ejstubbs

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?

On 18/12/2022 at 10:49, Derekl said:

Just bear in mind that being over the limit on a bicycle is the same offence as driving when over the limit. If caught, you lose your licence to drive, although I agree that it is less likely to happen and you are much less of a threat to others on a bike than in a car.

As Lochgorm said, this is not true.  See https://www.slatergordon.co.uk/newsroom/is-it-illegal-to-ride-a-bicycle-when-drunk/:

Quote

 

The maximum penalty for cycling whilst under the influence of drink or drugs is a £1,000 fine. This is also the case for careless or inconsiderate cycling. The maximum penalty for dangerous cycling is a £2,500 fine.

 

You wouldn’t, however, get any points on your driving license should you have one, as it isn’t a driving offence.

 

On 18/12/2022 at 14:47, Bernard Lamb said:

Please ensure that you not only insure the ebike for peace of mind but more importantly it is essential to take out third party cover before venturing onto public roads.

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.

On 18/12/2022 at 19:59, Enterprisingwestern said:

Did the regenerative braking on Worsbrough Bank recharge the battery?

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.

On 18/12/2022 at 19:53, big jim said:

one thing to bear in mind is the weight of ebikes, the vengence was 25kg so quite weighty to be lifting on and off the roof mounted cycle rack on the car

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!)

On 18/12/2022 at 14:37, Nearholmer said:

There’s a cycling thread on here, wherein at least one, and possibly more participants know a lot about e-bikes.

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 ☹️).

On 09/12/2022 at 18:31, didcot said:

...the bomber boys were only following orders.

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").

8 hours ago, Obi-Jiff Kenobi said:

While I don’t remember which race or driver, I do recall Charlie saying, as a car slid through a bend, “He’s got about as much grip as a dog on lino.”

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.)

5 hours ago, SR71 said:

There's no doubting that Murray Walker is responsible for my love of motor racing.

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.

On 09/10/2022 at 20:01, melmerby said:

After running my sets around a bit I have found one big disappointment. The NEM pockets

Mine vary from OK to rubbish

The OK ones are near as dammit horizontal and centered

The others very between a noticable set away from the centre, so they miss any other coupling they are trying to couple too - not rectifiable with the design used.

The worst are ones with a sag - quite a few, varying from a little sag to so much droop that a Kadee hits the sleepers and Roco/Hornby couplings wont couple when pushed together

Tightening the mounting screw doesn't work, some just overturn.

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).

2 hours ago, barney121e said:

I cant font a service sheet for the loco, and wondering if anyone knows if the pin should come out?

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?

14 minutes ago, Ian Morgan said:

They are starting a petition in Germany to try to stop this waste of resources on 'disposable' vapes.

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.

27 minutes ago, Reorte said:

There's an all too common attitude within professional sport that anything is acceptable, breaking the rules is just another factor to weigh up the pros and cons of as much as any legitimate tactic.

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...

54 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

Nuts!

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.

12 hours ago, Hroth said:

Car wheel balancing weights are useful, you can get them in graduated sizes and nowadays they are self adhesive.

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).

On 14/11/2022 at 04:28, faulcon1 said:

Trip advisor is NOT to be trusted as owners of Hotels/Motels/Pubs can't leave a response to negative comments.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen responses to negative TripAdvisor reviews for a number of hotels and restaurants I've been considering visiting.

It doesn't seem to be something that many businesses do all that often, though, if at all.  And I get the impression that some start off by responding to negative reviews, but eventually either get bored with it, or decide it's not worth the effort because:

(a) once they've built up a reasonable amount of feedback, most people can tell the difference between isolated less-than-totally-brilliant experiences (which is all that many of them are, despite the language that is sometimes used which can make not having your bed turned down in the evening seem like the end of civilisation as we know it) and a generally positive outcome for the majority of reviewers, and

(b) it can actually start to look a bit "needy" and/or combative, neither of which are likely to encourage new custom.

There's also the old (i.e. pre-Internet) 1:10 rule of feedback: if one customer has a bad experience, they'll tell ten other people about it.  If they have a good experience, they might tell one other person.  In these days of social media, requests for feedback popping up in your inbox* and so forth, the ratio has probably only got worse.

* Which I suspect all too often triggers the "You want feedback?  I'll b**dy give you bl**dy feedback!" response from unhappy curtomers.  As opposed to the "Yeah, it was good, I'll get round to it..." response from basically satisfied customers.

14 hours ago, figworthy said:

That was a major reason for not having an answerphone.  Eventually the surgery moved to a non-geographic number, so the calls stopped.

I had the same person call me three times on my mobile the other day.  The first time I didn't manage to answer it in time, so they would have got my voicemail greeting in which I clearly state my name (assuming that they listened/paid attention to it).  They rang again a minute two later and seemed surprised that Wayne wasn't available (that not being my name).  When I told them they had called the wrong number they just hung up.  They then called again a few minutes later, which I didn't bother answering.  After that they did seem to give up but such behaviour does make me wonder exactly how thick some people can be at times.

When we first moved in to our current house we had a spate of calls for one of the local livery stables.  IIRC the cause in that case was that one of the umpteen "local directory" type web sites* had published an incorrect number for the business.  It was surprising how many people (a) refused to believe that the number on the web site was wrong, and (b) seemed to think that it was my responsibility to get it put right.  The calls did dry up in the end.

AFAIK if you find yourself continually pestered by wrong numbers - which I can imagine would be annoyingly frequent in the case of a single digit confusion with a GP surgery - then you can ask your telephone service provider to get involved to try to find a solution.  This would most likely involve one or other party getting a new number, which even for a residential user could be more than a little inconvenient (although I believe the telco should be able to put an automatic redirection from your old number in place for a transitional period).

* I have never understood the reason for these sites existing in these days of Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo, especially since most of them seem to be little more than a minimal 'scrape' of Yellow Pages or the like, with most of the entries having a "if this is your business please get in touch" flag.  For those of a more mid-twentieth-century mindset, BT still maintains the actual telephone directory, and makes it available online (and I believe it has a statutory duty to do so).

16 hours ago, AY Mod said:

"Are we there yet?" will lead to permanent scarring in painful places.

I never cease to be impressed at your patience with some of the more, er... 'demanding' patrons of these forums.

And although I didn't notice any significant impact to the way I personally use the site as a result of the incident, I think this is nonetheless an appropriate time to reiterate my appreciation for the time and effort you and your colleagues put in to keeping this excellent resource both available, and a pleasant virtual place to waste spend time.

7 hours ago, SR71 said:

O I do hope someone draws that to the attention of the stewards at the next meeting. Crashing deliberately is a much heavier penalty and I believe this would qualify as new evidence.

Michael Schumacher was disqualified from the entire 1997 Drivers' Championship as a result of more-or-less deliberately* colliding with Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez.  Admittedly it was a championship-deciding race so the stakes were higher - but arguably that makes Verstappen's action even more petty and stupid, given that the only thing he had to gain at that point was a bit more polish for his ego by beating Hamilton through one corner.

* The FIA described it as "...an instinctive reaction and although deliberate not made with malice or premeditation".  (On the other hand, they took no action following the Prost-Senna coming together at turn one at Suzuka in 1990, despite Senna having made some pretty reckless statements before that race which could have been taken as evidence of intent.)

15 hours ago, The Lurker said:

good recovery drive from Lewis. I thought Karun Chandok’s analysis of that incident was very interesting- until I saw that I thought for once Max had been hard done by.

What Karun said mirrored my own reading of the incident, having watched the replay on YouTube.  It reminded me rather of the Hamilton/Verstappen incident at Silverstone last year, in fact, although with turn 2 at São Paolo being a lot slower than Copse the consequences were less brutal.  And of course in that race Hamilton was judged at fault and got a 10s penalty.

17 hours ago, Hroth said:

What you need is a turntable with a USB output that you can connect to a PC (and assuming you have access to a Windows PC for this exercise)

 

...

 

Install Audacity  on your PC. This is software that allows you to capture and edit the sound output from your turntable via the USB port.  Once working (an exercise for the reader, though its not difficult nowadays!) the sound file can be exported to your hard disk in whatever format, eg mp3, you require.

 

The mp3 (etc) files can be copied to the storage media of your choice and there you go!

FYI, Audacity runs on Mac as well: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/mac/

Supply problems from an EU-based manufacturer?  Whoever would have imagined such a thing could happen?

The point was that Ferrari built the whole car, in particular the engine, in-house (obviously some smaller/specialist components would have been sourced from external suppliers, such as electrics from Magneti Marelli).  Il Commendatore felt that his team's approach was more 'pure' than that of Cooper, Lotus, McLaren, Williams and their ilk, who bought major components like engines and gearboxes 'off the shelf' (though often with a lot of collaboration on the design) from third party suppliers, particularly Coventry Climax, Cosworth and Hewland in the early years when La Scuderia first started to be embarrassed by being beaten by the "garagisti".

Arguably BRM was the only British "costruttore" of the early years of F1.  Unfortunately their more radical engine designs, like the 1,500cc supercharged V16 and the 3-litre H16, largely ended up being interesting failures in competition terms.