openspaceman

I loaned my welding generator out on Saturday, last used and left with fuel in 9 years ago, started 3rd pull. RE the focus is it young enough to have an OBD2 diagnostic port? Some cars won't trigger the injector if the fuel doesn't reach pressure.

Yes I have seen these and the many home made ones on the web, we had a couple at Leith Hill but the water got contaminated by sump oil so they had to install mains. Anyway the papa site gives some figures and it looks like one of these pumps could pump about 2 tonnes up the hill in a day with abstraction of 73 tonnes of water from the stream, so filling a 300tonne pond would be problematic. Also costs for the pump run at about 2000 quid.

Someone shake that man's hand before I do, they were £180 plus vat new last time I replaced some

Yes it loses 25% at Dinorwig but is still profitable because it buys electricity much less than it sells it. It has a 600 metre drop and can supply 2GW for a couple of hours if necessary, during slack periods some of the turbines are kept running in compressed air so once the water hits them they can generate within 12 seconds. Interestingly, to me, is that the turbines are some way below the bottom reservoir. My take is this is that this is to stop cavitation when pumping back up the hill. I believe for a similar reason submarines can go faster when deeply submerged than on or near the surface but I haven't seen our resident expert on this post recently. Dinorwig was built in 1984 when nuclear power supplied 25% of our electricity, now all the original magnox facilities are closed, including the nearby one at Trawfynydd (the only inshore magnox which used the lake to for coolant water and coexisted with a 30MW conventional hydro power station which in 1931 supplied all the power needs of North Wales). The walk round this lake is an easy 8mile amble with a café at the end which was the workers social club. Incidentally there are many many more people employed here since 1995 when it closed after 30 years or generation decommissioning it than operated it. It produced 900MW which was enough to power North Wales when it closed. As you leave the café and head back down the A470 you can see the 1960s dam for the top reservoir of the Festiniog plant. There were plans for pumped storage schemes near Edinburgh and Exmoor using cheap power from Torness and Hinkley, whether renewables make these worthwhile time will tell. Because the farmhouse is at the top of one side of the valley and the stream flows through the bottom of the valley, damming it would flood the whole valley as there is little fall for the stream through the valley. The reason for pumping the water to a top reservoir was that the cheapest turbines are impulse ones and these can be throttled by having a governor alter the size of a nozzle to keep the turbine running at a set speed. Nowadays I guess you might run a turbine asynchronously and chop and reform the waveform to maintain 50Hz under any load.

I've worked on estates with ram pumps and they fascinate me. Twenty years ago my boss bought a farm in the Hampshire hangers, his wife wanted to make use of some renewable energy and wind-power was out because of the aesthetics. PV at that stage was way too expensive, so I bought him a biomass boiler which he never installed and still lies rusting in a shed. As there is a 30 metre drop from the top field and house to the stream at the bottom I calculated the family electricity use was about 30kWh a day and could be supplied by storing 300 tonnes of water in a top pond and running it to a turbine by the stream. What I never worked out was if a ram pump could lift that much water from the stream in a day. Working for petrolheads has meant I've never been able to indulge my interests in renewable energy

Interestingly enough there is already a mechanism for doing this without smart metering that we cannot use because of the way our grid is structured; when the grid comes under load the frequency dips so they bring more capacity on line to bring it back to 50Hz. The "peak lopping" generation used sells much more expensive electricity to the grid compared with the base-load from coal,oil and (latterly) nuclear generation. If a consumer could sense the frequency and only buy cheap electricity when the frequency were higher than 50Hz for non scheduled tasks like freezers and washing machines then the peaks could be levelled and better use made on unscheduled supplies from renewable sources. Yes and there are two lovely walks on the hills surrounding the Dinorwig and Festiniog upper reservoirs.

Gone up five fold in 20 years then, I used to get the tops for free.

Sorry I was being brief as posting from phone: the problem with replacing a petrol engine with a diesel is that the diesel peak revs tend to be much lower. So putting the Cummings in in place of the rolls royce means the top speed is down but also the stress on the rest of the power train goes up for the same power leven. My old boss still has a stalwart with the steerable water jets. By the time they came into service they were made obsolete by big helicopters. They are also poor swimmers compared with the Dukw which I did take a trip in round Boston harbour. If you leave the bow board out of the stalwart you get swamped and the one I watched going to sea nearly capsized when it drifted sideways off the slip during transition from wading to floating

The B90 revs to over 4000 what will the Cummings do? The owner of the other mog that used to run around Guildford borrowed a stollie and put a k60 in. That has a 1.3 step up between the cranks and being 2 stroke screams like a detroit. I watched him set off to circumnavigate the Isle of Wight but gather he never made it.

For mapping you want a long focal length, with a wide angle the distance to the object just below is a lot less than the distance to the edges to there is a problem rectifying the image so that all points map to a grid. If you take the same area from 3 miles up there is not much difference in distance from the corners to the centre. Still better than nothing though and mapmaker has a rubbermat routine that allows you to pull areas of the image to known points on the ground.

You talk whilst typing? :-)

I've always used mapmaker pro but haven't upgraded from 3.5 as I haven't need to make planning applications for a few years. Back in the day I'd scan 1:10000 paper copy and then use the utility menu to calibrate on 2 grid intersections. You can do much the same with a .pdf, save it as a transparent tiff and use it as an overlay on one of the free 1:10,000 image is based on the Ordnance Survey StreetView data as long as you acknowledge the copyright. You can also pay an annual copyright print fee I would have thought licensing the area from emapsite for a year would cover most applications, any paper copies are allowable as archive after the digital licence has expired.

Very good advice and you have nailed it with people trying to clear blockages on the starter, never had it on the mk1 but it normally blows a 40A fuse on the mk2s. When our mechanic was tasked with bringing the mk1 out of the shed and getting it ready for sale he killed the RDS unit and starter with water penetration from the pressure washer. An auto electric guy in Portsmouth sold me a new one for £108.33+Vat in February delivered. If interested I can get details when back at work tomorrow.

I installed underfloor heating in a small annex at work, it's heated by a gas boiler but I had always intended to link in the woodchip boiler to the return . The thing is you start trading thermal mass against warm up time. So a large thermal mass, and in effect the infinitely deep soil mass under an uninsulated floor is a big thermal mass, is slow to react to heat input. This is great for a constantly occupied building for a family but can be a bit wasteful for a couple that are away 12 hours a day. Underfloor heating doesn't depend on a large thermal mass to maintain comfort levels and can be done with pipes in aluminium plates with just a carpet on top. The point is that having feet warmer than head is comfortable at a degree or so lower overall temperature than vice versa. Thus given the same overall losses for the same comfort level the room can be a bit cooler, so heat input can be lower. Having said that, given that I burn 2 transit loads of logs a year, this house is uninsulated solid walls , poorly insulated roof as the ceilings are combed . I have not plumbed in the woodburner as it has had gas heating and it is tiny. The bills are small because we only have a radiator on in kitchen and lounge. So imo best bang for buck is a simple centrally placed log burner and I still wonder about a bit of warm air ducting. New build I would do underfloor as it is so cheap to install in screed.

I've also read this but assumed the edge insulation needed to be sunk down a few feet?? Also not a good idea if the floor needs venting as it's over granite. Of course you have a very big surface area to perimeter ratio compared with a house so heat losses to the sides are small in relation to the heated area. I do remember digging in a large barn near here which was open at the sides and being amazed at how dry the soil was so our sandy soil would be good to create a large thermal store. Of course you currently heat the house with the flooring as is so there's still a gain from the comfort of having the heat at foot level and I would expect the additional losses to be negligible if the slab is only heated to 25C.

This thread prompted me to look at the 2008 model we have spare. It has a Thermex of Reditch radiator part number 840013. I like this mark1 safetrak as it starts easier than the kubota engined models and is not hard on batteries like the later ones.

I paid 300+VAT for a replacement radiator to be built for a jensen A540 6" tracked chipper in 2013 so 600 euros doesn't surprise me. A transit one only cost 98+VAT earlier this year, the benefits of mass production I suppose. The thing about british chippers is tht many OEM parts are available direct from parts suppliers without paying the premium at dealers for the marque. Bearings, belts and switches seem to be about 40% of the dealer prices.

I was going to correct my spelling of callus just by way of lightening up. I still don't quite see the distinction between reaction wood and wound wood, surely in trying to occlude the wound the tree is laying down reaction wood.

You have a tab for hydraulic attachments for the 50RX but it doesn't list any, does this mean none?

I recently fitted a 750kg engine on a standard 1.2m by 1.2 m pallet with a height limit of 2m and it cost 56 quid IIRC from surrey to the midlands. I'm not at work atm but could look up the carrier when next in.

With the fresh nibbling at the edges of the callous I'd say it was old squirrel damage. Otherwise I might have thought lightning.

Perhaps some terms need a bit of definition here. I refer to hi idle as full throttle no load with a chainsaw and the onset of four stroking, similar to max governed revs on a diesel. Idle is synonymous with tickover for me. Tickover is normally around 2750 rpm but high idle can be 11000-14000 depending on the saw but I get uncomfortable if any of mine go over 13500.

It's not something I have had direct experience of but one of our contractors was stopped and weighed with a trailer behind a 4WD. Despite almost certainly being overloaded on the nose of the trailer because the sum of the axle weights was under the GTW he avoided a penalty. Had they separated the trailer it would have been over the trailer gross weight. So on that basis and not knowing the legal position a 800kg trailer with 50kg of nose weight may get past without comment as long as the tow vehicle has the 50kg to spare on its MAM.

Much as my experience for the first bit such that I've never experienced the latter. This despite taking a transit that one of the chaps brought back over the weighbridge and it weighed 4.2 tonnes. That's in 6 years with 3 transit trucks and many vans leaving the yard each working day. I would never have dreamt of doing some of the things I see when I was in business on my own account. However do something that attracts a policeman's attention such as pulling onto a dual carriageway with no indication as one of our subbies did and then get done for all sorts including defective brakes because the breakaway cable wasn't connected. They didn't weigh him though

Nor mine, poor piece of programming for one it pre supposes the antagonist has nuclear weapons and this wasn't the case in our early development of the nuclear capability. The other point it doesn't address is what benefit does the antagonist expect from a war No but for all intents and purposes the luxurious life we have now would not be available to the survivors and even they would be subject to turf wars last seen in the middle ages in this country and current in Iraq Syria and Afghanistan. This is not what I infer from the history: Russia had mobilised a massive ground war machine after being initially poorly prepared, their government was happy to have an ill educated, ill informed public as cannon fodder, they had not been party to any negotiations with Japan and had a score to settle with them. Russia had no inkling of the devastating power of nuclear bombs. The Japanese were finished anyway but further fighting would have cost them many casualties from starvation. The two bombs were a clear warning to Russia that the war must stop, it also saved many Japanese. An unfortunate consequence was Hirohito avoided a war crimes trial as the Americans needed a strong ally in the east. Similarly the need for America to develop a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear war head was why Werner von Braun avoided answering for his abetting of war crimes. That's my view too and that