I have a strong disinterest in handyman work.

Not for me, painting walls or fixing woodwork. Gardening, hanging doors, putting up shelves, making a new letterbox – nope, nope, nope.

So when the washing machine started producing dreadful noises, I feigned great interest in working at the keyboard.

This keyboard.

And, anyway, was the washing machine really making any more noise than normal? I dunno. Didn’t it always fill the street with the sound of a steam roller crossed with a jet engine?

In fact, when it went on to make clunking noises (still mixed with a steam roller and a jet engine), I figured that maybe there were just some coins floating around in the mix, coins that had come out of pockets.

Even if it did sound like the coins were as big as billiard balls….

But then the edifice came crashing down: the washing machine stopped working.

A five year old Korean-made LG front-loader, it no longer rotated, no matter what was done with the switches. In fact, as my beloved wife Georgina pointed out, there were also signs that the stainless steel drum had been rubbing on the outer plastic drum: abrasions were apparent.

So I got out the tools.

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I am starting to wonder if the problems that Ford and Holden are facing in this country with their large cars – the Falcon and the Commodore – are going to be possible to remedy.

Holden is now talking a whole range of environmental and fuel-efficiency measures – from E85 compatibility to reducing weight – and Ford, despite having just released a brand new model, has already made public the next engine option, a diesel.

As I have written previously, both companies have only themselves to blame for their current woes – they were happy completely ignoring the changing marketplace and blindly heading down an ever-increasingly irrelevant path. It’s obvious they expected the market to change to suit them, rather than build cars that suited the buying public. That applies especially to Ford, a company that with the FG Falcon, had years more time to prepare for the changing times than Holden had with the VE Commodore.

But what makes me think that they may have lost it big-time is what I am seeing more and more: Holden and Ford are rapidly losing their loyal long-term potential car-buyers.

Now, self-evidently, they have lost some of these already; otherwise Ford wouldn’t be sacking production workers and releasing a market-special FG seemingly only minutes after the new Falcon was released; and Holden Commodores wouldn’t be being outsold (let’s talk private buyers) by a helluva lot more than just a couple of other car models.

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Perception of any crisis in world affairs has always followed much the same pattern.

Those who say it isn’t happening and never will happen; those cautious but observant who say it might happen; those early adopters who say it is happening well before a majority agree; and those who like to see it unambiguously demonstrated before acknowledging it is actually happening.

Or – and this is really important – not happening.

Trouble is, at the ‘it might happen’ stage it’s difficult to decide on the right course of action. Do nothing and any action might be too late.

Or, conversely, do nothing and in fact the action might later prove to have been correct.

Think CFCs in aerosols and the ozone layer for the first; think Y2000 bug in computer software for the second.

And the eminence of the ‘early adopters’ counts for little: remember the 1970s predictions of a world overpopulation crisis, and how widespread famine would result in a catastrophic reduction in the population by the year 2000? Despite some very highly credentialed experts arguing vehemently – and with apparent logic – that we were doomed, it didn’t happen.

And now to global warming. 

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An Australian company has launched a car insurance scheme where your annual insurance cost depends on how many kilometres you travel.

This is significant for those who drive only to public transport, and also for those who choose to own multiple cars and drive each only for its best purpose.

The website is self-explanatory and I found the quoting quick and easy – and very interesting!

As you’d expect, it is beneficial only if the car does less than the average number of kilometres, but for those cars, it looks like insurance costs can be way lower than the current norm.

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I just can’t believe how ugly cars have become.

Surely, when assessed from 50 years’ hence, the first part of the 21^st century will be viewed as the all-time nadir in car styling.

There’s no point in giving examples – simply look at all the cars around you. Jarring discordance as stylists mix flat and rounded and sharp and fussy, no apparent clean-sheet designs – just variations in copying a handful of (awful) themes.

I read somewhere how someone really liked the look of a recent BMW. Surely they must be joking? These cars are fundamentally stylistically flawed; the fact that others copy them simply shows the imitating designers’ aesthetic limitations.

Sure, some current cars look fashionable – but are they well styled, good looking, or even beautiful? Only someone visually impaired could possibly think so.

Look at today’s shapes and then think of past cars.

The original Porsche Boxster? One of the best styled cars ever.

Many  – in fact a majority – of the 1950s American machines? Gloriously sweeping sculptures of chrome and metal and glass.

The 1930s Cord? Incredible.

The E-Type Jaguar? Incomparable.

But even stepping away from the exotic and looking at the humdrum: the Holden HQ Monaro? So tightly drawn, those rear bulging haunches of muscle.

Even the last Monaro – in its initial (non-nostril) form, one of the best looking cars I have ever seen.

The XD Falcon? Superbly proportioned example of the folded-edge school of design.

Even the Mini – the original; not the bloated and absurd recent pretender to the name. The Mini made industrial design fashionable: utterly different from taking fashion and applying it to industrial design.

So tell me, what are some new-shape cars being sold today that are well styled, and that will be regarded as so in many years? Not cars that are fashionable within the context of today’s horrible design cues, but are in fact timeless?

I can’t think of any.

Can you?

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Whenever talk turns to intercooler colour, two schools of thought emerge. There are those who suggest intercoolers should be painted black to aid heat dissipation. Then there are those who suggest the insulating properties of paint would outweigh any better thermal emissivity the intercooler would gain with its colour change.

I have always thought – and continue to think – that the insulating properties of a very thin layer of paint would be effectively nil. After all, you don’t have much faith in that ‘insulation’ when you’re reluctant to put your hand on a painted exhaust manifold or exhaust pipe!

But what about paints that are designed to insulate? Clearly you wouldn’t put them on an intercooler – but what about the pipe coming back from the intercooler to the inlet manifold? As I wrote in Insulating the Return, measurable gains can be made if engine bay heat is prevented from warming the returning air.

At least two different approaches are taken to insulating paints. The first is where the special paint is bought and simply applied. The other approach is where you mix an additive in an existing paint.

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Hybrid car drivelines can be characterised as being of series or parallel designs.

In a parallel hybrid, either of the two power sources can drive the wheels. In a petrol/electric parallel hybrid, that means either the petrol engine, or the electric motor, can propel the car.

In a series hybrid, one power source drives the other that in turn propels the car. For example, in a diesel electric series hybrid, the diesel motor might drive a generator that charges batteries. These batteries in turn power the electric motor that pushes the car along.

The best known of all hybrid cars, the Toyota Prius, uses a series/parallel design; most of the time the electric motor and the petrol engine drive the wheels directly, although the petrol engine can be used to drive a generator that in turn charges the battery pack.

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Read two good books the other day.

The first is really great for anyone interested in things mechanical, and especially the making of those things (or of course getting them made).

It’s called The Student Engineer’s Companion and comprises simply hundreds of line drawings accompanied by quick and simple explanations. The author is J. Carvill.

Opening it at random are definitions (actually, short descriptions) of poppet and sleeve valves, feeler gauges, sleeve couplings, helical torsion springs, forgings, flywheels and fillets. These are just a tiny sampling.

The book is English (my copy published in 1980 and reprinted in 1990 – ISBN 0-408-00438-X) and for readers from other countries there are a few descriptions that are a little puzzling, however in the main, the book accurately lives up to its title.

Especially if you don’t come from an engineering or trades background, it’s an invaluable primer in coming up to speed in the terminology of engineering.

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I recently bought a book published in 1950. Called Speed – the Book of Racing and Records, it covers fast machines on both land and water.

Written at a time when the United Kingdom held most of the records, it’s a brilliant read as the contributors are often the men who held the records. One of the best chapters is by John Cobb, then the holder of the world Land Speed Record.

Here it is.

The idea of building a new kind of car to attack the World’s Land Speed Record, which is the out-and-out fastest that any car of any size has ever travelled on the earth, came when I was driving my big 500h.p. Napier-Railton at Brooklands Track.

This very large car had been constructed for me to designs by my friend Reid Railton, an engineer whose talents, in my opinion, amount to sheer genius. The car was born on a drawing board and although I was perhaps a little dubious about its possible performance, everything that Railton said it would do it did – and rather more. It was admiration for his brains that led me to think that if ever a man could design a car to beat the World’s Record, then held at 300 m.p.h. by Sir Malcolm Campbell’s “Blue Bird”, that man was Reid Railton.

As things turned out, the car he designed for me did exactly as he said; in fact, his theoretical prophecies were rather on the pessimistic side and the car did better than he expected.

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