Ronaldo47
-
Posts
1,353 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Blogs
Store
Posts posted by Ronaldo47
-
-
The "Green Maritime Plan" explicitly states that the targets are not mandatory:
"8. These zero emission shipping ambitions are intended to provide aspirational goals for the sector, not mandatory targets. "
See my earlier post of 17th Jan 2024.
-
It seems from the article that many of the electric boats are in fact hybrids.
Reference is made to doing a day's cruising on "mainly" solar power, which according to posters on other threads, might be possible on a sunny day in mid-summer, but which is unrealistic for a narrowboat under typical English weather conditions .
-
Proper editing does take time. Like Winston Churchill's reported apology to the House of Commons for being about to deliver a long speech because he hadn't had the time to write a short one.
-
Asymmetic reducers are available that allow a level invert to be provided.
.
-
I bought a spare filter for our cordless Dyson so it could be used without interruption. Cleaning our open fireplace hearth in winter means a lot of fine dust being caught by the filter. Putting the filter in a pint glass with some soapy water and agitating it, soon results in something that looks like Guiness without the head. Several changes of water are needed before it becomes clear.
-
What Kennedy should have said to say he was from Berlin is "Ich bin Berliner". By adding the "ein" he was saying he was a type of spicy bun, an illustration of the dangers of translating word-for-word.
-
Almost correct!
-
I see that they have acknowledged that the taller bollards would need larger foundations to cope with the greater bending moment that will arise when a rope is attached at the top of the bollard. So not a cheap upgrade.
-
There's probably some legal requirement to use metric units in official documents.
-
I remember that, when I was taking driving lessons in the late 1960's, the instructor said that "three-point turn" was a misnomer, as the requirement was just to turn the vehicle round using forward and reverse gears. I took my test in Cardiff, where the camber of some side roads was so great that the crown of the road was higher than the pavement. On those roads, doing a 3 point turn used to involve doing a hill start as well.
-
I take my 1980's, and long discontinued, Bickerton folder with us when we go on the canals for lockwheeling and shopping. Folded, it fits its medium suitcase-sized carry bag and has a pedal with an integral sliding spanner to remove it when stowed. 10" front wheel and 12" rear wheel so not ideal for deep potholes, but being aluminium, easy to carry when unloaded. No luggage carrier, but it has hooks on the handlebars for hanging the carry bag on. I have used mine to transport bulky things like beer crates and even a boxed lawnmower, but have had no need to carry a cassette as all our hires have had pumpouts.
-
Spray foam for cavity wall insulation was in use by the mid-1970's. A work colleague who was into model railways, got a friend who was in the wall insulation business to come round and use his foam apparatus to make him embankments and other scenery. I Ieft that job in 1976, and had no further contact with the colleague, so it must have been earlier than that.
-
I retained my minibus and 7.5T entitlements at age 70, which involved filing forms D2 and D4. There was no official fee for renewing by this route, but I had to pay £140 in total to my optician and GP for thrm to do the necessary examinations and complete the paperwork. You need to book a 30 minute slot with your GP, and it took all that time do do the examinations & tests and complete the paperwork.
While your application is being processed, you do not have an actual licence but DVLA do (eventually) send you a letter confirming that you are entitled to drive all your original classes while your application is pending. As DVLA required additional medical tests (which they paid for on a private patient basis, no waiting months for an appointment), it took some 7 months before my licence arrived, but it was dated from its date of issue and not the date of expiry of the old one. I didn't bother at my next renewal and just did it on line. I had in the past made use of both the large minibus and the 7.5T entitlements, but deceded I wouldn't need them any more.
There was a special box on the D2/D4 forms to tick for those who wanted their minibus entitlement specifically for charitable/community purposes, which I didn't tick, but I don't know what the effect of this is. I think it might have been relevant if your licence did not have this entitlement originally.
-
6 hours ago, Barneyp said:
So 2 immigrants (almost certainly not ayslumm seekers / refugees) are in some way dodgy or corrupt.
Lots of white anglo saxon people are dodgy or corrupt.
Its just that certain organisations and sections of the media highlight it more when the dodgy corrupt people are not white anglo saxon and British born.
In certain African countries, corruption is seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour. My late brother-in-law worked for UNESO for most of his working life in a senior position, and spent a significant amount of time working in various third world countries. He once remarked that, following the appointment of some people from African states to senior positions, they had organised well-paid sinecures for their relatives and claimed extravagent expenses. Things eventually got to such a state that the UK and the USA both withdrew their funding from UNESCO for many years until it had put its house in order.
A couple of years BC (Before Covid) there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 about the problems that could be encountered with theft and corruption when doing business in Africa. One of the people interviewed was a senior Nigerian diplomat. He not only admitted that the problem existed, but was clearly positively proud of the fact that other african states admitted that the Nigerians were the best at it.
-
I still have the dregs of a bottle of Johnson's Uranium Intensifier, a photographic chemical that some 60 years ago I used to intensify some underexposed photographic negatives. A chemist colleage later assured me it was perfectly safe, which I guess I knew as I used to slosh the negatives around in the solution with my fingers, and they are still all there and I haven't grown any new ones! I think I would have got more exposure to radiation had I lived in a granite house on Dartmoor.
In the late 1950's, a cousin had a pen pal who lived in South Africa. Her father worked in a uranium mine, and she once sent my cousin, through the post, a matchbox full of lumps of uranium ore. They were crystalline and a dirty yellow colour, resembling irregular granulated sugar lumps. We often used to play with them when we visited.
-
I fear that discretion has been increasingly replaced by tick box procedures in a number of fields. My wife bemoaned its introduction shortly before she left teaching.
In the civil servuce at least, in some cases the object appears to have been to reduce the need for higher-grade (and therefore more expensive) staff who are capable of using their brains, by instigating check list processes that can be carried out by cheaper, lower-grade, staff.
-
1
-
-
10 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:
There is a theory that the way to progress is by cockup. When promotion time comes around, senior management will only recognise the persons name and not remember the reason why they recognise it. If I've heard of them, they must be exceptional, is the rational and it's true in a way! I first heard of it from an engineer at Jaguar, whose career only took off after he wrote off a very expensive new model of car in testing.
I heard a similar thing from someone who used to work in the old GPO Telephones Engineering division, where someone allegedly got chosen for a plum job attending an international conference because everyone at the appointment meeting knew of him because he was regularly seen coming in late in the morning!
In a division of the Civil Service I once worked in, a Mr Armitage had risen from the ranks to became departmental head. It was rumoured that this was because everyone saw his name whenever they used the toilets, where all the ceramic porcelain was emblazened with the legend "Armitage Ware".
-
1
-
-
Indeed, the king pins were sealed "for life", but the life wasn't long! I retrofitted mine with grease nipples but it didn't improve things greatly. When I replaced them for the first time on my then 5 year old Imp, I couldn't shift them and had to remove the hinge assembly and tip one of the technicians in the lab workshop at Plessey to remove the king pin using a fly press. I had a similar experience with the Harvey Spicer UJs on the rear wheels. The Rootes workshop manual instructed you to "tap gently on the ears of the yoke and the shells will emerge". In practice, removal of the half axle assembly to a heavy vice and slogging on the ears of the yoke with lump hammer was necessary.
-
The only fuse in my 1966 Hillman Imp was the 1 1/4" one in the in-line fuse holder for the car radio that I had fitted myself.
-
You need to bear in mind that the current rating of automotive fuses is the current at which the fuse will blow. Fuses for virtually all other uses, such as the 13A fuse for your mains plug, are rated by the maximim current they can carry indefinitely. This is generally around half of the automotive fuse rating. I have a few vintage 1 1/4" glass fuses that are marked with both types of current rating.
-
More than 20 years ago I went to a lecture organised by what was then the IEE, on oil well drilling. It explained how it is possible to steer the drill bit to make holes that changed direction, making it possible to drill holes that start vertical and end up with horizontal ends. The lecturer mentioned the doomladen reports that occasionallly used to appear in the press of the "only 20 years' supply of oil left" type, and explained that this was because they were prospecting for new sources on a rolling 20 years window basis, as there was no point in looking for more sources than that.
-
The 2025 date for all new boats to be designed with zero emission capacity that is quoted on the first page of this thread (September 25, 2020) clearly originates from paragraph 10 of the "Green Maritime plan" document.However, the quoted text, while accurate in itself, has been taken out of context, because it omits the wording of paragraph 8 which precedes it."8. These zero emission shipping ambitions are intended to provide aspirational goals for the sector, not mandatory targets. They can only be achieved through collaboration between Government and industry, promoting the zero emission pathways that maximise the economic opportunitues for the UK economy while also minimising costs for UK shipping."So prima facie, while the building of electric boats represents a voluntary action by the builders that goes some way to help the Government to achieve its "aspirational goals", this would seem to be a voluntary initiative rather than something forced on them by legislation.Reference has also been made to boats that are used only on inland waterways for leisure, being covered by the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation Regulations. True enough they are: however, my understanding is that these regulations only apply to suppliers of fuel for such boats, and not to the boats themselves. Suppliers must supply a certain proportion of fuel above a threshold from renewable sources. The regulations do allow higher proportions of non-green fuel to be supplied on payment of a surcharge, and so could make conventional fuels more expensive, just as conventional coal was allowed to be sold as long as the merchant paid a hefty charge to register and kept detailed records of sales.The "Fuel supplers' guidance" pages make an interesting read if you like that sort of thing..The "RTFO compliance 2024" document (179 pages) seems to be very enthusiastic about the use of green hydrogen, both to power conventional IC engines directly and for conversion to other types of fuel like ammonia. Using energy derived from algae gets an extensive mention, complete with flow charts (possibly the origin of the "bionic duckweed" solution to green motive power for railways that is sometimes despairingly mentioned by a columnist in "Modern Railways").So great importance is being placed on new innovative technologies, many of which may well be practical for large sea-going vessels, but which, like hydrogen, do not appear to be very practical for a typical narrowboat that is actually used for cruising for reasons that have been discussed on another thread.
-
2
-
-
I was under the impression that the proposals to use hydrogen were based on the assumption that surplus green energy that would otherwise be wasted, would be available to power the inefficient methods of hydrogen production. That is the rationale for the hydrogen-powered scottish islands ferry experiments: the island generates more green energy than it is possible to export.
Given that the proposed switch to heat pumps and electric cars means that the grid is going to have problems keeping up with demand, plus the proposals for battery banks to maintain the grid when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, which would soak up spare off-peak generating capacity, is there going to be much surplus electricity available at a cheap enough price to make hydrogen production on a large scale viable economically?
-
2
-
-
My understanding is also that it is misleading to say that steel can be made in an arc furnace. All the arc furnace can do is melt existing steel scrap and put it into a more suitable form for re-use. Unless the scrap is of high quality, specifically that it does not contain non-ferrous metals, it will be more prone to rusting than steel made from iron ore, as the non-ferrous metal content will be liable to form centres for electrolytic corrosion. The use of recycled steel was I think the cause for the poor body life of certain japanese cars in the 1960's, as well as the Vauxhall Velox's reputation as a rust-bucket.
There are steels and there are steels, in that the quality of the iron ore can have a significant effect on the quality if the steel. Swedish steel is generally of high quality because the ore from which it is made has beneficial properties and can be used to make steel with a consistent performance. Recycled steel which in practice will almost inevitably have been made from scrap from different sources, will be unlikely to exhibit such a consistent quality.
It's different for Aluminium, where melting aluminium ore in an arc furnace is the well-established method of manufacture. However, it does require a lot of electric power, and so tends to be made where cheap hydroelectric power is available.
Land Slip - Easenhall Cutting, Brinklow, Oxford Canal
in Stoppages
Posted
The clay in my part of Essex gradually decomposes and becomes weaker when exposed to the atmosphere. It was found that railway cuttings started to fail by slipping about a century after their construction. The problem was solved by constructing dutch drains down the sides of the cuttings to lower the water table, combined with toe weighting.