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The interior is absolutely amazing! It almost looks like it could have come out of a top-shelf US show rod.
I think the fibreglass dash works, and the quality looks great. I actually really like the paint colour as well. I don't like the rear wheel fitment, and I think the bonnet droops a bit too low over the grille opening, but I don't think anyone can deny that this car would be a stand-out at any car show.
I would be willing to bet that the paint on this car cost more than most of the readers' cars on RR are worth. In fact, the paint job is probably worth more than both my cars and both my motorbikes put together!
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Leather-trimmed interior rear-view mirrors are the way forward! Love it.
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The survey doesn't mention convenience. There is a crucial difference between being 'fast' and being convenient. For example, where I live, it's roughly 45 minutes drive to the city (Adelaide, South Australia). The train to the city takes 30 minutes, and they run roughly every 30 minutes. If I time it right, then the train is just as fast as driving, but if I'm late by 5 seconds and watch the train leaving as I run to the platform, then I'm instantly half an hour late! I have done it many times.
Anyway, after catching the train to university for years, I finally got a motorbike. The great advantage with the motorbike is that they have free parking anywhere in the city, and there is always a space! It's fantastic. On the bike, compared to a car, I save about 10 minutes that I would have spent looking for a park, use about a third of the fuel and the parking is free. It's even quicker than the train. The biggest hassle is having to carry your gear around when you get to your destination. I'm safety conscious and won't ride without a jacket, gloves, heavy boots and usually kevlar jeans, all of which weighs you down as you walk around! A lot of people don't seem to value their skin as much, so they have no such issues.
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That mower is a beast! I want one. ;D
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Hi mate, some very nice cars there! I love the whole one-make Reliant theme that you've got going.
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I would guess either boat or light aircraft. Whatever it is, it must be pretty old and probably quite small if the electrical system was only rated at 30 amps. This makes me think small boat rather than aircraft, although I may be wrong. 30 amps at 12 volts is about right for a small car from the '60s, but the gauge housing doesn't look like one from a car. Could have even been for a tractor or earthmoving machine maybe?
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Yeah, I knew fuel consumption was going to be bad, it was mostly having to put 70L into a car in one shot that hurt (the Volvo only has around a 40L tank so I've never had to put in more than 35L at a time) I've just recently had the opposite experience, going from my Holden ute with a tank of at least 70 litres to a 250cc motorbike which only holds 8 litres in the main tank and 4 litres reserve. The ute would happily take about $110 to fill, whereas the bike can rarely squeeze more than $10!
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If it had to deal with 300 degree+ gas all the time, you'd have to pump the water round VERY fast, and dump most of the heat to stop from cooking people alive in the building Heat transfer doesn't work like this. The engine will only put out a certain amount of heat. Exhaust gas may have a high temperature (actually more like 750 degrees Celsius), but the heat from a small engine will not raise the air in an entire building to the same temperature! Water has a much higher heat capacity than exhaust gases, so your mass flow rate of water would only need to be roughly 1/4 of the gas mass flow rate to absorb the heat. Remember that liquid water is also much denser than exhaust gas, so your actual volumetric flow rate of water will be very small compared to the volumetric flow rate of gas. I've never tried it, but if you assume that the diagram you posted up earlier about heat flow is correct, then the exhaust heat is approximately the same as the water jacket heat. Based on that assumption, logically a second water pump of equal size to the original one would be adequate for circulating the water through the exhaust heat exchangers. You might even get away with the original pump on it's own. Higher exhaust temp will give you better heat transfer, so if that's a primary design goal then the petrol engine may be better. Efficiency at burning methane is probably the most important consideration though. You're going to need spark ignition to burn pre-mixed gas, so I'd be starting with an SI engine rather than a diesel anyway.
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I agree with Dodgerover that 12.5 litres/100km is very good for a Jag. Look forward to using a lot more fuel around town!
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Oct 31, 2012 10:03:39 GMT
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This is so funny now! I assume that it must have made more sense in about 1997, when a 5-year-old MX5 and a bodykit would have been a lot cheaper than a new BMW Z3. I'd drive one now just to confuse people.
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I think the key to running a forum is to have your own unique niche. RR is obviously fairly general, but it would have been unique when it started, and it now has enough people to keep it going. So, if you wanted to make a new forum, you need to find something which people can't get anywhere else.
There seems to be a huge number of people on this forum asking questions about getting the cheapest possible car. Is there already a UK bangernomics forum? Perhaps that would be a good area to get into, ultra-economy. You could have a particular focus on small diesels which run on veg oil and have cheap insurance, or whatever.
A friend of mine was running a forum a few years ago, and was trying to build up a user base. The problem was, he wanted it to be about absolutely everything! It started out as a sort of hosting site for flash games, with built-in scores leaderboards, but then he wanted to try and expand the general section of the forum to include discussion about life in general. People were posting movie reviews, game reviews, articles about building gaming PCs, overclocking, all sorts of stuff. With no unique hook to keep the members there, we gradually drifted off to other established places which offered what we wanted to read.
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You are so lucky that there even is such a thing as a cheap Audi A8! Even a '90s one is still $10-15 grand in Australia, if you can find one.
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That accident was incredible! Ironically if he was wearing a seatbelt he might not have fared as well. Notice that it's a LHD car, and he ended up getting flung to the RHS and surviving apparently unscathed, while the driver's side was crushed!
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Oct 29, 2012 22:58:45 GMT
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Epic car-buying win! Congratulations sir. For buying this without telling your wife, you get 1,000 man points! ;D
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Oct 29, 2012 22:45:29 GMT
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I'm not scared of taking the tank off, I've had fuel tanks in and out of Beetles to replace the tiny little rubber fuel hose underneath, so I'm sure a bike will be easy. It even has a tap so you don't have to frantically jam a screwdriver into the end of the hose! I was more concerned with how much labour time they're going to want to charge me at the motorbike shop. I would have thought that on a simple air-cooled single they could have designed it with enough access to do the tappets without removing bodywork, but apparently not.
Well, I think I should probably man up and do it myself. It'll have to wait though, as from tomorrow I have two weeks left of my Bachelor of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering!
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Hi, a top box full of tools can get quite heavy to keep lifting on and off This man speaks the truth! You WILL NOT be able to comfortably lift and carry your top box around the place. When full, even a small top-box is ideally a two-man lift. You could do it on your own in a pinch, but you wouldn't want to. A mate of mine is a mechanic and his top box is probably 80kg+, mine is small and half-empty but it's still a lot heavier than I would want to lift on a regular basis. I bought mine used from my mechanic mate, it was his apprentice toolbox. I'm not sure about the UK, but in Australia every new apprentice gets a government grant for tools of $800, which they generally use to buy a basic set of tools in a small but decent quality top-box, usually with a small 2-drawer cabinet as well. Regardless of government incentives, mechanics upgrade their tools and boxes fairly often, so you should be able to get something used for a decent price.
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Caravans are not light, especially once you've fitted it out with furniture and loaded it up with food, fridge, cooker, luggage and the family. For this reason you can't really use a car chassis to build anything other than the most basic lightweight camper. You really need to base it on a commercial vehicle of some kind, as you're going to need a minimum payload of about one tonne. So, that leaves you with either a four-wheel-drive, or a pickup truck or van. In other words, a normal camper. If you start with a 4x4 chassis, preferably forward control, then there is no reason why your suggestion would not work great. A Mitsubishi Delica or any of the Japanese 4x4 cab-over light trucks would be an ideal base. Personally, for off-roading I would prefer something of this sort of style: Obviously, if you make it look like a standard caravan and then lift it up it will look ridiculous. The low car-less caravan look works great on the Saab campers, but I don't think it could work on an off-roader. If you want something a bit different, another option would be to make it look like a house, rather than a caravan. Either a steel or timber frame, covered in timber cladding. I've seen photos before of a tiny one built on Mini subframes, which had window boxes with flowers on the front of it and everything. I can't find any pics at the moment though. Imagine this, but self-propelled: Then of course there is the house-truck concept, as demonstrated brilliantly by yoeddynz in Readers' Rides. I think that's significantly bigger and more expensive than you were thinking about though.
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Oct 27, 2012 10:16:31 GMT
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Time for a minor update on the Honda. I've been riding it everywhere and enjoying it. I've been trying to keep up with lubing the chain but I've been so busy that it went about 1000km without oiling. I don't think the chain tension is too slack, but the wear on the rear sprocket is alarming!
Once I've finished exams in about a month, I'm planning to replace the rear brake shoes, chain and sprockets. I'll probably do a service/oil change at the same time. I'm considering taking it to a workshop to get all this done, depending on how much it will cost and how rich I'm feeling at the time. I'm dreading having to do the tappets, as it looks like you need to take the fuel tank and most of the bodywork off to get to them, and then work through four little access plugs on top of the head. All doable though I'm sure. Has anyone done the tappets on one of these?
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