PatB

Working from my memories of 1984 (not necessarily accurate), I'd raise a few points rather than a comprehensive list. Quite a lot of enthusiasts, and the desperately poor, were still running '60s and even a bit of 50s stuff as daily drivers, so whilst they shouldn't be used too liberally, Morris Minors, Austin A30/35/40s, Farina Oxbridges (the few the banger boys hadn't consumed), Mk 1 and 2 Cortinas, Triumph Heralds etc. are all quite acceptable in moderation in 1984. As for contemporary stuff, Fiat 126/127/128s were still around in decent numbers, as was the 131 and the Strada and Panda were relatively new. I remember quite a lot of Renaults too, with the 4 still in production alongside more modern designs, 5s, 9s and 11s in good numbers, 12s still hanging on, 14s, not many 15/16/17s, lots of 18s, quite a few Fuegos but hardly any 20s or 30s. Talbots (or whatever they were calling themselves that week) were still around, with a few surviving Avengers and quite a lot of the Alpine/Solara variants. Those funny little Citroens using the old Peugeot 104 shell seemed quite common. Lots of Japanese stuff, though not much of their earlier efforts. More common were things like Datsun ('twould have been round about then that they rebranded from Datsun to Nissan) Sunnys and Bluebirds with the contemporary straight line/sharp corner styling. Vauxhall Novas and Astras seemed to be everywhere, also with sharp edged styling. Light commercials were the ever present Mk1 and Mk2 Transits, but there were still quite a few of those 00 gauge Commers (ex PO and Telecom mostly) about, and the Bedford CF was still selling. The Japanese were also around with the HiAce van and HiLux pickup and the Mitsubishi L300. Don't forget all those Honda Actys either. I'm not sure if the Bedford Rascal had yet appeared. Don't forget the motorcycles either (though the manufacturers seem to have) for any comprehensive early 80s street scene. IIRC 1979 had been a record year for motorcycle sales and there were still huge numbers around, with L-plated 125s of various flavours probably being most common. Or maybe that design classic the mighty Honda Step-Thru (surely the Japanese must make a model of it, although probably to H0 scale sadly). If your scene's set in London it must include a courier's grubby and battered Honda CX500 somewhere, perhaps buried in the front wing of a Cortina minicab with the shaken but unhurt rider arguing with the driver. Possibly easier to do would be something under a cover in a front or back yard. When the 125 learner law came in c1981 thousands of 250s (the previous learner limit) became both redundant and financially worthless and so spent the 1980s decaying under tarpaulins before someone labelled them "Classics" as a joke and the world was daft enough to take it seriously .

Pretty sure it was in the listing title.

Does it yell "GAS GAS GAS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 DEAD DEAD DEAD"?

Back to basics. Unplug the lathe (and keep the plug where you can see it so some helpful person doesn't plug it in for you at an awkward moment). First up, check that the plug is wired correctly. Many are not. Make sure it's got the right fuse in. I suspect 3A would be appropriate for the little Unimat motor. Check the lead carefully for damage to the insulation. I'm not familiar with the Unimat motor specifically, but the first thing to do is clean it thoroughly. The sort of crud that builds up around lathes has a high metal content and so is quite conductive. Get it all off the outside first, then have a look in through any cooling slots. If there's rubbish inside you'll have to open it up and clean it internally. While you're in there, check all the electrical connections, looking particularly for stray strands of copper, more conductive crud and making particularly sure the earth core of the mains cable is firmly and conductively attached to the metalwork as it should be. Make sure the live core and anything it feeds only have continuity to anything else through the motor brushes and windings. With the motor apart, make sure the brushes are insulated from each other and from the motor frame. Make sure the commutator is clean. Carefully scrape any deposits out of the insulation gaps. Crud in this area is basically carbon and copper particles so it has the potential to short stuff. All the above can be done without a multimeter just by visual inspection, although a meter (or even just a battery and bulb continuity tester) will help. However, if nothing comes to light up to this point, it's time to check the windings with a meter. None should connect to earth, so that's the first and easiest check. Similarly, none should connect to each other, so you need to identify each end of each individual winding. There should be infinite resistance between separate windings and a smallish but measurable resistance between the ends of any one winding. That resistance should be the same for each. Any that read zero or which are otherwise appreciably different from the others represent a fault. Bottom line is that you appear to have electricity getting to where it shouldn't. The key is to find the route it is taking to do so. In the absence of complex electronics or sealed black boxes this is well within the capabilities of any individual able to work methodically and read a multimeter. Dont plug the thing back in until you've found and rectified all evident faults and then applied your meter to the plug pins to check for three things. First that there is zero resistance between the earth pin and any metal part of the motor that you can touch. Second, an infinite resistance between the active pin and any touchable metal. Third a non zero resistance between the active and neutral pin. Then you can (cautiously) plug it in and try it.

From my memory of these things in the 70s, my Triang minerals were all rewheeled with Jacksons, popped into the existing axleboxes without the addition of brass bearings. ISTR that Limas ran OK through pointwork to (then) Peco standards without modification.

30 years ago I thrashed a rented pov-pack Fiesta 950 around north Wales for a week. Once I'd worked out that you needed to rev it 'til the valves bounced to make it go properly I had a whale of a time, as the chassis, steering and gearbox were all quite pleasant. It was probably even more fun than a proper hot one, given that, even thrashed, the velocities reached were quite modest, causing less worry about death and/or licence loss.

I quite enjoy Murdoch but I find it pays not to have the old critical faculties turned up too high.

Will a CD drawer motor go in? They seem to be becoming the standard fix for dodgy pancake types.

Not impossible, but I don't see anything really familiar there. This is as likely to be a result of trying to identify an obscure bus from a near 50 year old memory which, at best, will be as seen by a 4 year old as to anything else . If it helps, I seem to remember inward facing bench seats over the rear axle, one of which (the RHS one) partially hid a big chequerplate hump in the floor which my mechanical guru older brother (well, he was 8 and good with Meccano) told me was for a mysterious object called a "diff", whatever that was .

I agree that it's been wound up a bit, but the human movement doesn't have the characteristic jerkiness that occurs when it's been really overdone.

Can't you just lay a third rail on the 5" circuit ?

Can't help with Sharpie colours, but you could try finding a local stockist of these guys (yes, I know aspects of their main marketing area will make some RMWebbers incandescent, but that's not really a discussion for this thread), show them a sample of what you want and see if they can supply a close match in their paint pens. Or supply an empty pen which you can fill with suitably thinned Railmatch or whatever.

Here's one to challenge (rather pointlessly I'll admit) the considerable expertise of those here and satisfy my idle curiosity. Does anyone know anything about operators in the Cheltenham area c1970? When I was 3 or 4 years old, we often caught the bus from Gotherington, via Bishops Cleeve, to Cheltenham. It always seemed to be the same bus, a double decker in faded greenish grey. I think it may have had an open platform and memory tells me that I thought it had a rather sad face, which makes me think it might have been a Leyland PD3. If anyone can make anything of that rather vague and ancient description, or knows what it actually was, or at least was likely to be, and who would have operated it in that particular area in 1970-71 I'd be curious to know.

When you think about it, if someone proposed Punch and Judy as kids' entertainment now, they'd be locked up. It has given rise to some excellent fictional interpretations though, such as Ben Aaranovitch's Rivers of London, an aside in Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear, and the very amusing (for those with a certain sense of humour) low-budget British, post-Hammer horror flick Funnyman.

I can see why there's outrage. Meddling in local government politics is exclusively reserved for our own homegrown property developers/speculators. Bl%%*y foreigners, coming over here and taking our scams .

That was Do It All weren't it? Cheapest cement in Bristol as I recall, at 3.25 a 50 kg bag .

Unless the film's been subject to some serious overcranking (it doesn't look like it, or not much anyway) it looks as if the train isn't hanging about.

I've always thought it telling that the first lleylandi in Britain were discovwred on the South Coast in the 1940s IIRC. I think we can safely assume that they were the advance guard for Operation Sealion and have done a highly successful job of establishing a bridgehead .

Presumably if you live in a town like that you get used to the disruption caused by trains and end up as accepting it as just the way things are.

I often find myself amazed at how uninterested salespeople can be in selling stuff, and it's not just EVs. When we bought our Scudo we went to both Perth dealerships and asked for a test drive. One seemed flabbergasted at the concept and very grudgingly allowed me to pilot their demonstrator 100 m up the road with the salesman in the passenger seat. The other threw us the keys, said "It's got a full tank, take it away and do what you want with it. Just get it back before we close at 6", so we did. No guesses as to who we bought from.

If all you want to do is have trains circulating at more or less constant speed, old H&M resistance controllers bought cheap will do the job reliably for not much money. If you want to be able to shunt and fiddle at low speeds, the Gaugemaster or Morley options will do it much better but will cost quite a lot more. If you want reasonable performance for pennies, buy a soldering iron, some strip board and a handful of electronic components, find one of the many circuit diagrams available on the Web (including in this forum) and have some fun and education building your own.

Perhaps not, although, again, I don't see the rental market as necessarily remaining in a state of stasis for the rest of time. As part of an overall transport system the rental industry will almost certainly change as the system as a whole changes. Even as things stand now, though, depending on the difference between an individual's typical use and their most demanding use, there may still be savings to be made by buying for the former and renting for the latter, even if the rental companies price gouge at times of peak demand. Again, it may not be a solution for everybody, but it might be interesting for people to look at the numbers for their own case and see. That big engine, all that extra luggage space, the extra gubbins involved in a 4WD system, etc. etc. all have a cost which adds up considerably over time. Maybe it's not worth paying that cost when not using what it's buying.

OT, but I find myself rather intrigued by the subset of boaties who do their (generally non-competitive) nautical stuff on the cheap(er). A Google search on "Phil Bolger" will turn up references to all sorts of unconventional vessels and links which can be followed to various eccentrics who use alternative approaches to various problems. As an example, the Chinese Junk Rig is reputed to offer a means of obtaining reasonable sailing performance without the need for the super high grade (and therefore expensive) materials and fittings required for a conventional rig. I should point out that I've no practical experience of such things. I just enjoy seeing people with the gumption to try doing things differently. To come back within spitting distance of the topic, though, as has been pointed out upthread, high performance IC vehicles tend to be an expensive recreational choice already. However, plenty of people of modest means still seem to make the sacrifices necessary in order to own one. My own experience has been with motorcycles where, at one stage, my desire to run powerful Japanese fours resulted in my getting most of my nutrition from the returned tray trollies in the university canteen, because almost my entire meagre income, after rent, was going on insurance, petrol, chains and tyres. An extreme example, perhaps, but an illustration that even as the IC vehicle becomes more and more expensive to run, those who really really want one will find a way to do so. Those less motivated will find something else on which to lavish their attentions. Sometimes we just can't afford to do the things we'd like. 'Twas ever thus.

Well, as far as I can see, this has indeed been the case within Australia for at least a couple of decades. Many Bunnings stores in WA still bear on spikes the heads of defeated enemies the three balls on sticks motif from Hardware House who had the temerity to challenge the behemoth a decade or more ago. Pity the rest of the world didn't see them as the unstoppable force they seem to see themselves as being .

It will help if we, as a society, can lose the idea that we must own a vehicle capable of undertaking our most demanding task, even if we only do that task once or twice a year. Here in Western Australia, for example, most vehicles spend their lives operating in an area approximately 100 miles by 30 miles, with road conditions significantly better than those in most UK cities. Yes, it gets a bit hot sometimes but it's otherwise a fairly undemanding driving environment. In spite of this we all tell ourselves and the world that we're a state of huge distances and harsh conditions so we really really need all those V8 Toyota Land cruisers that spend most of their time stationary within 25 miles of Perth's GPO. In reality, most of us could do the majority of our motoring quite adequately in a Kia Picanto (or EV equivalent) and put the savings towards hiring a suitable vehicle for the annual trip up the coast/across the Nullabor. From some of the posts above, the same mentality (or a variation thereof) seems to exist in the UK too. There is also a strong tendency to assume that both EV technology and the electrical distribution system will remain in their 2018 state indefinitely. That seems to be a rather heroic assumption, given the rate and nature of technological change for at least the last 200 years. I agree that EVs are not yet the solution for everyone. For some they may never be, or at least not within an easily foreseeable time. But they already have the capability to be practical for many more than currently use them, and the capability and affordability will only increase with time. Bear in mind that it's only a decade or so since the ghastly G-Wiz was being flogged to a naive public. Practical and available EVs have come an awfully long way since then.