turboplanner

The Dead Sea scrolls, found, I think in 1947, are still in the process of being translated, so we can expect more news.

As I mentioned, we can disregard Christians and Christianity. The Christian Era takes up just 6.7% of the 30,000 years back we have got to in this thread.

Well we covered, a long time ago in this thread, which is rivalling the bible for length, that the Pope and other financially based components of the roman catholic church were inventions of Saul to make money. As far as walking on water and dividing fishes to feed the multitude, Jesus, as one of the teachers talked in parables - which we don't do today. Also, a stream of belief caqme down from the Egyptians, and we have no idea today of their spoken language, and their written language was more visual, than the narrative we use today, so we have some major misunderstandings. For example, when Jesus raised someone from the dead, he wasn't bringing them back to life, they had previously been booted out of their religious group and were "dead". He was just reinstating their membership. Turning water into wine and cutting up fishes to cause them to multiply may well have been as simple as him saying, today: "Well that's it for today's sermon folks, the drinks and grog are on me!"

From my experience the only people who treat the Bible as infallible are atheists who quote it trying to make a point. You only have to read it to be able to pick out the BS stories. On the other hand the Bible contains a lot of detail which is factually correct, and is being corroborated by researchers even now.

The good old atheist logic we've come to know and love.

I would have thought he was too young to have a CPL

Victoria's dirtiest power station set to close next year

What are the annual sales of dual cab utes?

Well, I'll try to make it simpler, this is what you said: "We are 4WD, SUV crazy." "Most never get used OFF road" "most of the smaller ones don't tow anything" After a stab like that why wouldn't you expect someone who has lived worked and played in the industry for decades, to hit back. You were repeating an anti SUV PR strategy, whether consciously or subconsciously. I didn't say anything about communist propaganda, or you being affected by it, I said "this is not a communist country, you're free to buy what you like and use it how you like" What sort of a crack is this? I've owned 4WDs since the early Land Rovers, building a drilling riog on one when I was 18, and driven through the bush, on dirt tracks, up the Birdsville Track, down through Sturts Stony desert, and on may holidays in the remote areas north west of Broken Hill, and have never broken a shock absorber let alone torn one out of the chassis. Well I had a guy on a bike run wide on a blind corner and lay the bike down in front of me, but that didn't make him a cretin, and that didn't mean all bike riders made mistakes. Well Toyota, the market leader use it on the Land Cruiser range, right up to the luxury wagon, as well as the Hilux range. What are they doing wrong? I've owned a Nissan 720, two Rodeos and a Nissan Navara, have never found any of them "pretty useless" off road, and they've done a lot of bush and genuine outback work. The reason dual cab utes are so popular is that they are all-rounders, able to carry a payload in the back which is separate from the occupants, so safer, able to tow, and with a long wheelbase making them more comfortable. I've never cracked any of my chassis, but there's always someone who can find a way. I'm intrigued by this description of towing a heavy van into a deep watercourse; wonder how the van would get on. The reason for having a chassis is that when the suspension is reaching its travel limit the chassis can start to twist on its flexible mounts to the body, which also has some limited twist. This reduces body damage(cracking) and also helps in avoiding the disabling one-wheel-off the-ground scenario. The tray body may appear to have too much overhang to the novice, but when you do a weight calculation, the ROH cantilever effect is reasonable because of the long wheelbase. If you want to operate locally, not do too much road work, and want to drop the vehicle into gullys and jump ups, the SUV to buy is the short wheelbase/short rear overhang, but they don't have the all round storage capacity, are more pitchy to ride in, and less comfortable dorectionally when towing a heavy load. Bogging is as bogging does; you can bog anything or you can use your momentum to cross a bog patch, or you can make a decision to go round, or you can have some fun and winch yourself through a bog floating on the chassis. With the crew cab Navara I've towed a SWB Land Cruiser which had become bogged while trying to extract another SWB Land Cruiser on a beach. It was all about jacking them up off the chassis, getting the first one moving with a snatch strap then using the momentum of the two moving vehicles to yank out the original victim.

The customers manage to smash up semi-elliptical/beam axle configurations on dirt roads with corrugations, bulldust pools, jump ups etc. One I know set out from Alice Springs in a Nissan Patrol after a storm, when the sand dune crests were still sharp. He couldn't be bothered with the small amount of shoveling required to flatten the top, and just charged up the slope, flying through the air down the back side of the dune. Cracked his chassis in the middle the third or fourth time he did it, and had to be towed back to Alice Springs. I've been curious to see what's happening with the chassisless Jeep fleet out there. I mostly operate in the Alpine areas where it's not unusual to be in 4WD for several hours with ruts in the valley so deep in winter, that in places only the guys with the high suspensions and over size wheels can get the traction to pull the vehicle over the mud. For a case like that you can but an air bag kit which jacks the vehcile up for that type of operation, wading through water, climbing over logs etc. You the same with a low profile 4x2, add a pair of chains, and rarely be caught out. I've never driven a Lada, but heard they are brilliant off road. Interesting comment of yours about the Japanese being backward in suspensions. They are brilliant with tackling rust, allowing bodies to flex without cracking, electrical, transmission and engine, but they have always had a problem coping with the thought process you need to design a suspension. They can make them tough, but when you look at roll centres, scrub radius, linkages it all goes to custard.

I assume that was some time back; we've been fitting high speed tyres (130 km/hr) to new 4WDs for a few years now. The Holden Rodeo, in the mid 1980's was a low profile 4WD, and had a market share of next to nothing. The Hilux, particularly after the introduction of the Forerunner took off. I took an interest in the Rodeo situation, and took one off road and on gravel roads, being very impressed by its performance, but it had no charisma. When one of the design engineers came out, I pointed out the differences in the design concepts and told him Australians wanted the macho image. When I asked him why Isuzu hadn't jacked the suspension the same as Hilux (which gave Hilux the edge on deeply rutted and boggy tracks), he said "car fall over". I had a Nissan 720 with jacked suspension at the time, and took him for a drive up into the mountains, throwing it into four wheel slides, and diving along the rutted tracks where you had to keep momentum up because you bottomed out and lost traction. It apparently had a lasting effect on him because within a year or so the suspensons had been jacked to about the same as the Hilux. It is true that these vehicles have a higher roll centre and a higher centre of gravity, but when cornering on dirt tracks that produces a weight transfer to the outer tyres which substantially increases the grip, reducing the chances of sliding into the trees. I'd suggest the flips and crashes you see have more to do with the demographic which owns and drives those vehicles, and simply over cooks it for the conditions.

That was actually an anti SUV marketing strategy which resonated with a lot of the population, particularly those who used public transport and drove small cars; it has clearly stayed in your mind. However, it was unsuccessful, and the market took off anyway. I was once trapped in a paddock on wet grass with a 2 WD ute pulling an air compressor, which is why a lot of tadespeople use 4WD. If you own horses and have a horse float, you can get into paddocks and grass at gymkhana sites. If you own a boat, you can pull up a slippery launch ramp. If you love going into the bush, even if only for the annual holidays, a 4WD opens up new horizons. If you go up to the snow, even a couple of times a year, you can get into places you might otherwise turn back from. And so on; there are many applications where a 4WD is an attractive proposition. All tyres are horrendous on a roundabout where diesel has been spilled; I've driven 4WDs for many years along with 2WD cars and there's not a generation difference. If you want to race a 4WD or off road a car, you have a slight identity crisis. As far as "most never get used OFF road" is concerned, that was part of that anti SUV marketing strategy; this is not a communist country, you're free to buy what you like and use it how you like.

What's the situation with the Chinese economy?; a few nervous people in the US/Aus financial world.

Freighter Industries designed and built a 4WD in the 1950's but it was a Japanese genius that put and old six cylinder Chevrolet engine design into a package that was perfect for Australia. Sometimes it's down to great people.

Well I'll be stuffed; I was sure it was Kevin Rudd!

It was Gough Whitlam who decided to force Australian companies into open competition with world markets. It was Senator John Button who executed it. With tariffs we were insulated from the rest of the world, and could price our products based on low volume production costs. Whitlam was probably pushed by consumers who have repeatedly proved, as a whole: 1. If they can buy something cheaper or equivalent standard they will. 2. In doing that, the last thing they think about is killing industry in their country. Once the tariffs came off, car manufacturers had to compete with product produced at high volume. The difference wasn't minor; to give you an example, I was at a conference in the early 1970's where bus operators as a group decided to take Leyland to task over exhaust manifold cracking in its highly succesful 3/654 engine. The Leyland guy pointed out the obvious cause; they had been extending wheelbases and carrying enough extra people to cause manifold overheating. The bus operators did the usual and said "We don't care about that, just fix it! The Leyland guy smiled and said he'd like to, but the manifolds were not cracking in Australian semi trailers, and the entire Australian annual sales volume was one morning's production per year in the engine plant. The Japanese manufacturers stepped in and supplied vehicles branded in the names we knew well for some years, but once the Button Plan was activated it was all over. The first hope to get competitive costing with low volume was robotics, but the vehicle industry discovered, through International Harvester Co in the US, which had just fully converted to robotics, that when the cyclical downturns came, you can't lay off robots, you still have to keep the repayments up. The next hope was digital manufacture, where computers built the cars, and labour costs, hopefully would become irrelevant. Australian manufactures had by now closed down their plants in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, leaving Ford focused on Melbourne and GM focused on Adelaide. Both achieved good results, extending their lives for a few mor decades. Unfortunately to big overseas plants were also achieving massive cost savings through dumping labour, and then went another step higher with JIT (Just In Time) production, where production lines no longer had to build batches (with waste when sales weren't as expected, and lost sales when a model unexpectedly achieved runaway sales). They now were able to build every model in the range individually, so could order match build, for eaven greater savings. Australia copied that, and achieved another reprieve. One of the key factors enabling the Australian manufacturers to hang in was the local demand for a car suitable for long distance high speed travelling, and caravan/horse float/boat towing, and the Commodore and Falcon had an edge in this category. Then along came the SUV which did all that and extended the operating range with 4WD, and we simply shifted to SUV in droves, with a second fuel economy market opening up as well. The decision had been made by the marketing divisions to go after the competitive markets, which they did very successfully. I was in the middle of it, and while I had an emotional attachment to being able to walk down the line and see one of my orders being built, but I could supply my customers faster with more sophisticated product, and at a competitive price, and that's what they wanted. The decision was then made to quit local manufacturing on a financial basis; the politicians may have accelerated the change by a couple of years, but it was all over. If you want to look at macro economics post WW2, the first wave of prosperity came from the wool industry, which murdered itself quickly by gross over-pricing. The next wave was motor vehicle manufacturing. The mining industry picked up the vacuum from the wool and vehicle manufacturing era. Tourism is fast picking up the slack by the slow down in mining sales.

No, not yet.

M. King Hubbard's 1954 was for oil production to PEAK in 2000; here's the bell curve from his notes. His prediction was remarkably accurate, missing by only a few years. He predicted that prices would go up in cycles afeter peak oil, as it became more expensive to pump from deeper wells, and the increased technology required to extract the last reserves. This still gives us a comfortable margin to come up with oil-free technology before oil runs out; in fact it's likely that a lot of oil, gas and coal will just be left in the ground as useless material. [ATTACH]47981._xfImport[/ATTACH]

Interesting that someone from Edison would be checking me out after my post #3567

That will be one of the features which weans us off internal combustion; remember slot cars? and if you haven't seen them take a look an an electric RC aircraft race - they are MISSILES.

When I said some study, I wasn't thinking of a few minutes.

I've already posted on here that I drove several electric trucks (2 tonners) at the Tokyo Motor Show in the early 1990's. They accelerated like a 300 ci V8, I would have had one in a minute for the acceleration, but then I noticed the trucks being pulled off the circuit with overheated motors after about 45 minutes. The heat problem seems to have been solved, perhaps with a slight wind back in power. However the main components of the Tesla car are still much the same as the ones I used when I was designing Towmotor Fork Lift trucks 40 years ago. We still need the big breakthrough in batteries. Chadstone Shopping Centre sells Tesla Cars from an internal shop, and services them down near the car park. In terms of their suitability for City use, I'd suggest that should be qualified for Melbourne to read inner city commuting, and I thing they would be great for that. However, the demographic with the money to buy them follows the latte trail - a couple of times a month up to the Yarra Valley for Brunch, skiing at the weekends, down to Portsea and across to Queenscliffe etc. The key difference between and electric vehicle and an internal combustion unit is you can't hitch a ride and buy a jerry can of electricity; it's call up a two truck when you run out of charge. You might be watching your instruments Bex, but sadly I have to report that the latte set have the same reluctance to plan a trip within range as some people have to calculate for a flight plan.

Really? I'd suggest some detailed study. In the link there are several references to alleged claims by Tesla that I've never seen before; easy to assert a claim then "debunk" it. Let's not forget that in his time Direct Current had just been developed, with limited success; he was the Bill Gates of the era, who succeeded in mass distribution of power using Alernating Current, so of course he was mixing with socialites and living in a luxury hotel. His big mistake was not managing his finances himself, but living on an allowance paid by J.P. Morgan. The good thing about Tesla was that he was so open, and frequently supplied full design details of his experiments including the exact bill of materials. His many patents are also accessible for anyone to analyse. That allows is to judge him on his merits.

"Dr Nikola Tesla" by W.H. Eccles is a good place to start, but there is plenty of information in libraries and a few museums.

None of them quite there with a product yet, but some good thinking. This reminds me of fuel cell cars; someone came up with a theory, several manufacturers designed cars, Mercedes Benz put some fuel cell demonstration buses into Perth MTT with exceptional customer satisfaction, Honda ran a lease programme in California for fuel cell Civics - charged at home each night, able to operate all day, yet 20 years later the concept hase been overtaken by the older battery>electric cars, and even there we still don't have a winner against the internal combustion engine.