Don't expect much more efficiency from a turbine than from a reciprocating piston engine. The best turbines run at about 60% efficiency and the best reciprocating piston engines run at about 50%. In both cases they are about the size of a house. For smaller engines reciprocating piston is more efficient but not as flex able on fuel. Years ago Chrysler tried to make a turbine powered vehicle and had a number of problems (not related to reliability). This was back in the days when Chrysler corporation was know for good engineering and making a quality product.
I have never had issues starting my small engines (lawnmower, snow blower, leaf blower/vac, chainsaw, pressure washer, weed whacker, tiller). The one that is hardest to start is my snow blower as it has a manual choke that if you don't get set right it won't start, and even that one takes at most 4 attempts (usually 1) while everything else is a 1 pull start. Even with the snow blower if it doesn't start on the first pull set the choke to a different position and pull again, there are only 4 positions. For the record my snow blower is older than I am. I have had a few electric pieces of lawn equipment and my experience is that they were just junk, my first chain saw was electric, it worked 3 times and then never ran again but was replaced under warranty. The electric replacement and the electric replacement for that one were dead out of the box so I just gave up and got a small good gas chain saw for $40 more. The gas one has worked for the past 6 years trouble free and even work out in the woods for 2 weeks on end. I also had an electric leaf blower/vac and an electric weed whacker and neither of them lasted and after the chain saw experience got immediately replaced with gas ones.
Just a minor correction on the U-Hauls, most of their fleet is the large trucks but there are some that are based off of consumer trucks. Everything that is a 14 footer or larger is based off of something like a F550 (large commercial dump truck) or larger. They do have some smaller vehicles like the 10 foot truck which were rare when I worked there bu those were based off of the small Toyota pickup and they also have standard 1/2 ton pickups of F150 size and a cargo vans that are E150 sized. Most of the smaller vehicles like the 10 foot enclosed trucks, pickup trucks, and cargo vans are local use only.
Totally agree with you on the specialty vehicles, especially on the true offroad vehicles. My biggest beef is with the soccer moms driving them is they believe they are invincible when the roads are icy because they have 4 wheel drive. This also has seemed to have made lots of 4WD vehicles kind of weak as people want them to be more like a car and less like a truck. Try finding a new 4WD truck or SUV (excluding Suabaru) on the lot that has a posi let alone locking differentials, or has manual locking hubs now days. A perfect example of invincibility was last weekend I was driving in my Jeep in a storm where the snow had melted and then refroze on the road and I was being reasonable and driving 30-35mph on a major road who's normal speed limit was 50. I had tons of people in SUVs flying past me until I would come up to curve or intersection and frequently they were off in the ditch or involved in an accident with another vehicle or stationary objects. I was glad I have a tow chain as I cleared 3 intersections of vehicles all so I could get home. All of them said they had all or 4 wheel drive but it didn't do anything.
An ordinary person would not think that you are genuinely accusing him of criminal terrorist acts, or that "lied, cheated, and stole" is meant to be a specific accusation.
You must be new here.
The sad truth is that there is a large portion of the US population that believes that Obama is actually an antichrist Muslim terrorist who did lied, cheated, and stole in order to get elected, and is still an asshole, a racist, and a hatemonger. Not to mention that these same people believe he was born in Kenya and that the birth announcement was a plant for his presidential campaign as was the long form birth certificate.
I can one up you that. Red Wing shoes offers the option to search based off of: "Made in the USA" "Made in the USA with imported materials" "Assembled in the USA from imported components" "Made in China"
And Marty was saying that to the 1955 Doc Brown who said something along the lines of "no wonder this chip failed it is made in Japan". Interesting thing is that in the 50s and 60s people viewed Japanese goods like we currently view Chinese goods. A side note if you find a Japanese tin toy form that era in working order at a garage sale buy it, it is probably worth something, even more if it was made in "Occupied Japan".
I would hardly say many of them. The ones I see are either collector ones, or look like they are fogging mosquitoes as they go down the road. American cars from the 80s really were junk (maybe not late 80s but defiantly the early and mid). The Japanese were competing on quality and the Americans we for cost. I see more older Hondas and Toyotas than I do older Fords, Chevrolets, and Chryslers. This changed in the possibly the late 80s and for sure by the early 90s when we started making decent cars again since the Big Three discovered that people want quality.
Vehicles lasting is a relatively recent thing in the US, the newest vehicle in my household is 11 years old which is my wife's car and the oldest is my project car at 43. Most vehicles from the 80s and earlier had much shorter lifespans. In the 60s a vehicle was basically used up after 60,000 miles and required an engine, transmission, and suspension rebuild regardless of how good of care you took of it. Now the average life of a vehicle is 150,000 miles with many lasting longer. My experience with modern or properly restored vehicles is that their life is more determined by the quality of maintenance given than by the build quality.
I recently bought 96 Jeep Cherokee that has 369,000 miles on it and still runs like a top, everything works, plenty of power, and so far doesn't appear to go through any fluids. My daily driver has 227,000 and is a 97 BM 540i that I bought 4.5 years ago when it had 101,000 miles on it and looks and runs as good as it did when it rolled off the lot. Compare that to my mom and step dad who need to replace vehicles every 5 years because they barely run after that even though they only have 60,000 to 70,000 miles on them. Their approach to maintenance is once an idiot light turns on get it serviced. Yes I am serious my stepfather thought the oil light that really means low oil level or low oil pressure means change your oil and wouldn't do it until it turned on. Same thing with coolant which usually meant that the coolant got replaced once the pump failed, the radiator burst, or boiled over.
I know I like a unibody construction car instead of the bolted together vehicles from that era for example. Those cars literally shook themselves apart.
Which one was bad design, unibody or body on frame? I seriously couldn't tell from what you wrote but I would assume it was the bolted together ones, but the old unibody ones would usually just rust out since they were just spot welded together. Modern unibody and body on frame is much better than what was done in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, especially on American vehicles.
Too true on the stuff lasting. Recently we helped my grandmother clean out her house to get ready to move. We found a bunch of my grandfathers tools and he was never really a handy man so he just bought the cheap crap. Yes the tools existed but were junk and should have been thrown out in the 50s. Most of what we see that has survived is the good quality stuff as the cheap crap has long since been thrown out. On the other hand my wife's father and uncles have her grandfathers hand tools (from the 20s) and those were good quality ones that will probably outlast my grandkids. I hope my tools are like that.
Nice to know I am not the only one who still buys good tools. Even a decent set of tools (i.e. craftsman and not even the pro level stuff like Snap-On) goes a long way. I do break a lot of sockets and wrenches, but then my solution to a stuck bolt that won't come loose after torching is an 8 foot pipe over the end of the wrench or ratchet. I have in the past bought cheap tools because I got suckered in by the price and have always been disappointed. I have even broken a good number of Snap-On impact sockets, but you are correct in that good tools fail gracefully. Most of my collection is Craftsman, Stanley, or Milwaukee (great power tools), and an assortment of other specialty tools from other manufactures.
Why would anyone ever use the water heating function on the washer when I have a perfectly good water heater (why the hell do these things only last 10 years) that is more efficient than the washing machine.
So true. I loved my old 17" CRT. It was a survivor and was a good quality one that worked perfectly until I replaced it for a newer, larger, higher res, and lower power consuming LCD. I don't do graphics work that requires super accurate color representation so that was no big loss but I gained a ton of desk space. I gave that monitor to one of my cousins when he went off to college as he had a laptop and a second monitor is nice.
Even cheap, nasty stuff is often better then the very best stuff available 20 or 30 years ago, and vastly vastly cheaper.
Depends, I have lots of things that are old but are better quality than most comparable things made today. My kitchen table is over 120 years old, oak and cast iron (for the sliders and gears) but weighs 300+ lbs and apart from the finish which needs to be refreshed is still rock solid, no creaks wobbles or anything. This isn't a high end fancy table either but if I ever needed to replace it I would have to spend in the $3000 to $5000 range to get one of comparable quality. I have a set of good quality carbon steel kitchen knives from the 60's, they are extremely sharp and stay sharp. I could replace them but would spend $40 to $100 per knife again for comparable quality but I am not going to spend close to $1000 for a knife set. There are other things like tools where I would agree, like my welder. Last year I bought a small wire feed welder which is still more powerful than I need (it was the smallest good one) for about $250 on sale. Back in the 80s my dad bought a wire feed welder for doing similar automotive work but he paid closer to $2000 and his is about 5x the size of mine. Both welders are high quality mine is a Hobard and my dad's is a Miller, and we both could have gotten cheaper ones but went with quality. Miller still makes the welder my dad has and it is still about $1000 but at the time his was the smallest available where as now mine is.
I don't know about your washing machine, but the washing machine in my house (1972) is older than Voyager 1 (1977) and both are working just fine. My washing machine has had a minor failure (the one where too much stuff is put into the drum and it breaks the auger so it doesn't turn) that was repaired and it works just fine. I do agree that we have too many products with planned obsolescence or engineered failures (I am looking at you BMW with your crappy plastic pressurized coolant overflow tank) and that we could do a much better job. The biggest problem is that most people only care about purchase price so we have a giant race to the bottom. Even those of us who are more than willing to pay for better quality get stuck with crap even when being careful shoppers.
Recently I bought some new steel toe work boots as my old ones were worn out (no tread and pretty beat up). So I went and bought what appeared to be some good boots with all rubber soles (no polyurethane to crack) that looked like they were stitched to the leather uppers. Turns out the stitching is decorative and after a month of use the the soles started to separate from the rest of the boot. Also I found out that these boots leak like a sieve, I didn't expect them to be perfectly water proof but when you step in water it is like you aren't even wearing anything. These weren't the $20 Wal*Mart ones either but were priced on the higher end of the middle for work boots ($85) and looked to be well constructed with the stitched upper to the sole, triple stitched seams, thick leather, and all rubber soles.
I know what I will be doing in 2016 as I will finally meet the constitutional requirements to be president. This way I could truthfully add that I was a 2016 presidential candidate. I would even make a reasonable platform centered around my areas of expertise. Why not its not like it is that expensive. At worst (most likely) it would make an interesting story and at best (extreme remote) I elected and I could probably do a better job than the current crop of clowns.
How about also removing the party label for each candidate from the ballot. We already have multiple parties running in various elections but there are probably too many people who look for the D or R label and vote based off of that. This would at least require that people be some what informed as to who the R and D candidates are since they couldn't just vote down the ticket unless they knew all of their party's candidates.
Well I was going more for a funny, but they really haven't been doing their job. Personally I would love it if it was an actual public service job and they were to be put up in basically college dorms and had to eat from the communal cafeteria. Their pay would be room and board and their current benefits. As it seems most are corrupt as hell and they haven't actually been doing their job (no real budget in 3 years only continuing resolutions) so why should they get paid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't expect much more efficiency from a turbine than from a reciprocating piston engine. The best turbines run at about 60% efficiency and the best reciprocating piston engines run at about 50%. In both cases they are about the size of a house. For smaller engines reciprocating piston is more efficient but not as flex able on fuel. Years ago Chrysler tried to make a turbine powered vehicle and had a number of problems (not related to reliability). This was back in the days when Chrysler corporation was know for good engineering and making a quality product.
I have never had issues starting my small engines (lawnmower, snow blower, leaf blower/vac, chainsaw, pressure washer, weed whacker, tiller). The one that is hardest to start is my snow blower as it has a manual choke that if you don't get set right it won't start, and even that one takes at most 4 attempts (usually 1) while everything else is a 1 pull start. Even with the snow blower if it doesn't start on the first pull set the choke to a different position and pull again, there are only 4 positions. For the record my snow blower is older than I am. I have had a few electric pieces of lawn equipment and my experience is that they were just junk, my first chain saw was electric, it worked 3 times and then never ran again but was replaced under warranty. The electric replacement and the electric replacement for that one were dead out of the box so I just gave up and got a small good gas chain saw for $40 more. The gas one has worked for the past 6 years trouble free and even work out in the woods for 2 weeks on end. I also had an electric leaf blower/vac and an electric weed whacker and neither of them lasted and after the chain saw experience got immediately replaced with gas ones.
Just a minor correction on the U-Hauls, most of their fleet is the large trucks but there are some that are based off of consumer trucks. Everything that is a 14 footer or larger is based off of something like a F550 (large commercial dump truck) or larger. They do have some smaller vehicles like the 10 foot truck which were rare when I worked there bu those were based off of the small Toyota pickup and they also have standard 1/2 ton pickups of F150 size and a cargo vans that are E150 sized. Most of the smaller vehicles like the 10 foot enclosed trucks, pickup trucks, and cargo vans are local use only.
Totally agree with you on the specialty vehicles, especially on the true offroad vehicles. My biggest beef is with the soccer moms driving them is they believe they are invincible when the roads are icy because they have 4 wheel drive. This also has seemed to have made lots of 4WD vehicles kind of weak as people want them to be more like a car and less like a truck. Try finding a new 4WD truck or SUV (excluding Suabaru) on the lot that has a posi let alone locking differentials, or has manual locking hubs now days. A perfect example of invincibility was last weekend I was driving in my Jeep in a storm where the snow had melted and then refroze on the road and I was being reasonable and driving 30-35mph on a major road who's normal speed limit was 50. I had tons of people in SUVs flying past me until I would come up to curve or intersection and frequently they were off in the ditch or involved in an accident with another vehicle or stationary objects. I was glad I have a tow chain as I cleared 3 intersections of vehicles all so I could get home. All of them said they had all or 4 wheel drive but it didn't do anything.
Out of curiosity what does it take in NYC to get a press license?
Likewise, if you think "your" means "you are", you're probably not a real journalist.
Doubtful given the writing in my local paper.
An ordinary person would not think that you are genuinely accusing him of criminal terrorist acts, or that "lied, cheated, and stole" is meant to be a specific accusation.
You must be new here.
The sad truth is that there is a large portion of the US population that believes that Obama is actually an antichrist Muslim terrorist who did lied, cheated, and stole in order to get elected, and is still an asshole, a racist, and a hatemonger. Not to mention that these same people believe he was born in Kenya and that the birth announcement was a plant for his presidential campaign as was the long form birth certificate.
In my area they all seem to corrode out after about 10 years.
I can one up you that. Red Wing shoes offers the option to search based off of :
"Made in the USA"
"Made in the USA with imported materials"
"Assembled in the USA from imported components"
"Made in China"
And Marty was saying that to the 1955 Doc Brown who said something along the lines of "no wonder this chip failed it is made in Japan". Interesting thing is that in the 50s and 60s people viewed Japanese goods like we currently view Chinese goods. A side note if you find a Japanese tin toy form that era in working order at a garage sale buy it, it is probably worth something, even more if it was made in "Occupied Japan".
I would hardly say many of them. The ones I see are either collector ones, or look like they are fogging mosquitoes as they go down the road. American cars from the 80s really were junk (maybe not late 80s but defiantly the early and mid). The Japanese were competing on quality and the Americans we for cost. I see more older Hondas and Toyotas than I do older Fords, Chevrolets, and Chryslers. This changed in the possibly the late 80s and for sure by the early 90s when we started making decent cars again since the Big Three discovered that people want quality.
Vehicles lasting is a relatively recent thing in the US, the newest vehicle in my household is 11 years old which is my wife's car and the oldest is my project car at 43. Most vehicles from the 80s and earlier had much shorter lifespans. In the 60s a vehicle was basically used up after 60,000 miles and required an engine, transmission, and suspension rebuild regardless of how good of care you took of it. Now the average life of a vehicle is 150,000 miles with many lasting longer. My experience with modern or properly restored vehicles is that their life is more determined by the quality of maintenance given than by the build quality.
I recently bought 96 Jeep Cherokee that has 369,000 miles on it and still runs like a top, everything works, plenty of power, and so far doesn't appear to go through any fluids. My daily driver has 227,000 and is a 97 BM 540i that I bought 4.5 years ago when it had 101,000 miles on it and looks and runs as good as it did when it rolled off the lot. Compare that to my mom and step dad who need to replace vehicles every 5 years because they barely run after that even though they only have 60,000 to 70,000 miles on them. Their approach to maintenance is once an idiot light turns on get it serviced. Yes I am serious my stepfather thought the oil light that really means low oil level or low oil pressure means change your oil and wouldn't do it until it turned on. Same thing with coolant which usually meant that the coolant got replaced once the pump failed, the radiator burst, or boiled over.
I know I like a unibody construction car instead of the bolted together vehicles from that era for example. Those cars literally shook themselves apart.
Which one was bad design, unibody or body on frame? I seriously couldn't tell from what you wrote but I would assume it was the bolted together ones, but the old unibody ones would usually just rust out since they were just spot welded together. Modern unibody and body on frame is much better than what was done in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, especially on American vehicles.
Too true on the stuff lasting. Recently we helped my grandmother clean out her house to get ready to move. We found a bunch of my grandfathers tools and he was never really a handy man so he just bought the cheap crap. Yes the tools existed but were junk and should have been thrown out in the 50s. Most of what we see that has survived is the good quality stuff as the cheap crap has long since been thrown out. On the other hand my wife's father and uncles have her grandfathers hand tools (from the 20s) and those were good quality ones that will probably outlast my grandkids. I hope my tools are like that.
Nice to know I am not the only one who still buys good tools. Even a decent set of tools (i.e. craftsman and not even the pro level stuff like Snap-On) goes a long way. I do break a lot of sockets and wrenches, but then my solution to a stuck bolt that won't come loose after torching is an 8 foot pipe over the end of the wrench or ratchet. I have in the past bought cheap tools because I got suckered in by the price and have always been disappointed. I have even broken a good number of Snap-On impact sockets, but you are correct in that good tools fail gracefully. Most of my collection is Craftsman, Stanley, or Milwaukee (great power tools), and an assortment of other specialty tools from other manufactures.
Why would anyone ever use the water heating function on the washer when I have a perfectly good water heater (why the hell do these things only last 10 years) that is more efficient than the washing machine.
So true. I loved my old 17" CRT. It was a survivor and was a good quality one that worked perfectly until I replaced it for a newer, larger, higher res, and lower power consuming LCD. I don't do graphics work that requires super accurate color representation so that was no big loss but I gained a ton of desk space. I gave that monitor to one of my cousins when he went off to college as he had a laptop and a second monitor is nice.
I forget who said it but I follow the philosophy that:
I am too poor to not buy quality
Even cheap, nasty stuff is often better then the very best stuff available 20 or 30 years ago, and vastly vastly cheaper.
Depends, I have lots of things that are old but are better quality than most comparable things made today. My kitchen table is over 120 years old, oak and cast iron (for the sliders and gears) but weighs 300+ lbs and apart from the finish which needs to be refreshed is still rock solid, no creaks wobbles or anything. This isn't a high end fancy table either but if I ever needed to replace it I would have to spend in the $3000 to $5000 range to get one of comparable quality. I have a set of good quality carbon steel kitchen knives from the 60's, they are extremely sharp and stay sharp. I could replace them but would spend $40 to $100 per knife again for comparable quality but I am not going to spend close to $1000 for a knife set. There are other things like tools where I would agree, like my welder. Last year I bought a small wire feed welder which is still more powerful than I need (it was the smallest good one) for about $250 on sale. Back in the 80s my dad bought a wire feed welder for doing similar automotive work but he paid closer to $2000 and his is about 5x the size of mine. Both welders are high quality mine is a Hobard and my dad's is a Miller, and we both could have gotten cheaper ones but went with quality. Miller still makes the welder my dad has and it is still about $1000 but at the time his was the smallest available where as now mine is.
I don't know about your washing machine, but the washing machine in my house (1972) is older than Voyager 1 (1977) and both are working just fine. My washing machine has had a minor failure (the one where too much stuff is put into the drum and it breaks the auger so it doesn't turn) that was repaired and it works just fine. I do agree that we have too many products with planned obsolescence or engineered failures (I am looking at you BMW with your crappy plastic pressurized coolant overflow tank) and that we could do a much better job. The biggest problem is that most people only care about purchase price so we have a giant race to the bottom. Even those of us who are more than willing to pay for better quality get stuck with crap even when being careful shoppers.
Recently I bought some new steel toe work boots as my old ones were worn out (no tread and pretty beat up). So I went and bought what appeared to be some good boots with all rubber soles (no polyurethane to crack) that looked like they were stitched to the leather uppers. Turns out the stitching is decorative and after a month of use the the soles started to separate from the rest of the boot. Also I found out that these boots leak like a sieve, I didn't expect them to be perfectly water proof but when you step in water it is like you aren't even wearing anything. These weren't the $20 Wal*Mart ones either but were priced on the higher end of the middle for work boots ($85) and looked to be well constructed with the stitched upper to the sole, triple stitched seams, thick leather, and all rubber soles.
I know what I will be doing in 2016 as I will finally meet the constitutional requirements to be president. This way I could truthfully add that I was a 2016 presidential candidate. I would even make a reasonable platform centered around my areas of expertise. Why not its not like it is that expensive. At worst (most likely) it would make an interesting story and at best (extreme remote) I elected and I could probably do a better job than the current crop of clowns.
At first I thought he was an exterminator, although with the zombie preparedness platform he might actually be.
How about also removing the party label for each candidate from the ballot. We already have multiple parties running in various elections but there are probably too many people who look for the D or R label and vote based off of that. This would at least require that people be some what informed as to who the R and D candidates are since they couldn't just vote down the ticket unless they knew all of their party's candidates.
I thought that a Libertarian was a Republican that wanted to get laid, hence why so many on /. claim to be Libertarian.
Well I was going more for a funny, but they really haven't been doing their job. Personally I would love it if it was an actual public service job and they were to be put up in basically college dorms and had to eat from the communal cafeteria. Their pay would be room and board and their current benefits. As it seems most are corrupt as hell and they haven't actually been doing their job (no real budget in 3 years only continuing resolutions) so why should they get paid.
Thanks for tracking that down.
Well you can still read the bill here at thomas.loc.gov.