Posts by Naughtyhorse

Maybe you weren't looking at smut.

...

well my grumble flickery was all tickety boo. :-)

Re: copper v ali

Overhead line suffer (significant) aolean vibration if the tension on the line is much above 20% UTS of the wire.

this vibration has an amplitude of a few 10's of mm and a wavelength in the order of a few m, with a frequency of the order of 10hz. (the actual sums are horror stories Eigen this and Reynolds that) - quite hard to see from the ground, but easy to spot when a line that should last 40 years fails in 6 months.

the also gallop - huge low frequency ocillations couple of m in amplitude, and 10's to 100's in wavelength.

We can (sort of) design out aolean but galloping is more problematic

ASCR (steel core) wires are sooooo 1970, it's all AAAC - All Aluminium Alloy Conductor (except for the HTLS types, but thay are still rare-ish ) these days. ACSR was not used to save cost. the alloys of ali to do the job did not exist. As soon as they did, we used them. Grid has/had a massive restring program to replace all the quad zebra lines (ACSR) with triple Aurucaria (AAAC) - you may notice as you drive round, some overhead lines have 3 wires per phase and skinny insulators, some have 2 or 4 wires and big ol' porcelain or glass insulators

towers are under tension, anything under tension vibrates

terminations on OHL's occur twice per phase (4 times if you count the non-tension joints of the jumpers) at every angle in the line - typically every few km, often less

(i'll not pass comment on either the training or expertise of my linesmen :-D)

If you consider the implications of the point above, you will see that in fact I do have some experience with high current terminations. 100A into a starter motor is not going to keep me up at night considering I work on 3.5kA UHV terminations by day (potentially 60kA under fault for a few seconds). In reality it's just like any other electro/mechanical connection. you need to keep things clean, and use the correct tools... correctly

If you read my op you will not I did point out that using ali just made the wire harder to use - thicker and stiffer (we sometimes used copper conductors in distribution too-it's a nightmare - but that's all about tension, so does not apply here) the resistance per unit length & mass ratios are very similar, but LME prices make ali preferred, but that's only important if you are buying of tons of the stuff at a time.

Re: copper v ali

Im not too sure about some of the points you make.

Crimp connections work perfectly well on ali-ali. It has to be clean (as does copper) as far as power is concerned to properly connect to copper you need bi-metalic terminals. you can cut corners and use heavily tinned ones, but it's not the same.

As for high current vibration prone connections.... have you ever noticed overhead lines? you know the ones waving about in the air, carrying hundreds of amps, with a worst case mechanical load of a few tons, and a 40 year service interval?

The key phrase in the OP is weight for weight. In terms of what the article is trying to achieve using ali achieves nothing other than a bigger, stiffer wire.

Re: Fuse wire

that's what fuses are for.

Re: Cruise control

I have long been surprised about the loom thing. As student, back in the 80's I recall being dragged out to a presentation by Ford's on 'the future of motoring-ing-ing-ing' or somesuch, that made exactly this case (indeed they even had a pair of looms for a sierra that graphically demonstrated the differences). Saved weight, Reduced cost, Reduced manufacturing complexity, and improved reliability. I have been patiently waiting for 35 years for this to appear! (file under jet-packs and having 3 pills for dinner).

Of course these days you could eliminate the control harness and use bluetooth :-)

Oh, BTW... put me down for one of them new thrugglewashers, my old one is covered in clag, i have tried fettling it, but it's not the same.

Re: DropBear never forget though @Asylum Sam

chairs by Chippendale come to mind.

but he was an artless oaf when compared to the great ayn rand

plates by Wedgewood

spoons by Cellini

'wall art' by Cezanne

not appliance-ey enough. fair point

shotgun by Purdey

H5 timepiece by Harrison

cooker by Aga

not mass market, but who gives a fuck?

Maybe you couldn't employ a million wage-slaves knocking them out in a factory, or a burgeoning layer of pointless middle management. But think of the pride in a job well done.

Fuck Madison Avenue, when 1 bloke drives my silver cloud, he'll convince all his mates to go and get one. Not as a favour to me, but a favour to them. And he'll do it for free

lol

Re: never forget though

tried to buy an iphone3 today.

they won't sell me one.

okay i'll settle for a 4

they threw me out

Re: Food

Are you saying they didn't have doctors in the USSR, cos I'm pretty sure they did. (and possibly dying of something curable because the cure is not available to anyone in the country is slightly preferable to dying of it because i cannot afford the treatment)

So far as I can tell - and im in no way a communist, certainly left of center but no ones brother, comrade - the USSR collapsed due to corruption more than anything else, corruption of the founding ideas and global petty corruption on a day to day level. Possibly this will always be the case whenever anyone tries this experiment, but as I see it we can't say communism has failed until we have first seen it tried. and we simply haven't.

In fact it's entirely entertain-able that the same analysis can be applied to capitalism and the road to nowhere on which we now find ourselves. capitalism broadly can work, but what we have now masquerading as capitalism will not.

Re: I for one look forward to this

The real problem isn't consumerism, it's short-term profit-seeking as opposed to long-term strategy.

so the problem isn't consumerism.... it's consumerism

oh dear

Re: Ex-TV repairman

While it is probably true to say that TV's are a tad more reliable today (purely an unfortunate side effect of the changes in technology)

The reason we all left the industry was due to the increasing use of large scale integration. when I was a lad a TV has typically over a thousand components in it, many of which ran hot (valves, I'm now very old and started very young), or close to the edge of their operational envelope and consequently failed fairly frequently. (a good engineer could make a living out of finding the 1 part that failed and replacing that for a few pence and charging a few quid. a less good one could swap out the offending panel, which got swapped with his more skilled colleagues, for a bit less than the few quid)

your modern LCD tv as at most 100 components, surface mounted (hard to rework) on about 3 boards.

for sure they are probably better machines (although i suspect no-one knows if they actually last longer. they are mostly disposed of while still working! because they are old)

the result of this?

they are cheaper to make

therefore cheaper to buy

the difficulty of service puts the cost of service up -increasing the likelihood of uneconomic repairs.

this puts the service industry out of business - so you cant get it fixed even if you want to.

so you HAVE to buy a new one.

Re: Must be a different rover...

Rotten as a pear within 5 years and about 15 miles to the gallon is how I remember them.

now the P6 is an altogether different proposal (except for the rust and fuel economy)

:-D

Re: never forget though

Oddly, I sort of agree with your conclusion, but take issue with all 3 points you used to get there.

1 I never buy the 'cheapest one in the range' - unlike many I have some choice in the matter. If (peer) pressure is put on consumers that they need to have the latest iTem but they cannot really afford it, then they will settle for the iTem-S.

2 Maybe it's cos I'm a design luddite but if for eg apple made this years phone significantly technically better than last years, I might consider buying it. but they dont, it's just the same cowboy in a different shirt. In the early days of computing this argument held some water, the technology was advancing at a massive pace, so a 3 year old PC might not actually be capable of performing in the modern environment. but those days have long gone.

3 Designed in obsolescence is the work of satan. gluing in batteries or using custom magic screws or requiring the use of special tools specifically to carry out maintenance is a prime example of "It’s not that designers are unethical, it’s just that ethics has been eliminated from the system in which they work." The ECU example you quote is entirely valid, but way more of this practice is about ensuring obsolescence (or locking out back street repairmen) than it is about improving the performance of the system in any measurable way.

That said, I broadly agree with you that consumers (AKA the electorate) shoulder a fair proportion of the blame for the current state of affairs.

Re: with the stupidity surgically removed.

you mean like;

c:>_

Re: TOP TIPS

I would have thought apple would be world leaders at this sort of infrastructure, seems to me they have been taking the piss for decades now.

Re: Question is

Building/spaceship full of sleep deprived people who are just waiting for their stock to vest producing less than iTastic designs.

film @ 11

Re: depa-depa-dooooo...

3,520 pints of WINE.

mon dieu

Re: Merkin beer?

Noes!!!!11!!!

the humanity....

Re: Expecting perfection? You're going to be disappointed.

That is just incorrect.

On so many levels.

We all (most) have lots of shiny-shiny now. But mom and dad both work full time - and barely scrape by, junior leaves college with the same personal debt as a mortgage, just no house to show for it and a degree that just about qualifies him to flip burgers.

And these are broadly speaking 'the haves'

Thats some economic miracle you have there

Re:model a whole years economic activity in the UK in less than a minute

Go on then.

Before you start maybe read a book on chaos theory (positive feedback is the clue). It would prevent you making some basic mistakes in the coding.

(and stop you looking a bit..... disengaged on fora :D )

hey there teabagger

you're an asshole, that does not understand English and the door is over there ====>