willedoo

ome, you only need to feel sorry for the approximate half of them that voted Democrat. For the rest that voted Republican, some might have some regrets but the majority are glad to be rid of Democrat government. I've had some personal experience with it as I have friends who are American, and my stepfather's two sons by his first marriage live in the U.S. and are married to Americans. Their views all vary a bit. A mate who was out here last year just before he passed away had been a Republican voter until he lost the right to vote, so he didn't vote in the Trump election. He broadly supported the Republicans and was fairly neutral on Trump. On the other hand, his older brother is a Republican and absolutely hates Trump but will still vote Republican over Democrat.

The M-63 Ural frame is off the ute, oiled up and living in the shed. I'll park it up until I decide what to do with it. Some would probably suggest using it as a boat anchor. As I mentioned previously, the bloke I bought it from had only just bought it, so knew nothing of it's past history. He kept the single 500 Yamaha motor that was in it and sold the rest. Whoever installed the Yamaha motor had to butcher the frame to fit it in vertically. I'll most likely de-modify the frame back to original as the motot I'd put in it is a much lower height than the Yamaha 500 engine. In the attached photo the red dotted line is where the top brace was cut out. The red arrows point to where the down tubes have been cut and extended with sleeve inserts. That wont be too hard to fix; I'll just jig it, cut the top welds and pull the two sections back to the original position leaving the sleeves inside. Then it's just a matter of grinding a V and welding, then grinding flush. For strength and appearance, there's the option of welding a chevron over each of them, and possibly incorporate a cross brace in that area. The swing arm is also upside down but it fits both ways. The older Ural swing arm setup looks a bit like a plunger rear end from a distance and has that bobber look with the rake of the frame. It's got some really solid sidecar mounts. The top mounts are substantial size 10mm plate. The second attached photo is a model Ural offered only a few years ago and is now discontinued; I forget the name of it. It was a retro look model that offered the old style telescopic forks and similar rear end to the M-63.

I had a closer look at the old headlight that was bolted to that Ural frame. A small trademark on the lens identified it as an Everwing brand which was the brand of headlights supplied to Datsun. Googling Datsun photos pins the age down to anywhere between the early thirties and early fifties, either from a Datsun car or Datsun light truck. It's a nice old headlight and quite big, about 200mm wide across the front and around 180mm centre of lens to the rear.

Yes, John Howard found that out the hard way. He finally got a majority in the Senate allowing them to pass legislation at will, brought in work choices and got walloped for it. At least that's the way I remember it if someone can correct me.

It seems like most of the political journos are writing and saying that the rise of One Nation has meant the end of the two party system as we've known it. It might come to that, where we have three main parties for a period of time. Or One Nation could flame out, the coalition eventually rebuilds, and we're back to the old two party system. I don't follow European politics much, but some of those countries seem to have multi parties and they try to cobble together a coalition of parties after the election to get a governing majority. It makes me wonder if that's the direction we're heading here in Australia.

The amalgamation of councils by the then state government made it a lot worse here. Small, well run councils thet were in the black and cashed up were swallowed up by the larger councils that were heavily in debt. The supercouncils it created was like handing kids the keys to the lolly shop. Higher rates, more potholes for most places. It increased the bureaucracy a lot; our council now has 1,800 staff and 1,000 of them work in the office behind a desk. Things worked a lot better under the old system of smaller, leaner councils. In our three tier system of government, local government is far and away the weak link in my opinion. They are the most wasteful of the three and the worst for caring about the people that voted them in. There would be good councils around the country and anyone who lives in those council districts is very fortunate indeed as it's not the norm.

The Urals like that M-63 frame I posted above, were made by IMZ-Ural who had a plant in the Ural Mountains. They moved there from Moscow during the war when a lot of manufacturing moved east. Their sister bike was the Dnepr brand made in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR. A lot of the frames and engines were identical and in the early days IMZ supplied engines to them. I think after that they were probably license built engines.

The new ones are a handy thing but certainly a bit expensive. For the last two or three years the ones imported here with left hand sidecars have the gear up option, which is 2WD on demand with the sidecar wheel driving for dirt road/off road use. It's a straight drive, non differential. Before that it was only the Russian/European/U.S. models with the right hand sidecar that had the 2WD option due to the drive shaft being on the right hand side. The new ones drive a lot better with a sidecar compared to the old ones that had telescopic fork front ends. The newer leading link setup pushes the front wheel as far forward as legal and makes them behave a lot better. They're headquarted in the U.S. now and have moved production from Russia to Kazakhstan to get around the war sanctions.

The ABC radio has just issued a traffic warning of a rooster on the loose in the vicinity of the big pineapple. They're on to it. It's usually something like a ladder on the road or an escaped cow or horse, but this is the first rooster warning I've heard.

On that rate topic, I also heard the Gold Coast mayor on the radio saying they're keeping the rate increase this year to a 4% average. I'm not looking forward to my next bill after our council recently announced they're a billion dollars in the red on their budget.

I might have to stop complaining about my 30% council rate increase last year. I was listening to a grazier speaking on the ABC radio country hour talking about his latest rate bill from the Cassowary Coast Regional Council. He's had a 60% increase this time around. Combined with big increases preceding that, he's now handing over a third of his income to council in rates. Or as he put it another way, for every three cows he sells, one goes to paying rates.

onetrack, the last quote is not a totally over the top response, but I wouldn't put it in the respectful and courteous discussion category. When it comes to inappropriate speech on this forum, I'll be the first to put my hand up and admit to it. I've never pretended I don't. But I don't do it to other members because I don't like or agree with the content of their posts. The only time I ark up on someone is as a response to someone making unfounded and ludicrous attacks on me personally. And then I have to slap myself and remember the old Chinese saying that if you argue with a fool, there's two fools arguing. I'm not having a go at anyone here for their personal viewpoints, just calling out the blatant double standards that seem to be the norm on this forum lately. I think everyone on both sides needs to take a chill pill.

He certainly hasn't received respectful and courteous replies to his posts, whether they are rants or not. If you did up an abuse balance sheet I don't think long term members score very well on the scale. What ever happened to sensible debate. If people don't think they are getting sensible debate from someone, why just post a reverse rant back. Fair enough if people want to go tit for tat like that, but don't pretend it's just one side doing it.

I don't have an opinion on what Brendan has said, but I agree fully with the rest of it. Name calling, playing the man instead of the topic and mudslinging are not the sole domain of new members. For anyone wanting to sugarcoat the behaviour of long term members, just read back through some of the threads.

Yes, I remember them being cheap. Solid frames but often had awful Soviet era welds. Factories used to supply free vodka to the workers; maybe the bad welds happened when the vodka ran out. The new Ural Gear Up 2WD outfits start at $35,000 for the standard model.

Another new/old toy picked up today, a 1970 Ural M-63 frame. Frame is original from the steering head back, including the rear guard. It also has left hand sidecar mounts which is a bonus. I haven't identified the wheels and forks as yet. The light is an Everwing, probably an old Datsun driving light. The bloke I got it from had only just recently bought it for a Yamaha 500 single motor that was in it. He said the engine was a tight fit in the frame which probably explains why the longitudinal brace below the steering head has been cut out. It's the closest I've been to an old Cossack since 1972. Second photo is what an original looks like for anyone who doesn't know the model.

Speaking of common decency: "GON is a fool" "You are a fool GON" "Your a racist turd" Quotes from guess who.

The ON surge is understandable in one way and unexplainable in another. Sure, I'm a Queenslander and know well that ON, a Queensland based party, has always done ok in elections in this state for a small party. By ok, I mean polling numbers like 10% compared to much smaller figures in other states. But this time around, I don't know how to put it in words, except to say the shift is major going by what I'm hearing from people everywhere. By that I mean people who haven't voted that way before. If we were six months out from a Federal election, I'd be of the opinion a lot of people still aren't fully aware of what's about to hit on voting day. But we're not six months out and the two major parties have almost two years to turn things around. Not such a hard job for the government as it is for the Liberals; if they don't rebuild to a reasonably solid base in the next twelve months, they're done and dusted for sure. The last year of a three year term is almost like one big long election campaign, so the Libs don't have much time on their hands. They're still sliding down, so they have to halt that before they even have any chance of heading back in the other direction. They're probably looking for a circuit breaker but it's hard for them to get traction when they're still losing supporters and One Nation is dominating the media. If it was newspapers, you'd find mention of the Libs somewhere down the back between the sport and classified ads, while the front page is all about Albo and Pauline.

Apologies for quoting just a portion of a sentence, but I'm just commenting on that possibility. For them to gain any effective power I can only see three scenarios. The first and second are assuming Labor can't form a majority at the next election. In that case, One Nation could either be the senior partner in a One Nation/Liberal coalition government, or the junior partner. For the third scenario, Labor holds enough seats to govern in their own right or with the support of independents, but One Nation does well in the Senate and holds the balance of power in the upper house. I don't know whether that's possible or not as I haven't checked how that could happen given there's eight parties and two independents holding senate seats and it will likely be a half senate election if there's no double dissolution. At this stage, while always possible, it's hard to see One Nation gaining enough seats in the lower house to govern in their own right.

I bought this pedestal drill on marketplace today. It's a bit of a monster, two of us loaded it into the back of the ute, but it must weigh at least 100kg or more. The head is solid cast steel which contributes a lot to the weight, although it's built like a tank from top to bottom. One thing about it though, the on/off switch on the left hand side reminds me of the safety aspect of modern drills with front facing switches. I've got an old bench drill with that same side mount setup and it's not ideal.

Don't worry Brendan, it's not your chain I'm jerking. I was expecting a bite from someone else.

One Nation seems to be getting a lot of free publicity, some good some bad depending on the media outlets, but the media is certainly giving them some oxygen. It took a shark attack in Sydney to finally bump ON off the top of Google's news feed. It's been saturation level lately.

In case anyone is wondering why I clicked the informative button on Brendan's post - I saw the post and he had a string of icons there starting to resemble a poker machine. There was left to right, 1 Like, 1 Haha, 1 Winner and 1 Sad. So I thought why not give him a crack at getting the full jackpot - one of every type, the full string. So come on blokes, don't be mean, all it needs now is 1 Confused, 1 Thanks and 1 Agree. I'm not sure if anyone's ever hit the jackpot on this forum before.

I think a lot of the issue nowdays is that almost everything relies on computers. There's humans there but they have to work within their company's systems. Computers don't have common sense and because the human staff have to work within their computer systems, common sense is long gone from corporate customer service. A big portion of the work force these days have never known a day of their life when computers weren't a big part of it, so they don't know any better. To them, ineffective, unproductive computer bureaucracy is the norm.

Bumper season that should read.