Cyclists waste petrol

On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 02:11:54 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:41 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Cost to the customer should dictate ones further away will be less
likely to be bought, so I guess they were different carpets.

Presumably. They were all 12' rolls so I never saw the working side.
Furniture was the same deal. There still are furniture factories in the
south eastern US while most of the furniture I loaded on the west coast
was from Asia.

Other products weren't so easy to rationalize. I don't know about the UK
but the Sunday papers (when people still read the Sunday papers) have a
lot of colorful advertising brochures and other crap that most people
strip out and use to wrap garbage. I picked up a lot of those in Boulder
CO to take to Baltimore MD, which is about 1600 miles. Nobody on the
east coast can print useless stuff?

The whole scheme depends on cheap transportation / cheap fuel. Keep
those container ships and trucks rolling!

If your government put as much fuel tax on it as ours did, that wouldn't be happening. A US gallon of gas here is $6.16 US. How does that compare to what you pay?

On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 01:55:40 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:43 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 22:03:58 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 12:53 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
It's a PLANT. A naturally occurring plant.

So is jimponweed. Want some?

The point is illegalising a naturally occurring thing is insane.

I tend to agree. afaik jimsonweed or amanita muscaria aren't illegal but
travelers' accounts suggest you don't want to take their trips.

And what you put in your own body should be nobody's business but yours. If I want to take my chances with a small dose of arsenic each morning, then that's up to me.

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 03:12:20 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/10/2018 12:53 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:


Are your roads littered with speed bumps? I go over perhaps 200 a day.

That cinches it. No trip to the UK for me. Some of our dirt roads have
speed bumps, aka small boulders, but I've never seen them other than on
private roads.

Round here they put them in the stupidest of places, for example 10 yards from a junction, where nobody could possibly be speeding anyway.

And apparently they cost £10,000 each to install including paperwork.

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 02:47:15 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/10/2018 12:14 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
How many miles did you do in those 12 years? What parts did you replace
for servicing, predicting a failure might happen in the future? I don't
believe you didn't have to change any tyres, brakes, suspension parts,
steering, hoses, etc.


What the hell do you do to cars? Tires are expendable and don't count. I
had to replace a brake hose and heater hose in my 32 year old pickup
because a porpupine ate them. He also chewed at the upper radiator hose
but it's still going strong, teeth marks and all.

I ignore all speed limits and speedbumps and go as fast as I can without my car coming off the road.

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:51:56 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 02:47 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sun, 09 Sep 2018 21:35:53 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news On Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:22:50 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 08:10 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

I hate anyone who uses headlights during broad daylight. They get my
full beam back.

And I hate anyone with HID lights at any time.

WTF is a HID?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-i...discharge_lamp

Ah the things that break the badly written laws. Some ****wit decided
they'd state headlamps on cars should be 55W, and measured it by power
consumption, not realising that someone might invent something more
efficient in the future. Now we have LEDs, we have cars with ****ing
searchlights on the front capable of reaching Mars.

Precisely. There are some LED driving lights for bikes that can reach
Mars and start a fire there. I've been thinking of mounting a set,
mostly to see that damn deer lurking in the shadows but they might come
in handy for assholes that don't understand the concept of low beams.

They still don't. I encountered such an idiot the other day, his lights were making it almost impossible for me to see, so I put my full beam on. He then put his on which was even brighter. So I pressed my horn. Hopefully he got the idea.

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:49:25 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 01:05 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:22:50 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 08:10 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

I hate anyone who uses headlights during broad daylight. They get my
full beam back.

And I hate anyone with HID lights at any time.

WTF is a HID?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-i...discharge_lamp

Some of the high end cars come with them or you can retrofit. They're
very bright and also have a weird blue/white coloration. I'm sure they
are wonderful if you're sitting behind them.

Can't they make them white? Why do they have to change between green, blue, yellow, orange, etc as you change the angle?

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:45:16 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 01:08 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
I really ****ed off a horserider once. I was driving a very old Range
Rover automatic which had a conversion to LPG. It very often misfired,
made loud bangs, and changed gear without warning. I managed to cause a
small explosion and a loud revving of the engine just as I passed a
horserider coming the other way along a narrow country road. The horse
**** itself, and so did the rider.

I did better than that... I was coming down a narrow road that went past
a dude ranch on my Harley. Coming the other was was a herd of dudes on
their docile refugees from a canning factory led by a genuine wild west
cowboy. ****head's horse had a nervous breakdown while the guests' nags
barely roused from their stupor.

it doesn't take much to set them off. I've worked with horses enough to
know most of them are a neurotic bundle of nerves. If the horse can't
handle public roads, trailer it to a nice quiet horse trail someplace.

Indeed. Horses on roads were fine, before the invention of the motor car.

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:28:15 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 01:09 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:15:30 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/08/2018 10:23 PM, Rod Speed wrote:

In its defense Nixon imposed a 55 mph national speed limit in '74 and
the cops were really enforcing it for a couple of years. The car was
not designed to do 55 except as a blip on the way to 90.

Mine was a manual and did that fine.

This was also a manual and would do 55 in 4th but the engine was at the
low end of its rpm range. Much of a hill and you had to drop a gear and
I lived in a mountainous area. I have a bike that had the same problem
with 45, a very common speed limit around town. At least I could change
a sprocket and get 45 to match a useful part of the rpm range.

How odd, I've never had a car that won't go down to 30mph in 5th gear,
nevermind 4th.

There's not exactly a lot of torque at 1500 rpm unless you're driving a
Detroit 60 diesel. You can lug it down that low but don't expect much to
happen.

Not enough to overtake, but enough to change speed easily without annoying the engine. I can put my foot to the floor in top gear at 30mph, and it'll go up to 40 in a few seconds. Fine for town driving where there's usually some old codger or a woman (!) behind the wheel in front of me anyway.

The strangest part was the plug wires. At around 15,000 miles you would
go out in the morning and it wouldn't start. No misfiring or any other
symptom, just no go. Replace the wires and you were good for another
15,000. I carried a set of spares. I never dug further after figuring
out the problem but I assume the primitive computer had a range of
parameters and a German sense of humor about non-conformity.

What are plug wires? Do you mean HT leads?

Yes. Generally called spark plug wires in this country. They may be a
thing of the past. My Toyota doesn't have any but I don't know how
common that is.

It will, but they're concealed in one tube.

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:15:19 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 06:33 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Have you seen the newest (well last 5 or 10 years actually) Ford
Mondeos? The centre console (where the radio goes) has become ****ing
huge. There's zero legroom anymore. I don't understand why they've got
that big lump in there.

No, and I may have missed my chance. It was called the Fusion in the US.
Ford announced they're dropping sedans in favor of SUVs and pickups in
the US, although the Fusion might live on as sort of a Subaru Outback thing.

The general public yawned but the cops are ****ed. They really loved
their Crown Vics. That was dropped in 2012 so they have to switch to Dodges.

They're constantly trying to stop us Europeans from having big cars, but nobody listens.

On 09/30/2018 09:06 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

I don't understand why they're still using steel on any vehicle, it's
ridiculous.

https://autoweek.com/article/car-new...and-ford-f-150

They are waiting to see how Ford makes out. One major difference is the
F150 and SUVs based on the chassis still use a conventional steel frame.
It doesn't matter what the body is made of.

http://www.trucktrend.com/features/1...-pickup-truck/