The tipping point came when Al Gore released his new documentary: I Was Wrong. Completely repudiating An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed in minute detail how flawed his previous views were.

The world was not actually warming, he noted,  instead it was cooling – and cooling in a way that was very likely to result in greater crop yields, more favourable rainfall patterns and political stability.

And the cause? From his documentary we learned for the first time that CO2 was proving in fact to be hugely beneficial. The greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were counteracting the altered reflectivity of Earth’s surface caused by widespread urban development and farming practices.

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I’ve just read a fascinating and powerful book.

Japan in the Passing Lane was written in the early 1970s by Satoshi Kamata, a Japanese freelance journalist. The English translation was published in 1983. Kamata’s preferred title – Automobile Factory of Despair – is perhaps a better description of the book’s contents.

Kamata joined Toyota as a seasonal worker, one employed for a 6 month period. In the book he describes by means of a daily diary what life in a Toyota plant was then like. The job was harrowing, exploitative, mind-numbing, dangerous – and enormously hard work.

The assembly line moves so fast that Kamata, working in a plant making gearboxes, can barely keep up. That might be understandable when he was first introduced to the job, but it also remains the case months later.

He describes the tasks he has to do at his station:

1. I pick up two knock pins (small pieces of steel shaft) with my left hand from a parts box (where identical parts are stored) in front of the assembly line. I insert them into the upper holes on a gear box and then knock them in with the hammer in my right hand.

2. With my right hand, I take an input shaft out of a tin box coming down the assembly line. I insert it into the center hole of the gear box. Holding the input shaft from the other side with my left hand, I drive it in with the hammer. (Sometimes it doesn’t go in easily.)

3. With my left hand, I screw a synchronizing ring to an end into which an input shaft has been driven.

4. I turn the gear box around.

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When we ran the story on modifying the Honda Insight’s TPS signal, I knew that we’d get some attention. That’s in part because to a much greater degree than with the Toyota Prius, Insight owners – especially in the US – are much more likely to modify their cars.

But what I hadn’t counted on was the stupidity that’s so rampant in car discussion groups. Just as occurred when I wrote about upgrading the Insight’s rear springs to improve load carrying and handling (see this blog), all the idiots came out of the woodwork.

Examples? Try these:

Just my opinion but the circuit does not extend lean-burn, it just helps those with a heavy foot maintain a smoother TPS input into the ECU and the Insight will not drop out nearly as quickly.

Well, no kidding – that’s exactly what the article says the modification achieves!

He was driving pretty fast and I get better results with just my foot.

I was doing the same speeds as other traffic, 80, 100, 110 km/h – what do you normally do, dawdle along in the slow lane?

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Today it’s been rather hard to concentrate on work.

Instead of the sounds of birds, my home office has been filled with the noise of an excavator working in the front garden. The roar of the diesel; the grinding of its scoop teeth on rocks; the clatter as the driver changes buckets.

After living in this house for about eight years, I am finally having a decent workshop built. The shed is going to be (I hope) 14 metres x 6 metres, a huge area of floor space for my pan-brake, lathe, mill, bandsaw, oxy acetylene – and all the rest of the gear.

That equipment currently resides in the space under my (elevated) house – but that area is not weatherproof and has low ceiling clearance. It’s also not anywhere near 84 square metres in size…

The excavator is smoothing and levelling, creating the pad for the shed. It might be in the front yard but the unusual shape of the block actually tucks it into a space scarcely visible from the road, and on an area of land we seldom – if ever – used. The block is steeply sloped so quite a lot of earthmoving work is needed: today another level was scooped out for a shed rainwater tank, a rock retaining wall was built, and an area was built up and compacted.

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I loved buying tools and relish for years afterwards their effectiveness. I am not talking tools like spanners and screwdrivers, but things that are much less common.

One example is my tube bender. Small benders for tube and pipe come in two complexions: those that use a hydraulic jack and inside formers, and those that use hand power and inside and outside dies. The hydraulic benders are designed to be used with thick-walled pipe and the latter, hand-operated, designs are for smaller diameter, thin-wall tube.

Primarily to help build my recumbent pedal trike, about 9 months ago I bought one of the hand machines. It has dies for 3/8 – 7/8 inch round tube and ¾ – 1 inch square tube.

And, for a cheap machine, it works very well. When bending high tensile 7/8 inch chrome-moly tube (something it’s not meant to do!), I place an extension on its handle to apply greater leverage. However, for smaller tube sizes, the standard handle is sufficient.

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My wife’s business Speed Pedal sells recumbent trikes, folding bikes and bike trailers. Through her work, she often gets to meet people who collect unusual pedal-powered machines. So there’s the man with something like 100 bikes – everything from historic to current, from tandem to single to well… you name it! And another bloke who rides just weird looking machines. Complete with his long flowing beard, on the road he looks an amazing eccentric.

I always figured that was all a bit bizarre, but I now think I am heading in the same direction.

You see, I’ve recently bought two new bikes. And both of them are pretty strange. However, the difference that I have to a collector is that I am buying them only to use, and if I don’t like the machine, I’ll sell it.

To people reared on the traditional diamond framed bike, the fact that other bike designs even exist is a source of surprise. I have previously covered (both in this blog and AutoSpeed) the design and development of my favourite pedal-powered machine – a full suspension recumbent trike.

However, while I love the machine, it has a major disadvantage – it is large and unwieldy to send to distant places.

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Unusually, in this blog I want to refer you all to the AutoSpeed article that was published today. As I have written above, I think it’s probably the most important article that we’ll publish this year.

So what’s it about?

In short, the article is based on a paper written by Dr Andrew Simpson when he was working for the Sustainable Energy Group at the University of Queensland. His paper looks at a huge number of alternative fuels and drivelines, concluding which are the best from both energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions perspectives.

Andrew has given us permission to use major excerpts of the paper, and in fact went through it again to ensure that his conclusions are current. The full paper can be downloaded from the link at the end of the article.

His is a detailed ‘well-to-wheel’ study, where the environmental costs of producing the fuel and the efficiency of the cars using them are evaluated. Even better, they’re all benchmarked against a real car, the Holden Commodore. Even better again, the alternative fuelled cars are modelled to have the same range and performance as the Commodore.

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The idea that some bridges collapse is fascinating: when I cross the largest bridges in Australia – Sydney’s wonderful and famous Harbour Bridge, the Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge and the Tasman Bridge in Hobart – I can only rarely suppress a primeval shudder.

Why? Because I am always waiting for the damn thing to fall down.

And after all, three spans of the Tasman bridge collapsed in 1975 when the bulk ore ship MV Lake Illawarra struck two pylons. Five occupants of cars crossing the bridge were killed, and the ship – with massive sections of concrete lying across her – sank, killing all seven crewmembers.

And, while it was being built, a 135-metre section of the Westgate bridge – the bit weighing 2000 tonnes – fell to the ground, killing 35 of the workmen involved in its construction.

Then there’s the Bold Street bridge in Granville, Sydney, which collapsed after being impacted by a derailed train passing beneath. Eighty-three people died when the four-lane concrete bridge – weighing 570 tonnes – fell on the railway carriages.

So perhaps it’s not so odd that I don’t have quite the implicit faith in bridges that others seem to have.

The Australian bridges didn’t fall down because of inadequate design (perhaps the Westgate disaster excepted) or maintenance. Nope it took ships or trains running into bridge supports to cause the collapse of magnificent, finished structures.

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While car modifiers talk endlessly about exhaust systems, there is surprisingly little hard information about the design of exhausts, especially mufflers.

That’s why I was particularly interested to come across the text that follows, contained in – of all things – a book on corrosion of cars, published exactly 50 years ago. The chapter, by H. Silman of Electro-Chemical Engineering, is a great summary of exhaust muffler design.

The automobile exhaust system consists essentially of three parts:

(1) the exhaust manifold, which collects the discharged gases from the exhaust ports and conveys them by means of a pipe at least one-quarter of the diameter of the cylinder to the silencer,

(2)  the silencer, and

(3)  the tail pipe, which leads the gases to the rear, the side, or more rarely to the top of the vehicle.

Sometimes twin parallel exhaust systems are used, especially with multi-cylinder engines, whilst it is also becoming increasingly common for two silencers in series to be fitted, the second and shorter unit being located immediately before the final outlet.

The exhaust gases leave the cylinders of an automobile engine at a pressure of around 60-80 lb. per sq. in. and with a velocity of up to 150 ft. per sec. This results in a considerable volume of noise, which must be reduced sufficiently to make the vehicle inoffensive to the driver and passengers, and to the public at large. This legal requirement is achieved by allowing the gases to expand into a silencer chamber, where the intermittent and violent discharges of gas are broken up and emerge from the tail pipe as a continuous and relatively uninterrupted stream.

There are various designs of silencer, but they usually contain a number of baffles carefully designed to avoid excessive back pressure, which might result in a loss of power and overheating of the engine. There is always some loss of power resulting from the use of a silencer, but this need not exceed about 3% with a well-designed unit.

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