ejstubbs

As I noted above, the crossover point is at £27.34 (sold price plus postage charged) - anything above that then the maximum £1 offer is better than the 80% off offer.

Resurrecting this moribund thread: for at least the last 12 months, my wife and I have been receiving reduced selling fee offers every few weeks, on the same weekends. She always gets the maximum £1 fee offer while I only ever get the 80% off fees offer. The breakpoint between the two is at around £27 the total of the selling price plus postage (fees are 12.8% plus 30p), which is OK for small items but less great for items in the upper double figure range like locos. In terms of eBay usage, I sell a fair amount more than she does, and more rgularly (though I've been "on strike" for several months now, waiting to see if they ever come back to me with the better offer). I also buy more off eBay than she does, which they must know earns them fees from the sellers. I have set up a second account which, when I get round to it, I will use to test the water by listing a few low cost items, and see if eBay starts offering maximum £1 selling fees on that account. (I have a not dissimilar issue with Amazon at the moment. For some reason they have taken to offering me regular free trials of Amazon Prime Student. I am not a student, and even if I was I would need to be registered with a .ac.uk e-mail address to qualify, which I'm not. Why they keep offering me something which a moment's glance at my account would show that I' not eligible for I have no idea. What's galling is that they no longer offer me occasional free trials of ordinary Amazon Prime. They seem to have got it into their head that I am a student for no reason at all, and I haven't a clue how to disabuse them of that idea.)

I did think that maybe judicious use of a soldering iron on a low temperature setting might be sufficient to persuade it to take a permanent set in the correct position. Good idea to use something to hold it in the right place - I had had visions of trying to delicately juggle coach, iron and brake rodding detail with just two hands and it all going horribly wrong 😧

I'm wondering if anyone can offer advice regarding a minor problem I have with one of my Genesis LMS six wheel coaches? The brake 3rd has had an annoying "click" from the get go, notable for only occurring when the coach is running with the brake compartment leading. After ignoring it for a while, I finally managed to track it down to the underframe brake detail. There are two longitudinal rods leading from a transverse rod attached to a 'crank' driven from the 'vacuum cylinder'. One rod is quite short, only going as far as the wheelset under the end of the coach below the passenger compartments. The other is much longer, and terminates between the wheels at the end of the coach under the brake compartment. It is this latter rod which is making the click: the rod does not run straight, but instead deviates slightly to one side, as can be seen in this photo: This puts the end of the rod right at the end of the axle, where there is a high spot on the axle (you can see something similar on the middle axle) which flicks the end of the rod as the axle rotates. When running passenger end first it makes no discernible noise, but when running in the other direction it catches against the end of the rod, creating an audible click. Now, I could just try smoothing down the high spot on the axle, or simply trimming the end of the rod fractionally shorter, but the fundamental issue seems to be that the rod doesn't run where it should. This photo shows the underside of my all brake, with the rod running straight and true, as it does on all my other Genesis coaches: I need if possible to persuade the errant rod to run straight, but being flexible plastic it doesn't want to take a bend Any suggestions as to how I might safely persuade it to lie where it should?

I don't use the #5 (or its height & length variants), preferring the #14x series. For screw fitting of the gear boxes I use the Kadee #246 tap & die set to make tapped holes in the vehicle chassis, with 2-56 screws as recommended by Kadee (I use black button head hex drive 2-56 screws, in various lengths, from modelfixings.co.uk - as ever, other suppliers may be available). I find screw fitting much more secure than gluing, especially when dealing with older stock where the construction materials are not certain though the Kadee gear boxes do seem to stick well to polystyrene kit chassis using ordinary poly cement/mek/limonene etc (though not so well to plasticard, for some reason). Someone mentioned using #15x series couplers: the coupler heads on these are 'true' HO scale, so a tad smaller than the coupler heads on the #14x series - which might actually make the #14x series better suited to 4mm scale. The #15x series are also only available with centerset coupler heads: that's probably appropriate if you are keen to get the most prototypical look possible on HO stock, but the height variations offered by the #14x series (underset & overset as well as centreset) do offer more options for the fitting of the gearbox to the chassis, while still getting the coupler head at the correct height. The short & narrow gear box options (#252 and #262) also offer a bit more flexibility in the gear box placement.

But at least it's not a genuine historic aircraft that gets trashed in bad weather. ('d hope that the genuine ones that get replaced by replicas go into museums, or at least into secure storage awaiting conservation.)

It's my understanding that many if not all of such gate guardian aircraft are glass fibre replicas nowadays (I think this was mentioned in the Airfix episode of James May's Toy Story). The original aircraft don't stand up well to being stuck up on a pole in all weathers, and can be vulnerable to vandalism and even theft (though I can't help thinking that you'd have to be pretty sneaky and/or foolhardy to try something like that outside a military facility).

There's a couple of T34s in Berlin sitting around not doing much, if that's any help?

That's a much clearer explanation than the one I [tried to] read the other day!

On Christmas Eve, someone managed to roll their car completely over on this Edinburgh street: If you look closely in the StreetView photo, you'll see that it's a 20mph limit. If you click on the link to the StreetView web page and swing the camera round 180° you can see the zig-zags marking the entrance to a school. A photo of the aftermath posted on Twitter (unfortunately now deleted) showed that, at the time of the incident, there were many more cars parked on the street, on both sides, The reports said that the driver "clipped" another car, causing their car (a fairly normal hatchback, not an SUV) to roll over. I can find no report of any police action being taken 😠

OK, got it - many thanks.

I have a custom activity stream set up, based on VNC but with the content type limited to just topics. I've now discovered that new content in some forums is not showing up in that activity stream. For example: new content in the "UK Prototype Questions" forum is showing up, but that in the "UK Prototype Discussions (not questions)" forum isn't. I'm struggling to work out why this is happening. ISTR a forums filter somewhere, which allows you to ignore forums you're unlikely to be interested in, but I'm struggling to locate it. I had an idea that it was somewhere in my profile or account settings, but if so then it's clearly in a non-obvious place. Can anyone shed any light?

As Lochgorm said, this is not true. See https://www.slatergordon.co.uk/newsroom/is-it-illegal-to-ride-a-bicycle-when-drunk/: No more or less essential than when riding a normal, non-assisted bike on public roads. Specifically, there is no obligation in law to have third party insurance when riding an EAPC-compliant e-bike on public roads. Non-EAPC-compliant e-bikes (sometimes also known as "speed pedelecs") are electric motorcycles in the eyes of the law and the same laws apply to them (and e-scooters) as to other motor vehicles (though the e-scooter lobby is pushing to to get that changed). Which is not to say that third party insurance is not a good idea, for the reasons you cite. As Butler Henderson pointed out, many household insurance policies include cover for such risks, and cycling organisations such as British Cycling include cover in their membership. Many cyclists have cancelled their British Cycling membership due to their recent deal with Shell. Cycling UK (the CTC as was) offer £10M third party cover as part of their membership package. Regenerative braking is rare to non-existent in the EAPC market. One main reason is that it requires a direct drive motor, which is not compatible with what is generally regarded as the best assistance system which acts through the pedals and drive train: being a standard drive train from the pedals to the rear wheel - including in particular a freewheel hub - there's no way to drive the motor from the wheel when braking, or freewheeling downhill. Rear or front wheel drive systems might be more amenable to regenerative braking but even then it has to date been generally accepted that the cost and additional complexity of the electrical systems required to support regenerative braking do not justify the rather underwhelming expected benefits (one article I read suggested an estimated range increase of 1.5miles, which arguably falls within the category of rounding error in real life applications). Yes, there are e-bikes out there which have regenerative braking but AFAIK none of them are EAPC-compliant, and many/most of them are explicitly or implicitly sold as e-motorcyles, not EAPCs. I went for a towbar mounted bike rack after acquiring my eMTB. As well as being a whole lot easier to load the bike on to than a roof mounted rack, it also significantly reduces aerodynamic drag, and thus helps my MPG. I have, however, developed a fairly good technique for lifting the eMTB over gates and other impediments to progress when riding off-road in this enlightened part of the UK (hint: if all else fails, taking the battery off might help!) I'm afraid I set that thread to 'ignore' soon after it was started after reading one too many snidey and ill-informed comments about e-bikes. It may have become more e-bike-friendly since then but TBH blocking yet another thread that would otherwise tempt me to return on a regular basis just to "check it out" helps keep my time wasted online somewhat under control, as well as reducing the temptation to buy more stuff (saying which, just yesterday I let myself be tempted into buying a new bike light that someone had recommended on another forum ☹️).

I think you need to be careful about using that form of words, especially in the context of the conflict under discussion.

Or accidentally drop your credit or debit card in to it - although you may be able to use the remnants for contactless payments, as demonstrated on TV recently by Hannah Fry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f1td/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-1-bank-card (from 26'24").

That was a good one. According to https://1990sbtcc.com/2022/06/23/charlies-memorable-one-liners/ it was Thruxton in 1997, as Will Hoy and Patrick Watts collided in very wet and slippery conditions. Plenty more on that web page! (But not the paper-hanger one, for some reason.)

While Murray, with his unbounded enthusiasm and self-deprecating approach to his own mistakes, was without doubt a major influence on my early interest in motor sport, I do still have a fond memory of Charlie Cox once commentating on a lap-long dice in a BTCC race at Thruxton. As the two came barrelling through Church and Brooklands heading towards the Club chicane he described the lead driver, at the very limit of grip and with his adversary nudging hopefully at his rear bumper, as being "busier than a one-armed paper-hanger". I thought it was both a brilliantly accurate metaphor and - though I should probably be ashamed to admit it these days - extremely funny.

I've found the same with the LMS coaches I received the other day. Some of the NEM pockets are so far off-centre that they won't couple up to another coach with a more-or-less centred NEM Pocket, even with the small TLCs they come fitted with. There's no chance of the worst ones ever working properly with NEM Kadees installed and, as you say, the design of the NEM pocket doesn't offer any obvious way to fix the problem oneself. I have no intention of taking a knife or glue to a brand new model to fix a problem that it came out of the box with. I'm surprised no-one else seems to have mentioned this as an issue. Have you approached Hattons about it? I'm about to take some photos of my examples and see what they have to say. EDIT: As it happens, I use Hunt Elite couplings within a rake and the magnets in those seem to be more than strong enough to pull the wonky NEM pockets into line. Still not good for folks who want to run these things "out of the box", though.

As BH says. Pickup from one rail is through the 'driving' wheels on one side of the loco*, via the chassis and the drawbar to the brass coupling pin on the tender; that pin is insulated from the tender chassis, with a wire connecting to one power feed on the motor. Pickup from the other rail is through the wheels on the opposite side of the tender to the pickup wheels on the loco, through the tender chassis to the motor. This isn't shown well on service sheet S.87, but can be worked out by reference to service sheet S.87A (front and back) as linked from my previous post. * The pickup wheels on the loco are on the left side (looking from the cab). The pickup wheels on the tender are on the other side (obviously).

It's service sheet 87, available here: http://www.hornbyguide.com/service_sheet_details.asp?sheetid=14 http://www.hornbyguide.com/service_sheet_details.asp?sheetid=308 or here: https://www.lendonsmodelshop.co.uk/pdf/Hornby Service Sheets/No.087 4-6-0 Black Five.pdf https://www.lendonsmodelshop.co.uk/pdf/Hornby Service Sheets/No.087A 4-6-0 LMS Class 5.pdf The 'driving' wheel axles are all part number S.2345. I can't imagine that the one for the centre drivers is not supposed to come out though - full disclosure - I've never disassembled a Hornby Five of that age to that extent. Does it actually rotate?

I only heard about disposable* vapes a few weeks ago, on a visit to that London and spotted an ad on the side of a bus passing by. My heart sank. * In this context - and indeed many similar ones - the use of the term 'disposable' makes me think of guidance I was taught on a data protection course a while back: "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Actually applies to so many things in life when you start to think about it...

Can't help with your specific issue I'm afraid, but I do have a Bachmann Jinty and it's never had any problems negotiating 2nd radius curves, even at full chat. That's no comfort to you, of course, but I think it does suggest that the problem most likely lies with your particular loco rather than being a fault with the design.

Not only professional sport: "It's all fine so long as you don't get caught" is a far too prevalent attitude in many commonplace day-to-day activities, particularly driving (exceeding the speed limit, parking on DYLs "just for five minutes" and so forth) but also things like being married, managing water companies, being a government minister...

I think that's a lady squirrel, going by what I remember from an all-too-famous 'atmosphere' shot in an early series of The Great British Bake Off (warning: link may be NSFW). Not that I watch the programme, it's just that it was pretty much impossible to avoid people going on about it the day after... Oh, you meant that kind of nuts. Sorry. As you were.

They tend to be steel, rather than lead (the old type with a bendable clip that attaches over the edge of the wheel rim) these days, don't they? Certainly the ones I have are. Not that I've found that to be a significant problem in the stock I've tweaked weight-wise, but it might be problematic with anything that's tight on space, which is where the greater density of lead (~45% more than mild steel) might be helpful. That would be sheet lead, though, rather than shot which has air space between the pellets. The densest packing for spheres occupies about 75% of the available space, which would mean shot in the ideal, densest possible packing is only about 8% denser than mild steel. More random packing (which is what you're most likely to achieve) can end up occupying less than 65% of the available space, which would mean that it's ~8% less dense than mild steel. OTOH shot is easier to get in to awkward-to-access or oddly-shaped spaces than sheet (not that lead sheet is particularly difficult to cut).