Top Gear - Captain Slow's brilliant idea..

Whenever TV's 'Top Gear' features electric cars, you may be sure of two things:
 1) They will run out of battery power in the most inconvenient place;
 2) Jezza Clarkson will be chortling with glee.

But when they (finally) reached the seaside, Jezza & Captain Slow (James May) went on some dodgem rides - thereby giving Captain Slow a brilliant idea:
   Overhead power transmission for electric cars on motorways.

It's not as silly as it sounds, i reckon.  Better still, magnetic charging via underground cable..

Possible?  Don't know, but tougher technical problems have been successfully tackled, so why not!
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Day for Night - well, summer Was coming.. :-[

Just when i was getting back on track..
Yes, this Is a whinge!


Had to leave class last week because of my recurring problem with re-entering 'society' i.e. other people - i cop their infectoids: viruses, bacteria etc, in this case a miserable little cold!  Now i'm behind again, been stuck @ home with a computer with:
* inadequate memory, which may require a 'credit card upgrade'
* a woefully slow broadband connection (ditto my neighbours, i've checked).

Makes getting around the web bloody tedious, & downloading even more so!

So, i've been flagging the 'puter & watching TV instead:
* late-night ARL (Aussie rugby league) certainly helps, but i'll watch Trackside even though i'm definitely not a punter at all;
* looking forward to the 'Log o' Wood' challenge (Ranfurly Shield!) - GO Southland!!  Bang those Jafas!
* 'Top Gear' can generally be relied upon for the kind of hilarious idiocy that makes it entertaining for more than just petrol-heads - they've even been known to include diesels in their line-ups..  not to mention their daft racing challenges, usually along the lines of Car vs Public Transport, tho' they've also included bicycles & speed-boats (across London), & bizarre things like downhill racing (skis), parachutes (including one of those man-made squirrel-glider things!), bobsled, dog-sled (Richard 'Hamster' Hammond), light aircraft (James 'Captain Slow' May with Hammond) & rock-wall climbers. 
And once or twice, of course, Jezza Clarkson's Nemesis, Sabine Schmitz - the Queen of the Nurburgring, who jeered at his barely-under-10-minute round of the 'Ring' by telling him she could do that time in a van!

All good fun, but not helping me get any work done.. {sigh}

It's now nearly 3a.m. & cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!
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A horrible, horrible car (& other musings)..

I got my licence in a 1958 Mercedes - lovely car with a very tolerant owner (I drove over a traffic island on John Wilson Memorial Drive on my first attempt at night-driving). I discovered a couple of other things:
* drinking makes you inattentive
* power brakes are essential (not universal back in the day!)
* seat-belts are essential - use 'em!
* distracting/ed drivers are dangerous!
etcetera etcetera..

Then i climbed into my sisters Phase III Vanguard..
..& got the shock of my life!!
Arrrgghh!!
How could a car be soooo BAD??!!

The bodywork was the least of my problems;
* the boot needed a bungy cord to keep it shut
* the doors sagged & wouldn't shut without slamming
* things rattled (it WAS old-ish, of course)
But the running (& stopping!) gear scared the crap out of me.
* the hand-brake would stop you on the flat - just..
* the brakes (non-power-assisted) were feeble
* the suspension made everything judder at its top speed of about 60mph (95kph)
* 2nd gear seemed to be missing (as in 'never ever there' not as in 'not working')
* the gear-shift was a column-change - which i will now proceed to explain:

Back in the days before Automatic Transmissions became the convenience-du-jour, there was the Column-Shift: the gear-shift was mounted (via a complicated set of inter-linkages) on the steering column.
The 58 Merc had a lovely (German!) 4-speed column shift that worked beautifully,
but on the Vanguard..
..as i said, it seemed to be missing 2nd gear for a kick-off.
Low gear was SO low you could (& my brother did once!) drag off a V8 - for about 20 metres until they caught up with you,
but there seemed to be a yawning revs gap until 2nd!!
This wasn't helped by the clunky, rattly, hopelessly-worn column shift that dithered & rattled whenever you pushed it across the gate looking for a gear on the other side!
And you couldn't get it into gear until it stopped rattling!
Which took an alarmingly long time - like about 2000 revs, it seemed to me.
So, going up a decent hill meant revving like crazy,
TRYING to change up from 1st into 2nd,
& nearly stalling the damned thing from loss of revs.
You had to tickle the clutch while waiting at traffic lights on a hill coz the hand-brake was made of chewing-gum.

There was one good thing - its ex-Massey-Fergusson tractor motor. Tow anything!

Still, i've had custody of more eccentric vehicles..
.. a 1951 Singer: overhead cam, no less (in those days!!) but {sigh}
a very very strange gear-shift made of rods AND a cable!
Which strreeeetched!!
Until it was no longer possible to get it into 1st or Reverse.
Driving this thing was an exercise in timing whenever i approached an intersection where i might have to give way - i could not stop!!
At least, not with any hope of getting started again any time soon..

Did i mention that the exhaust eventually fell off?
As well..

My old next-door neighbour - the bloke with the garage & the belt-driven 3-phase electric power-train - had some disparaging things to say to his two sons about column-shifts, in his classic Coronation-Street accent that he'd never bothered to lose..
"Waste of time! ..fourteen or fifteen moving parts.. a couple of 'thou'(sandths of an inch) off each one.. " .. & so on & so on.. ending with the definitve statement:

"Only proper place for gear shift is on top of gear-box!!!"

And - as we all now know - he was absolutely right!
That's where you almost invariably find it.
On top of the gear-box, where it belongs.

And the ultra-modern, 'flappy-paddle' gear-shifts don't work properly either, at least not according to "Top Gear" presenter Jezza Clarkson - he hates them.
They're too slow for someone used to doing 'racing-changes'..

Finally, the most eccentric car i've ever seen: a post-World-War-2 Auto-Union
(now Audi). It had:
* 3 cylinders operating in 2-stroke mode
* a saddle-back radiator (water-cooled) astride the gear-box
* front-wheel-drive (most uncommon in those days)
* a super-charger
* the Citroen/Volkswagen motor-differential-gearbox arrangement..

..& it went like stink!!
Until it ran into a tree & karked itself..