As I write this, I am building a shed.

Well, no, for pedants, not literally as I write this, but on the day of writing this. But even that’s not true – it is taking more than a single day; in fact probably 12 days.

But anyway, I am building a shed.

It’s a big shed; 14 metres by six metres by 3 metres wall height. It is made of Colourbond and Zincalume steel, and Cee sections and Top Hat purlins and Girts. I’ve also come across Knee Braces and Mullions and Cleats.

Which is probably as much Arabic to you as to me: I’ve never built a shed before.

But one thing I figured I really needed was an electric drill. But not any old drill; nope one with a clutch and a bit that could drive the four million Tek screws that hold the shed together. I’d already bought a new electric drill, one that plugged into the wall and could hammer – sufficient you see, for drilling the holes in the concrete for anchoring the Columns to the Slab.

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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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Anyone who has read Sir Laurence Hartnett’s book Big Wheels and Little Wheels will know how important it was to establish a domestic Australian car manufacturing industry.

In that immediate post World War II time, it was seen as consolidating the industrial gains made by Australian in WWII; establishing a secondary industry that used the most sophisticated of manufacturing technologies this side of making aircraft (steel production, casting, machining and industrial design); and laying the foundation for a productive, long-term industry for Australia.

And when making things so dominated the employment landscape, a car manufacturing industry was also sure to provide a lot of jobs.

And in due course it did.

But now, in 2008, new Holden boss Mark Reuss is playing from the same hymn sheet.

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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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As regular AutoSpeed readers will know, each week we repeat some of our content. We decided on that path for a few reasons, but the primary one was that I could see from our readership stats that many – in fact a huge number – of previously published articles were being completely overlooked.

Time has certainly vindicated that observation: most of our republished articles have proved (and are proving) very popular.

The selection of the older articles that I think worthy of bringing forward again is manual: I look at our old material and decide what is still relevant and strong. That’s an easier task than it would be for most publications, because from day #1 of AutoSpeed I was always conscious that material published in AutoSpeed would be continuously accessible over a long period.

So?

Well, wherever possible, I tried to make articles timeless – or at least, written in a form that would allow them to date as slowly as possible.

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Whenever I write in AutoSpeed about making something of the items others throw away, I am always a little surprised at the positive reader response.

That said, some stories have been more enthusiastically received than others: I now carefully preface all such stories with something like:

If you’re the sort of person who isn’t into junk, read no further. However, if you like picking up discards cheaply (or at no cost at all) and aren’t afraid of putting together some bits and pieces, this is for you!

Putting that first normally stops those people who really aren’t much interested in grubbing through others’ rubbish!

And so I am presenting here another such item. Again, it’s clearly not for everyone!

My 3½ year old son, Alexander, loves monster truck toys. Because he knows that real monster trucks can jump cars, roll over, do wheel-stands (etc, etc), he rightly expects his monster truck toys to do the same. But they’re not cut from the same cloth, and often suffer fatal results.

However, in our household, that’s no problem. Why? Because most of his monster truck toys cost nearly nothing.

What we do is this.

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One of the difficulties in assessing change in vehicles over a procession of models is getting past the obfuscation that normally accompanies car publicity. Both in advertising and PR material, every model is always billed as being vastly better than the preceding model.

Of course, in many ways newer models or versions often are better – but in other ways sometimes they are not.

One example of this is the weight of cars: as we all know, cars of today are much heavier than the cars of yesterday. However that’s a process that has been largely unremarked upon as it has been occurring. The upshot is we only now say: “Hell! Look at how heavy new cars have become!”

But this insidious change occurs in other design aspects as well.

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Despite having in the past worked for an electronics hobbyist magazine, and having played with electronics for most of my life, I don’t consider myself to be any sort of electronics whiz.

In fact, I am painfully aware of how little I know and understand.

But that’s one reason I am so pleased that together with eLabtronics, we’ve been developing a whole range of off-the-shelf electronic performance modules. 

Why their need?

Well, I’ve seen it so often. Someone will ask on a discussion group or in a car club for some simple electronic device. Like, they want to automatically turn on something when a certain voltage is reached. Or they want to flash a light. Or they want a simple timer.

Always – absolutely always – there’ll be an electronics whiz that will come out of the woodwork.

Say it’s the flasher that’s desired. The ‘whiz’ will say as fast as he can:

“Oh yeah. Just use a triple-five and a few passives.”

The person making the original requests always says: “Pardon?”

Then expert says it all again, although this time faster and maybe with a URL for a circuit.

The beginner is then likely to say something like:

“OK I think I am getting it now.

“So how do I make the flash rate variable?

“And did I say, I want to pulse the car horn. Is that OK? Will the triple five do that?”

The answer of course is: no, a 555 IC won’t be able to handle the required power. And neither will it like working in a car without any protection circuitry on its power supply leads….

In fact, for every ‘simple’ circuit request, there are always – but always – complexities that are easy to overlook.

So when I say that I started working with eLabtronics over 10 months ago – and the first product is being written about in AutoSpeed only this week – you get some idea of what goes into apparently simple designs.

Of course, the eLabtronics Multi Purpose Module isn’t just a flasher. Or a voltage switch. Or a timer. The same hardware will be able to do all these functions – and plenty more – just by software changes made by the company. 

Which brings me back to the beginning. In the past we’ve covered a range of DIY modules in kit form. They were (and remain) very good designs – but the user had to build them. And many people aren’t confident or happy building electronic kits where just one, apparently trivial, wiring error can stop the whole thing from ever working.

The new eLabtronics modules are fully built and tested. Courtesy of their microcontroller design, they also have far more flexibility and options than those previous kits.

The ‘expert’ quoted above will be dismissive. But the electronics non-expert, who just wants to do all those apparently simple things, will love them….

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/18/2279048.htm

Puts into context decreasing sales of large cars, I think. Holden and Ford must be absolutely pulling out all stops to re-jig their product range… helped more than a little by Federal government pressure. Is anyone still saying that the VE and FG are the right cars for the times….?

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