Styling? What’s that again?

Posted on September 24th, 2006 in Opinion by Julian Edgar

 

When I think back to all the cars I have owned, appearance was always near the bottom of the list.

My first car – a tiny 1973 Honda Z – was the only one available on my limited student budget and came courtesy of my mother. My first real car – a ’77 AlfaSud – was bought because at the time, it was regarded as one of the best handling cars around. My next car – a ’77 BMW 3.0si – was regarded by some as the very best sedan in the world, and the next (while regarded by most as nowhere near the best car in the world!) had better steering, a smoother engine and much better NVH than the BMW. It was a 1986 Holden VL Commodore Turbo.

The Commodore was replaced by a Liberty RS, the Liberty by an R32 Nissan Skyline GTR, the GTR by an Audi S4, the S4 by a Lexus LS400, the LS400 by a tiny Honda Insight.

Yep, full circle.

The perfect glove box item

Posted on September 10th, 2006 in Opinion,Reviews by Julian Edgar

Over the years I’ve built and written about plenty of hand-cranked LED torches. The articles have appeared in Silicon Chip magazine (see Our Fantastic Human-Powered LED Torches for an example) and in addition to those covered in the articles, I’ve built plenty of other torches for personal use. But now commercial hand-cranked LED torches have become available – and some of them are very good.