So all you smug people in your oil burners, you can add shipping to the list of things competeing for your fuel and pushing the prices up.

I thought that only applied to the heavy marine diesels – ie engines the size of your house…

I wouldn’t have thought road diesel would contain much heavy end hydrocarbons

Did you try the burgers 😮

these are a much more elegant solution and are whack free;

Never, ever, managed to get a Hope HedDoctor to work….

20mm copper plumbing pipe and a mallet – what else is there to “need”?

VW have offered the Eos in diesel, I think…?

Regarding sound – 6+ cyl diesels have always sounded nice. it’s only the 4 cyl ones that have tended towards rattly.

And as for petrol engines not sounding good? – 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8+ cyl engines all have their own characteristics.

4s can sound fairly mundane, but can also sound pretty good under power. The old Peugeot XU9 JA/K from 205 / 309 GTi sounded nice and raspy under power… Subaru’s flat 4 engine sounds pretty distinctive… Honda’s V4 also makes a lovely noise.

Love the slightly offbeat turbine like wail of a 5 cyl. Always fancied a Fiat Coupe for the 2.0l 20v engine.

Always fancied a RM Blizzard – white with black maple leaf pattern. they were always sooo expensive though

S Max is a great biking / outdoors car. We’ve had one for over 3 years.

It’s spacious without being huge, good fun to drive, economical… Front tyres can go quick if you’re not careful with the diesel torque, although current fronts have done over 20k and rears over 40k.

Sadly considering selling, as we’ve just had some big bills (tyres, brakes, exhaust). Classic car connundrum – just spent money on it so do we keep and recoup or sell while it’s all still good 🙁

Then there was the really tacky, greedy, self indulgent, money making bit in the middle, where good taste evaporated into the ether leaving us with mullet powered hideousness like this. – Warning, it’s bad.

This bit only happened in London, SE England and the Media

But why then would he be dumb enough to return the card to me? Surely he’d realise I’d see he’d tried to hack it?

You’ve already explained it yourself…

dumb enough

Town Called Malice – if you want mainstream

Lots of others though…

I never bought into this 80s greed and tacky music nonsense that the media use to stereotype the whole decade.

80s were all about anger, bitterness, ****tting about with your mates, despair… and there was a whole stack of good music

Easy – just make sure you have the right sized tool(s)

Bump…

Nobody been?

Nothing else available?

i would advise not feeding them fish, the eggs taste rank.

Not so sure about that…

Ours used to be on the beach every day. Fed on small crabs, sandhoppers, seaweed etc. Lovely colour and flavour to the eggs.

People are confusing burning hydrogen with fission

No, not here…

Hydrogen for fission is a different matter

It certainly is – I’ve never heard of H being used as a fissile material…

The biggest problem is ‘stable’ sources of fission material

As in politically stable sources of supply? As a stop gap technology fission has to have a lot going for it.

Of course, not something that you can google (I hope), but presumably all of the weapons grade Pu that is currently being “liberated” could / should / is finding a beneficial use…

They taste very nice

In strict thermodynamic terms you are correct, however the amount of energy we get out of oil by burning it is greater than the energy that we have to put into it’s extraction and refining.

and

Indeed laws of thermodymanics state energy can be neither created or destroyed, only converted form one form to another

= unsustainable….

[lobs grenade] But what’s wrong with fission? [ducks for cover]

Someone does’t know what elemental or molecular means. Or you’re being silly.

Just pointing out that we have loads of the oxide… 😉

I’m not aware of any reserves of either elemental or moleuclar hydrogen

Nonsense.

This planet has huge reserves of dihydrogen monoxide.

Have / had an Airborne Ti post on my Lucky Strike. Definatelys adds to the Ti “feel”.

You do need to think about frame size though. If you like the frame to be on the small size, with a lot of post – then you will get more springyness. If you have a larger frame with less post showing, then the effect will be less.

Only steel bike I have…

Some “modern” road bikes look nice, but too many are way too “chunky” looking. I also prefer the older style, more delicate looking chanisets. Seen a few recent road bike posts of nice looking bikes tuined with bulky looking drives

ETA – and this frameset was regarded as “oversize” when I bought it 😮

Age group being ranted about?

Secondary age, then probably fair enough.

Primary age – get a grip and stop being a tosser / troll

Not a parent, then?

Hopefully submariner training is more thorough than wikipeadia.

It would appear not.]

HMS Thetis was lost off Liverpool with most of her crew when someone “opened the door” underwater. Tragically she was brand new & on sea trials. A test cock (hole) had been painted over, so the crew didn’t realise that the torpedo tube that they opened was open to the sea at the other end.

Dangerous?
Sat right at the front, I mean, if anything goes wrong….

I guess from a stats point of view accidents are rare on the railways, but when they do occur the driver’s cab doesn’t look like a good place to be.

In the past I’ve found that cruise control is bad for economy – it maintains speed, rather than momentum…

A shop in Cardiff used to advertise “free handcuffs” with every new metal bed frame!!!!

…and no, I haven’t shopped there…

Golf Bluemotion (1.6Tdi)… average over the first 3000 miles has been 48mpg. Best – 62.3

That’s surprising!! I had the VW 1.6Tdi engine down as a likely candidate…

Although a colleague recently had a Bluemotion Polo as a hire car and reckoned it was rubbish. 3 cyl diesel, very economical but desperately slow. His view was that being underpowered required it to be worked hard in any situation other than motorway cruising.

Interesting on the fuel types front. Always found that petrol cars showed benefit of the better grade fuels – both performance and economy.

Never noticed the difference with the diesel (except less sooty emissions).

Got hold of some Gore Fusion 3/4 length ones in Jan sale.

Very comfy, but more “shell” than “soft” – for some reason I expected them to be more like the XCR type windproof fleeces.

Based on computer readout, our S-Max 1.8 TDCi Zetec does about 46-48 on most stuff. Add in a few longer motorway journeys and it will creep up to low 50s.

Particularly interested if the claimed low 60s for some of the “tax eficeint” diesesls are achievable in real life situations.

Might give Band of Brothers a go.

On the subject of fact vs fiction…

Has anyone read this…

Fascinating, but gruelling book, with an interesting, unusual take on a bit of post war history. Was sold as being factual when I got a copy in the early 80s. Seems debateable today…

So many…

The Great Escape

Going Home, from Local Hero

And whilst we are on classics…

… Lawrence of Arabia,
The Dambusters
633 Squadron

Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack for Dr Zhivago

Timeless classic. Haunting, huge, epic, desperately sad… matches the themes of the film perfectly.

Nobody?

… surprised, thought there might have been a few on here

You might be interested that there are privately funded studies underway near tavi that are doing trails into the bio-accessibility of As etc at the moment… to reassess the current SGV value. Some interesting work.

Don’t really bother with SGVs – look at each case individually, always use PBET / SBET or other testing methodologies. For mtb use it is the exposure assumptions that are difficult to tie down…

In a nutshell, what we’re blathering on about is that ex-mine sites are often incredibly toxic areas,and possibly always will be. If you do use them please be aware of this.

There is some ongoing human health risk assessment for a well known “red” site (think planets) in Cornwall. The work focuses on risks to mountain bikers. Arsenic in the loose, unvegetated soils does present a very real risk to mountain bikers using some of these former mining sites – through inhalation of dust, ingestion of mud and skin contact with mud and dust.

Using a variety of riding sites, reducing time and frequency at any one riding spot and practicing good hygiene should all help to manage risks to an “acceptable” level… ie, try not to get covered in mud (full face helmet should reduce mud splatters around the mouth), try to reduce dust inhalation (eg not directly following other riders in dry dusty conditions), use full length jersey / pants to reduce skin contact.