onetrack

Well, we got thoroughly pounded with the heat today, some areas of the Central Sahara are starting to look like a place to take a cool break, to us. They wrote up the article before the heat peaked, they said Perth had 42.5°C, we actually reached 42.9°C at 3.58PM today. https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/western-wa-town-cracks-australias-top-ten-hottest-temperatures/1805026

There must be quite a few Japanese with some strong character, then!! I think the flies got to them more than the distance and the brutal constant pedalling. The ferocious headwinds across the Nullarbor must have made a few of those hardy cyclists want to give up!

I just remembered - the old Alice Springs Hospital (now Adelaide House), designed by John Flynn, had a very effective "Coolgardie safe" style of air-conditioning built into its design. The building had a cellar and large underfloor passageways, with a large vent on the roof of the building. Air was drawn through the cellar and then upwards through the building, exiting the roof via the large vent (utilising the "heat rises", and venturi principles). I believe that wetted hessian was also placed in the airways under the building, and in the cellar. The result was a simple but very effective air-conditioning arrangement, that was probably close to todays evaporative coolers in effectiveness. I do recall many of the old hospital patients leaving remarks on how comfortable the hospital was on hot days. The design also incorporated the wide verandahs that were a feature of all the early buildings, which aided greatly in keeping the direct hot sunlight off the walls, thus reducing heating of the building. A couple of wind-driven exhausters/ventilators on the roof would probably have greatly aided the air flow, too - but they possibly weren't available in that era. I thought that there were also troughs of water under the hospital too, to aid in cooling, but I can't see or find them mentioned anywhere. https://collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/resource/B+61843 In the photos on the website below, there's one photo showing a cutaway model of how Flynns air-conditioning system for the hospital worked. https://activatealice.nt.gov.au/eat-drink-shop/adelaide-house-museum

Ahhh! - but air is a totally different kettle of fish when it comes to heat and cold retention and loss. The reason large bodies of water affect local climate is all due to their slow release of heat, and taking a long time to warm up.

One of the secrets to Roman concrete strength and durability - especially when it came to being submerged or frequently sprayed with sea water, was the pozzolanic volcanic ash used as aggregate in their concrete mixes. The pozzolanic ash contained a mineral known as phillipsite, and this mineral reacted with the lime and seawater to form aluminous tobermorite crystals, and these crystals have incredible durability. Modern Portland cement concrete is rapidly degraded upon contact with seawater, and Portland cement concrete in builddings and bridges starts its degradation process after only 50 or 60 years - but the Roman concrete is still intact and unworn after 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#:~:text=In Rome%2C readily available tuff,water than modern-day concrete.

I've already got a good little OBD reader, better than the one on Temu. It cost me $100 a couple of years ago. However, if you want an OBD that can alter ECU parameters, you're looking at big dollars.

The takeover technique from the Stalin paybook is to flood the area you want to conquer with tens of thousands of ethnic Russians. This is where all the trouble started, in the areas of the Ukraine that Stalin flooded with Russian workers to work the Ukrainian coal mines. But the Stalin regime also used man-made famine to get rid of revolters. The Ukrainian Holodomor must have been horrible, many Ukrainians resorted to cannibalism to survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

The Ukrainians are very pleased with themselves today, they managed to down 3 Russian warplanes in one go, 2 x Su-34 fighter-bombers and 1 x Su-35 fighter. The Russians are refusing to admit to the three aircraft losses, saying they only lost one - but the Ukrainians are telling the Rooskies where they can go look for their pilots, as they've picked up four Cospas-Sarsats signals that are activated when ejection seats are triggered. Of course, ejection seats being triggered doesn't always mean the pilots survived. Regardless, the loss of three very expensive Russian warplanes must hurt. https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-shoots-down-3-russian-jets-one-morning-air-chief-2024-2 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/02/17/7442337/

Anytime you want-a da concrete shoos, Luigi is your man!!

I used to ride my bike a lot as a young teenager, but I don't think I ever did 100 miles in a day on it. Might have done 25 to 30 miles some days, though. When I lived on my gold mine, alongside Hwy 1, North of Norseman, I'd regularly see cyclists loaded to the gills, pedalling their way across Australia!! The interstate truckies hated them and would try to blow them off the road! The highway was only 6M wide in those days and this meant that trucks couldn't overtake cyclists when other traffic was oncoming, so they would have to brake to a crawl. Nothing makes a truckie more irate, than having to brake multiple tonnes down to 15kph, and then take ages to wind up speed again!

No, I acquired them both used, the traytop has 179,000kms and the dual cab has done 195,000kms. However, I'm fairly sure the EGR cooler has been replaced on the dual cab. Why does an EGR cooler have a 160,000km life? It should last the life of the engine, the engines will do well over 350,000kms. If it's a "lifed" item, why isn't it listed for replacement in the service book? It's just cheap-arse Ford construction, just like the plastics for the solenoids in their 6R80 automatics, they would melt and destroy the transmission. I heard where the EGR cooler problem was related to faulty brazing.

We've got natural gas for our hot water, because I hate cold showers when the power goes off!! It costs us about $1.50 a day for endless hot water, via a continuous-flow HWS, and I'm happy enough to pay that!

Pete, what were the reasons given for the subsoil air-cooling failures? I'd imagine the circulation speed of the water would be a critical factor. Maybe it simply requires a large volume of water? The brother and I bought a 5 acre property in a wheatbelt town in W.A. in the early 1970's. It was an old Goldfields house that had been transported there in 1923. The owner was an old Italian bloke. Because he was obviously short of a dollar and couldn't afford a water tank, he'd excavated a big underground water tank, lined it with a thin layer of concrete to seal it, and roofed it. The tank was about 8M in diameter and about 1.5M deep. The water in that tank was always a nice cool 15°, regardless of outside temperature. When we moved in, reticulated mains water had become available, so we connected to the main, and the big underground tank became obsolete - so we ripped the roof off it, tiled it with cheap mosaic tiles, and turned it into a swimming pool!

Test drive a RAPTOR?? I currently own TWO Rangers, that are the biggest pieces of crap out. There's always something going wrong with them, or something breaking on them. One, the dual cab, has a vibrating rattle behind the glovebox that drive me nuts, and no-one can find it. It reverberates in tune with a certain engine RPM range. I've only owned it a short time and I've had to rebuild the A/C system with a new A/C compressor, a new A/C on-off switch in the dash - and I've had to replace EVERY knob on the heating/cooling/fan controls, because they all broke. The parts sellers even make up complete kits of all the knobs that break on them!! The electric window switch jams in the up position and pops the circuit breaker every second day. I've already had to replace the entire switch assembly for the mirrors, as it all stopped working! Nothing on Fords is designed to last more than about 120,000kms. I swore off Fords back in the early 1990's, when I bought a new EA Falcon Ghia Wagon that cost me over $40,000 back then - and after 18 mths of breakages, I tried to sell it (with 70,000kms on the clock), and I got offered $16,000 for it!! And last week, the dual cab overheated because it started using water without me realising it. No visible coolant leaks and no signs of coolant loss in the exhaust - but now it's got either a split EGR cooler (a common fault), or a blown head gasket, or a cracked head. I'm thoroughly sick of this Ford JUNK!! Meantimes - my two Hiluxes (one petrol, one diesel) run beautifully every day, without a single thing ever going wrong with them.

I've done some more testing, and found that the realestate.com.au site works just fine for me (including the search menu), if I use MS Edge browser. But I rarely use MS Edge, I use Chrome 99.9% of the time. So it appears there's a conflict between Chrome and the realestate.com.au site. I did also change the Chrome site permissions to allow pop-ups and redirects, but still no joy with their website. I'll see if I can contact their webmaster.

Jerry, that article is from July 2020, so 3.5 years old. I wonder how much of that US$5.9B Govt loan to Ford, has since been repaid, though? Ford's long-term debt levels seem staggering to us mere mortals, but I guess it's in line with many other manufacturers, as they have to finance new models, new plant and machinery, and new factories. Ford's long term debt currently stands at US$94B, but it's up from the US$88B it was, in Sept 2022. However, it's nothing like the US$140B it was, in March 2016. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/long-term-debt#:~:text=Ford Motor long term debt for 2023 was %2499.562B,a 19.88% decline from 2020.

I don't think Ford ever got bailed out by the U.S. Govt, but they certainly got hurt with the GFC. The U.S. Govt bailed out Chrysler way back in the 1980's I think it was - but they got all their money back when Chrysler recovered to profitability.

I did have javascript disabled on the realestate site last year, but activated it again while I was still running Windows 7. I went through all the site permissions this morning, looking for anything that might stop it loading, and the only one I could see that might cause trouble was, "block sites that are not secure". As a fair number of worthwhile websites run with out of date security certificates, I thought maybe that was the case with the realestate site - so I reset all the permissions to default and allowed insecure sites to load. But it still didn't seem to help, although I can access their home page now, which is more than I ever could previously.

Security settings are the standard default settings that come with Windows 11. Does MS think realestate.com.au is a scam site? They might be right!! EDIT - Ahhhh!! Here's something interesting. I clicked on Willies link, and reset all the site permissions on the realestate.com.au site this morning, while it was attempting to load - and Windows tell you to reload the page, straight after you've done that - but when I reloaded the page, the site still wouldn't load. So I left it all day and clicked on Willies link again, just a minute ago - and still the same result, it wouldn't load. So ... I deleted the Tassie property address part of the URL, so it just read, "realestate.com.au" - and the home page of the website promptly loaded up! I obviously wasn't holding my tongue right all this time! Then I clicked on Willies link again - and the site refuses to load his link!! So ... I go to their home page, type in "Upper Castra" in their search menu - and the site refuses to load again!! Arrrrghhh!!!

I've never seen a Flying fish playing on the road - and I was always told playing on the road is a very dangerous thing to do, and it'll get you killed!

The whole video is about Ford EV's and their poor build quality. But IMO, all Fords suffer from poor build quality, anyway. However, the video points out that despite Ford being a vehicle manufacturer of 120 years standing, they still have trouble making reliable EV's - when they should be a piece of cake, as they're supposedly so much simpler. Ford are still going over to more EV manufacturing, but Jim Farley has had a "Road to Damascus" moment when he was fronted with the figures for Ford unreliability - so he's reportedly set about lifting Ford build quality. But, what Farley has also done is break up Ford into three major business sections - Ford EV's, Ford "Legacy" manufacturing (IC-engine and Hybrid vehicles), and Ford "Pro", which he claims is vastly more profitable and important to Ford than anything else. Ford Pro is their technology sales and parts division, and Farley is reporting to analysts that they're making 50% profit on Ford Pro, far more than any other part of their business. Their Legacy manufacturing has around about 10% profit level, and their EV manufacturing is a massive loss-making division that is not expected to be profitable for several years. Despite that, Ford are still ploughing US$50B into their EV manufacturing division, with a major accent on EV build cost reduction.

We've got a recycling centre only about 500 metres away in an old factory unit, in a nearby small industrial area. It's run by Asians, and I've never seen keenness like it! You drive straight in, they tell you to not even get out of your car, they'll take all your bottles and cans in whatever containers you've got, straight out of your vehicle, without you even lifting a finger. The Asians empty every container and sort the stuff into big skips at amazing speed. You just keep driving forward and when you get to the payment area, the collector adds up what you dropped off, comes over to you, reads out the tally, asks if the tally is correct (it always is!), and asks how you want to be paid. You can collect payment in cash, have it paid to your bank account, or nominate a charity to give the money to. All this takes about 3-4 minutes on average. Sometimes there's a small queue, but they churn through the queue at speed, and you never have to wait long. https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=f0d8b6dbc2182cd0&sxsrf=ACQVn08RzZyV5sUZYVv7rOsJ1bhRQQYUdA:1708164771364&q=Containers+For+Change+-+U+Can+Recycle+Dianella The State Govt is installing more automated centres, but I think they're a backward step - and much slower.

Subsoil temperature is around 15° constantly, but you need to be pretty deep to get that constant temperature, probably at least a metre. I see no reason why your system wouldn't work - but the volume of water in the pipes is also an important factor - more volume = slower resistance to temperature changes. Then again - you could always pick up a shovel and dig a cellar! They're a nice spot to be, on hot days! - plus, it's a great area to store all your wine!

The thread is about electric cars, so here's some more reports on them. https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/29/23188085/jd-power-initial-quality-study-2022-tesla-polestar-ev-decline

I never spoken or written a bad word against realestate.com.au anywhere. And yes, I've tried accessing it on my Toshiba laptop (Win 7), and it won't load there, either. I have found quite a few websites where others are complaining the real estate website won't load for them. I can't even contact their webmaster.