trust, sum you can’t…..

I snuck in a cheeky early weekend ride on Thursday afternoon!

Had the place to myself in the sun, just me and the squirrels :-)

on-the-fly geo adjustment! sick!

The “DC leakage” requirements are easily, if pointlessly, met with a suitable DC rated RCD

(pointlessly, because the DC traction battery in your car is GALVANICALLY isolated to >3kV continuously by the OBC, so there is no practical DC leakage path, and if there were, then you wouldn’t be able to charge anyway, because your cars BMS includes real time isometry and as soon as the isolation imnpedance falls below around 100kOhm, the battery contactors are disabled)

Couchy, the “Outside socket” doesn’t comply with any of the rules for EV chargers. This is because it is an outside socket and not a charger! The loop hole is the fact that the 18th edition compliance ends at the socket, the end of the fixed instalation, ie it does not cover mobile / portable equipment that is plugged into that socket (which is covered by the other regs, such as CE marking, Electricity at work, and the Low voltage directive etc etc).

So what you plug into your socket it up to you, be that a cabled mobile charger, a lawn mower, an actual caravan or next door neighbous cat………

They are not actually called “Chargers” that just what people call them!

They are actually Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment, EVSE’s!

Don’t get a charger installed. Get your electrician to install a 32amp outside socket (often called a Caravan plug, the round white n’blue 3 pin plugs you see at camping and caravaning grounds).

That means you can then just buy a cheap charger, and simply plug that in.

For example, openEVSE chargers are as little as £200 if you build the charger yourself (not hard)

This also means you can simply use a caravan plug to 3 prong 13amp socket adpator to charge multiple EVs off your 32A socket if you need to (obviously at a rate not exceeding 32a in total)

Equipotential bonding, as is the name for making sure all metal objects in your house, from the toaster to the radiators are tied to earth is very sensible. This is because a fault where the casing of a device becomes live, or a wiring fault that shorts inside your boiler to the metal pipework is significantly likely (statistically speaking) to occur. So, nailing everything to earth in general is a good thing!

When it isn’t a good thing, is when the main incomming supply looses its earth and neutral connection simultaneously, because then your “nailing everything to earth” has just become “nailing everything to live”……

(statstically that failure however is much less likely to occur, and so in general, it’s better to equi-potential bond everything, and that’s what we do.)

More importantly, have any of the Forum Big Hitters flounced because they didn’t get a mention in the “Forum Big Hitters” article????

#getsreadytoflounce

BTW, it’s worth clarifying on why the earth rod requirement for car charging is so stupid/unnecessary:

1) the earth rod is nothing to do with the cars own HV battery, because that battery is NOT earth referenced in any way. You can touch earth and grab either Battery+ or Battery- and not get any shock what-so-ever because the battery is just that, a battery, consisting of galvanically isolated chemical cells where the only potential generated is between the +ve and -ve of that battery. To get a shock you’d have to grab battery+ and battery- at the SAME TIME.

2) the eath rod is there to protect the car user from getting a shock off their metal car when there has been a house supply wiring fault of a specific nature. This fault, a simultaneous loss of protective earth AND the neutral conduction results in everything becoming live when any switch is turned on, and voltage can pass from the live wire, through a load, and into the Neutral, but not “escape” back down either that Neutral or the protective Earth. This fault is as you might expect, not that common (although it is more common on certain supply layouts that share Earth and Neutral) The idea therefore which sounds initally sensible, is to add an extra earth rod for your car charger, so that should this fault occur the metal chassis of your car does not become live when it is plugged into your EVSE.

3) The problem is however that there are currently lots of other metal things in your home that will become live, irrespective of if your car is being charged or not, and they include:

any metal bodied electrical item (toaster, oven, microwave,kettle,)
any metal plumbing (taps, sink, washing machine, dishwasher (not the wife!), shower head, radiators, towel rails etc etc

So, why if the danger is considered so great to us from a car becoming live, do we not insist on having that independant earth rod fittd ANYWAY, ie for all houses! And of course, modern cars are increasinly not made of metal, are pretty much 100% painted, anodised, undersealed, or trimmed.

Try it, try to find some bare metal on a modern car! Ok if you drive an old Defender you’ll probably manage, but on any modern EV, it’s really really difficult to actually find any “bare metal” certainly far far harder than to find say a tap to touch, of which there are many in your house!!

And it gets worse. I can guarantee that pretty much everyone will regularily touch a metal tap in their house when either not wearing any shoes (the rubber soles of which offer a very real reduction in shocking current) or worse, when actually sat in a nice bath full of water. How often do you go out to your car in your bare feet?

So why do we need an earth rod (or alternative protection device) for our car and not for our house? Simples, money! With the charger installation Grant, electricians can get a nice chunk of cash and few people will argue because “safety init mate”

Got out for the first time in a fair while, dodging the snow and sleet showers yesterday at Woburn.

The loggers have been busy since my last visit as well, with a fair amount of the old trails now treeless for a bit!

Don’t get a charger installed, get a IP44 (or better) 32A “outside socket” installed. Much cheaper, and no requirement for the stupid additional earth rod etc.

Then just buy a cheap EVSE, i use the OPENevse, which is open source, so if you really want to you can modify the firmware yoursel!

(The charging cable is locked to the car when charging, so someone can’t easily steal your charger)

The granny charger (via 13a plug) is fine for charging a low mileage EV. My old i3, with it’s 18kWh usable battery capacity (65 to 85 mile range) was only charged on it’s granny charger for the nearly 5 years we had it, doing a daily commute of aroudn 25 miles. At 4 ml/kWh, that meant around 6 hours charging, which fits into normal cheap rate timeslots ovenight

Our new i3, with its 42 kWh battery we’ve just upgraded the wiring and can now charge at 32A single phase at home, and need this to make use of the extra range (only when we use that full range on two consecutive days, which is pretty rare)

Also, lots of possible confusion around Sampling rate and Analogue Bandwith!

Sampling rate, in samples per second is simply how many times the scope can read an input. For a multichannel scope, especially the cheaper ones, that rate is most likely SHARED across all the physcial input channels. So a 4 channel scope with 1 millon samples per second can only read each channel at 250ksps when all four channels are being used.

Analogue Bandwidth, is the frequency at which an AC analogue signal is attenuated by some amount, usually 3dB. So a scope with a 100 MHz 3dB analogue bandwidth will show a 100Mhz sinewave as having half its true magnitude

Mr Nyquist mathematically proved that you only need 2 samples per integer waveform, although as that was for a sine wave, ie a fixed shape, that knowing two points on it, you could calculate the frequency and magnitude of that wave.

In reality, because you DON’T know what the waveform looks like before you measure it, mostly i’d suggest that you need the sampling rate to be at least at a 10 times higher frequency than the frequency of the highest harmonic of the signal of interest.

If you take the Rigol 1054Z for example, you’ll find it has 50 MHz analogue bandwidth per channel, but samples at 1GHz (1000 MHz) in order to be able to define enough points on each waveform as to be able to show a reasonable approximation of that waveform.

IME, unless you are doing Radio, Radar, Wifi or similar, you really don’t need that fast a scope. A 50Mhz scope will still show a 100MHz signal, it just will be heavily attenuated and the edges will not be sharp, but for fault finding and debugging, you mostly need to only know if the signal is there or not! IN conjunction with a logic analyser, that is very fast (because it doesn’t bother trying to work out what the shape of the signal is, just is it considered logic low or logic high) you can almost certainly fix most things!

i’d generally trade bandwidth for more channels and more memory depth. The big advantage of the USB style scopes is that at lowish sampling rates (where the USB data link is not a constriction) they effectively have an infinite memory depth because the typical modern PC/Laptop has a HUGE harddrive!

Some suggestions from me

1) don’t bother with the chinese little pocket scopes. They are too fiddly, the screen is too small, and often the firmware is terrible and they can even show incorrect readings (due to things like aliasing and sampling errors). They seem cheap, but they are frankly, rubbish. Avoid!

2) If you are going to be doing “digital” debugging, then a logic analyser, which shows just a change in a signal, ie a digital edge is probably going to be useful. Salea do some cheap USB logic probes with lots of channels. These obviously cannot “see” an analogue signal, they are NOT an osciloscope, they simply tell you when in TIME a digital signal changed state.

3) A proper bench top scope is really not that expensive these days, and there are three options

a) an old CRT scope of a good manufacturer, probably 4 channels, but no storage and likely to be huge andpossibly fragile, but something like £100 gets you a good one. If got an old Tektronix 2245A on ebay at the moment that was my old backup scope

b) a low end modern LCD storage scope. Rigol own the market here for low end stuff, and the 1054 or similar have become the go-too starter scope. Although i have a nice £7k Agilent scope for my work, i often find myself using my 1054 instead because it’s cheap enough that if it gets dropped or damaged i’m not too worried! If you need to debug things that happen over time, ie randomly, then a scope with a deep memory, ie lots of storage is key!

c) a USB scope, using your pc as the “screen”. This brings the cost down, and is fine for ocasional use, but if you are going to use it a lot, a proper bench top scope, that is always there, needs no pc/windows to work must not be underestimated. Pico own this market, with a range of different options

In all cases, please watch this, and understand what it means, as it is CRITICAL to staying safe when working on mains powered devices

I think it’s actually pretty hard to have a video channel on MTBing.

Back in ‘t day, you could do a magazine article on say “jumping technique” and because that mag only came out once a month and there were no easily searchable archives, do pretty much exactly the same article a year later and nobody would notice. But now, on you-tube, everything your do is right there, still staring you in the face 5 years later, and the “Insta” generation must have a new edit every week right, so soon, finding new stuff to do is really really hard.

Therefore “new product” becomes your savour, because it is new, and so by definition you haven’t done it before!

Great car OP!

Make sure you have an agreed value on the insurance and don’t crash it!

(they fold up nicely because those lovely looking curved side tubes are not in pure compression……..)

The big engine’d E90’s are fairly rare beasts now. I have a mint LCi 335d that’s gotta go this year, and valuing it is really hard simply because they don’t actually come up for sale very often. Good spec, good history and good condition makes massive, massive differences to the value of these cars, to the tune of 5 grand, ie a poor one worth 5k, a good one worth 10k, for basically the same car!

I don’t think it will be a hard sell on a specalist site, might as well put it up from strong money and see who bites, and if not, come down from there :-)

Classic Trump playbook in that “Interview” in that they don’t actually have any plan, or answers, so they simply resort to shouting loudly. They might as well put their fingers in their ears and run about shouting “nah nah i can’t hear you” like a 5 year old……

What is suprising is the number of people who seem to fall for that rubbish trick?

Brexit has always been about making 2 plus 2 equal 5, because 5 is clearly better than four.

Ask an idiot if they want four or five, and they will respond “five” because it’s biggerer in’it.

Don’t worry about the fact that you can’t have five, because you’ve only got two two’s, that’s irrelevant and can be spun away with bull and waffle.

Right up until it can’t. At somepoint, the clock stops, and it will be completely, inescapably obvious to even the thickest person that 2+2 does not equal five, no matter how you spin it.

We are not their yet, but that day is coming, and unfortunately, the thick & poor will carry the brunt when it comes whilst the rich spinners will retire to their hedge fund shorted private island in the sun……..

Given that no one knows more about “medicine” than one D.Trump, perhaps the doctors at Walter Reed should just let him heal himself???

I’ve been riding the backwoods long enough to remember when at least 3 of the trails where actually hidden behind bushes and shrubs you had to push through from the main paths to get the very difficult to find start of the good trails!

Yes, it’s buisier than ever, especially at the weekends (i never ride their at w/ends..) but you’ll have the entire place to yourself on a wet tuesday eveing in Feb, which considering there is a town of some 230,000 people less than a mile away is pretty amazing really.

I also find all the scare stories of “walkers mown down by bikers” to be just that. Let me ask a quesiton, in say the last 20 years, how many people have been addmitted to hospital after being hit by a bike? I’m going to suggest it’s actually precisely zero.

In the 20 oddd years i’ve ridden their, i’ve met a lot of nice people, and a few total idiots, on foot, wheel and hoof, and mostly people just get along and are actually pretty corteous. A wave, a big smile and a cheery “hello, lovely day to be in the woods isn’t it” goes a long way ime!

Give it a few months, the winter nights and rain will drive away the crowds, and we can all just go back to enjoying the trails at our own pace, time and chosen method of propulsion……

And how are they going to police this closure? Pay the warden to turn people away? 24/7?

The trails have been their as you say 20 years or more, people will, imo, ride and walk them unless you physically stop them?

I3 owner for 4.5 years now. Still absolutely love the little thing! Such fun to drive and amazingly low consumption. Absolutely the best car BMW have ever made (and surefire future classic….)

I “installed” my own charger just over 4 years ago, using the open source OpenEVSE unit. I just plug it into an outside socket mounted on the wall of my garage. There is no addiotional earth rod, but this doesn’t matter in my case because my EV is pretty much entire made out of plastic, and hence has no metal surfaces to earth!

https://www.openevse.com/

Max charging is limited by my garage wiring to 3kW (charger is 32A 7kW capable), but my EV only has a dinky battery (22kWh) so that’s actually plenty to fully charge from flat during cheap rate over night ‘lecy.

Zero problems in 4 years, total cost was around £100.

If man made climate change is indeed the effect we think it is (and by the time we are absolutely sure, it’ll be far too late to do anything about it…) then i’d argue that this does indeed “last for thousands of years” and in fact, unlike stored nuclear waste, directly affects every single person on the planet on a daily basis.

Problem for me is there was no A-B-A type test.

Watching the video,there are several very significant sections where on the second run (on the GD) that YB is hitting much faster / straighter lines. However, without a second run on his normal bike, we don’t know if he was able to hit those lines due to additional familiarity (due to it being his second run) or actually because the long/slack bike ENABLED him to hit those lines without crashing……..

I fear TJ you don’t fully understand just how powerful modern power stations are!

GW of power takes KW of input energy. A modern Gas combined cycle plant might be 60% efficient. So say 4 GW of power takes 6.6 GW of input energy. Buring 1Kg of high density hydrocarbon fuel (coal or oil) produces around 8kWH of heat, so 6.6GW of heat requires 883 tonnes of fuel per hour!

A typical fast growing softwood has a density of 350 kg/m^3, so that 883 tonnes/hr requires 2,380 cubic meters of trees being fed in, per hour. A typical railway box car has a volume of about 150 cubic meters, so you need 16 odd box cars an hour to run that powerstation! (384 per day, typical train with 50 box cars, about 8 trains per day, one every 3 hours)

The other significant problem is that people dont’ understand the risks posed by pollution, both nuclear and conventional.

Yes the beaches near Nuclear stations have increased levels of detectable raditation, that could indeed given any person spending SIGNIFICANT amounts of time there potential heath problems. But let me ask, how many actual people have got health issues due to that contamination? How many people spend months or years there?

Compare that to say Oxides of Nitrogen released by buring coal or oil. They are around us all, in locations where we DO spend a lot of time (especially if you live in a built up area). Children are partiularly suscpetable to things like Asthma brough on by really quite low concentrations. And yet the average person doensn’t see this as “dangerous” depsite being, in terms of total deaths, and in terms of the cost to our health service, and loss of earnings from people sick off work as a result, is many, mnay, many times more significant.

TJ simply dismisses this with a simple “i dont’ have a car”, which is great and all, but unfortunately, around 25 million people DO have a car in the UK alone, and you ARE going to breath in “their” pollution do to sharing an atmosphere with them…..

But because “NUCLEAR!!” the average person in the street (and i think TJ) consider nuclear waste to be a more serious problem!

According to the report referenced above, the highest public area dose localised around Sellafield is 0.37 mS per year. How “dangerous” is that?

This report details the doesage you recieve from cosmic radiation by living in Europe:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17445647.2017.1384934

It says “This paper presents and describes the European Annual Cosmic-Ray Dose Map at 1 km resolution (Main Map). The Main Map displays the annual effective dose that a person may receive from cosmic rays at the ground level, which ranges from 301 to 3955 μSv”

Therefore the dose you get, simply due to cosmic radiation is pretty much the same as, and up to 13 times higher than the dose from the worst case at Sellafield.

Hence the report stating:

“Natural ionizing radiation is considered the largest contributor to the collective effective dose received by the world population. The human population is continuously exposed to ionizing radiation from several natural sources that can be classified into two broad categories: high-energy cosmic rays incident on the earth’s atmosphere and releasing secondary radiation (cosmic contribution); and radioactive nuclides that originated in the earth’s crust and are present everywhere in the environment, including the human body itself. For most individuals, natural exposure exceeds that from all man-made sources combined”

So lets not all have a panic attack about “ooh noes, nuclear radiation is destroying everything” shall we.

Today, IMO, the only viable & secure method to meet our greedy energy needs, the method with the lowest overall pollution impact, but unfortunately far from the lowest total cost includes a significant proportion of nuclear driven generation.

The is also the big problem of public perception:

When asked

“would you mind having a nuclear powerstation built near you?”

pretty clearly a massive majority will answer

“NO”

But actually this is wrong question to ask. The real question is:

“Would you prefer to have a nuclear powerstation built near you OR would you prefer to have rolling blackouts in your electricity supply at times of high demand and low renewable generation”

Let me suggest, that the answer to THAT question is going to be rather different, especially if you ask it AFTER people have actually experienced said blackouts

Lets face it, us humans have grown fat on a glut of extremely cheap and addictive hydro-carbon derived energy. Today, we are increasingly coming to the realisation that we have been paying another price beyond pure cost for that energy, namely the potentially unstabilizing effects of massive relases of Carbon Dioxide into our atmosphere. Whilst groups like Greenpeace were worring about a few hundred of thousand tonnes of nuclear waste that might (<< note might, not did, or will) get realsed into the environment, we went ahead and ACTUALLY release tens of billions of tonnes of pollutants into our atmosphere unchecked. Anti-nuke peeps say “ooh but nuclear waste is soo dangerous” and then drive to work in their car without a single thought for the fact that every time they run the engine, pollution pours out the back. Pollution that kills people daily, and potentially could result in a significant issue for the human race as a whole.

So far, any new generation tech is simply based on “commercial worth” ie how much it costs, vs what you can sell it for, ie to make a profit for share holders. This is what has stiffled things like tidal or wave energy, not the (relatively) minor engineering problems involved in developing generation assets. The fact is, wave or tidal energy costs more per unit of electricty that wind or solar. And modern nuclear generation is even worse, because rather than saving money to pay for the decommisioning, you’re giving the profit to your share holders.

I can see a sea change (sic) comming tbh. At some point, if and when we do run short of ‘lecy, suddenly, the vast majority of people are going to stop worrying about saving 2 pence per kWH, and worring about keeping the lights on, the water and sewage pumping, their employers buisnesses running! Suddenly, “oh nuclear power is too expensive” will be replaced with “i need to keep my fridge running”.

Unfortunately, without a non politicised, non commercial plan and methodlolgy for providing the Uk with a long term viable generation mix, by the time this happens it will, imo,be too late…….

(and if you are poor, live in a deprived location, are non skilled with a low paid job, then you are totally F’d when the lights go out, because at that point, money talks)

Sorry to sound a note of practicallity, but the chances of an old 1980’s Maser, managing to ride up and over a 3 foot high solid stone pillar sticking out of an equally solid stone bridge without any kind of even cosmetic damage is nill! Given they had all the structural solidity of a biscuit tin !

Your chargers output rating, 4 amps at 36v (144 watts) is only going to be reached when the battery it is charging is fully charged, and at that point, there is a very good chance the charge current will be being tapered by the charger (to avoid cell imbalance)

So, for most of the charging period, the charger is likely to be pulling significantly less power than that peak rating. Allowing for a 80% charger efficiency (typical worse eff) you need around 175 watts at the input, which is 0.72 amps at 240Vac.

If you allow your inverter to also have an 80% efficiency, input current at 12V is 14 amps, which is a bit too much to pull continuously from a normal cigarette lighter adaptor ime.

However, i suspect a 200W inverter would actually work, and a 300w one will deffinately work, but either would need a decent 12v dc feed from the battery, and ideally probably needs the engine running so the alternator is charging (which also boosts vehicle voltage to around 14.3v, so reduces currents a bit)

With the assumption that you are talking about a “lack of grip” for cornering, rather than say breaking, then chances are you may not be loading/leaning the bike correctly! What’s your footwork like? if your footwork is wrong/lazy/poor then you will never be able to turn the bike at speed. Modern LLS bikes require the rider to actively turn them, and not just by pushing / pulling on the bars! Modern tyres also can be quite “square” with aggressive side lugs, but a fast rolling middle bit, so fail to lean the bike and engage those lugs and yes, there will be little grip!

The good news with practising footwork, is that is best done when going slowly! ie you can do it on every corner to get the basic technique engrained and into your muscle memory. Once you’ve done that, nothing beats finding a nice turn and simply riding round it repeatidly, as fast as you can till you fall off ……. ;-)

If it were really the “ultimate drivers car” it wouldn’t have 650 bhp, it would have 350 bhp. Unfortunately, to pay for the engineering at these volumes it has to cost many millions, and you simply cant’ charge £3M for just 300 bhp……..

Er, there’s a world of difference between driving a typical road car, even quite a fast one (lets say 250bhp/tonne) and one with over 600 bhp/tonne. You can get yourself in a world of trouble extremely quickly, and simple things that perhaps might not matter (like missing a gear or finding neutral by mistake) can, and do, cause people to crash.

Cars of this level of performance are so fast, that the average motorist, even skilled and sensibly ones can get themselves into more trouble than they can get out of. Yes, sure, more automated cars can also be crashed, but in a panic, you are much more likely to mess up say a gearshift in a car with a peaky, powerful engine, than one in a car where you just pull a paddle and the car gets the next gear for you…….

Luckily most owners won’t actually be driving their T.50 very much. IME, the “venn diagram” for

a) Rich enough to spank a cheeky £2.8 million on a car

and

b) Skilled enough to drive a manual, >600bhp/tonne car at any speed

has a vanishingly small overlap zone…… ;-)

The important fact is that no two drops are the same and it’s probably not “one” technique, but a lot of different ones, which you needt to be able to apply to suit the drop your are, er, dropping!

So to say “don’t manual off” or “don’t pop” is really eronious, because it the drop is tight, tall and you can’t drop off at any speed, then you are going to HAVE to manual off it!

In extremis, we have the trials style drop from a rear wheel stand, where the drop is left at zero speed, ie from a continuously held “manual” and is started with a pedal hop off. At the other end are those bike park drops, with 100 yards of straigth run in, 100 yards of straight run out, with the landing at just the right angle, in just the right place and a perfect take off ramp, smooth, flat, no lips, easy to judge, and sure, you can ride right off those at 100 mph without doing anything and it’ll all be good.

The real world is probably somewhere in the middle….. :-)

Which is why you need to get out a ride all sorts of drops, and not just practise the one you happen to have in your local bike park

Two things that helped me to do drops

1) The size of your pop or front wheel lift are nothing to do with the (vertical) size of the drop and everything to do with how fast you are going off the drop. A technique to land both wheels together off a kerb works just the same to land two wheels off a 6 footer!

2) Straight Arms = DANGER! If you have locked straight arms, and the front drops, you ARE going OTB, because you cannot in any way stop yourself being pulled forwards as the front drops (you can’t make you arms longer than they are when they are straight out already!) Unfortunately, as novices and scaredy pusses (like me) our natural tendancy is to move right back on the bike, and that creates those straightlocked out arms, so when we get our timing wrong, and the front drops too early, OTB we go! Staying the “Middle” of the bike is a LOT safer, because you have room to adjust to what ever happens, going right back early, means you have set your destiny and cannot change it. But staying, broadly, in the middle is, ime, really quite difficult and feels counter intuitive to people like me, esp when you are nervous of the drop……

Comminuted intra-articular fracture

Pretty sure i saw them play the alternative stage at Glasto back in ’97 ?? :-)

GWS!