made sense. Could you explain where the original poster made his/her mistake?
They said :
If you want to think like an engineer, stop thinking about energy. Think about power. Measure everything in power.
Power is the rate of transfer of energy. Think about one and you need to think about the other. Like income is a rate of transfer of wealth (to use a finance analogy as the GP did).
With a vehicle going along, power (measured in Watts - or horsepower in old units) is the main interest - because it determines the rate (ie speed) at which it can push through the air (and other) resistance and climb hills. In doing this it is drawing energy (measured in Joules) from its store which could be in fuel, in a flywheel, a battery, or (hybrid) combinations of these. The vehicle draws energy from this store at some rate expressible in Joules per second, which is Watts. Multiply this rate by some efficiency percentage (like 30% with an internal combustion engine), and that is the power getting to the wheels. The total energy in the store is of interest in determining the range of the vehicle
However, from the safety angle any energy store is a potential bomb or fireball, and you need to think about what will happen to it in a crash. In conventional cars the fuel tank is fairly well protected from impact; once broken it tends to catch fire. Designing a car with a flywheel would also need to consider a crash - for instance if it escaped from its casing it would shoot off like a random cannon ball. The potential damage of either fuel or a loose flywheel would be measurable by their energy content at the time. This was the point raised by the GGP.
The GP's analogy of a flywheel as a "connected mesh of weights" is a strange one and irrelevant to the point.
The power used by the gyro is likely less that the power loss due to the differential.
Power loss in the differential mechanism is miniscule. It only comes into action when cornering, and only slightly so on typical corners on the open road (like half-a-turn of one wheel relative to the other). Moreover, it is gears in an oil bath, the efficiency of which is very high.
Of course, the differential is usually bolted to the crown wheel of the final drive, with which it shares the oil bath, and turns with it. The crown wheel is being driven by the prop-shaft pinion at hundreds of rpm, and any gear inefficiency will show up more here, not that is much to worry about even so. In any case, this gyro car will also have a final drive crown-and-pinion, or some equivalent device of similar efficiency such as a chain sprocket, as most motor bikes have.
Even during the Victorian Era, much interclass screwing around took place. Don't confuse the stereotype of exemplary chastity with, as they say, "the facts on the ground". Prostitution was all over the place. Etc.
Prostitution generally involved higher class men screwing lower class women. The other way round was rather unusual.
Trains are actually either electric(passenger) or diesel electric(freight) hybrids. Both utilize batteries.
Eh?
Yes, trains use batteries like any car uses batteries, but we are talking about main propulsion (traction, to use the railway engineering term) batteries here, not auxiliaries.
There are plenty of diesel passenger trains in the world BTW, and there are diesel locos with direct mechanical transmission too - mostly shunters (switchers in the US?). But diesel-electric is so common that it is usually referred to just as "diesel".
That sounds kind of dumb. Why would a train need batteries for propulsion?
Because wires can be unsightly, third rails need to be maintained and secured over long distances, and there is always the occasional flooding or natural disaster that could disable an electrical line at the worst possible location when it's sharing a road with cars, or perhaps being loaded on a ferry.
Third rails are not a good idea over long distance because they need to be relatively low voltage ( under 1000V) so have significant resistance losses. They tend to be used for metro systems as they need smaller tunnels.
Overhead wires (pretty well standardised at 25kV) are unsightly, but are now more-or less standard in Europe for any new longer-distance line or refurbishment of an existing one. They are not all that expensive to put up and maintain as these things go (less than maintaining a fleet of Diesel locos).
I don't understand your point about "sharing a road with cars, or perhaps being loaded on a ferry". Sharing a road is almost unheard of in the UK (although it was once common when railway sidings reached into factories). As for loading onto a ferry, quite rare, but the main-line loco would not go onto the ferry. Only the wagons or carriages would be put on board, and they would be handled on and off with diesel shunter locos.
FTFA:- "Even major companies like Apple have suffered from their technology being copied by Chinese firms"
Technology like rounded corners. That is when I lost my last shred of sympathy
He invented a radio with a clockwork motor driving a dynamo. The company (of which he sold his share) subsequenty manufactured radios with batteries charged by hand-turning a dynamo. Sounds far more than a "tweak" to me. Which part of his patent does he think they infringed - the handle? The dynamo? or the radio? - I have heard of all those things before. The combination of those things? - they did not use that combination of things.
I remember this guy on TV, with Mandela who was welcoming it. Of course Mandela would, as would enable him to broadcast his spin to his remote population.
I've got a great new idea that will revolutionize the commercia airline industry. Do I have to build an airplane to keep my patent.
It is extremely unlikely that you have an idea that will really "revolutionize the commercial airline industry" unless you are already so familiar with it that you will be in the aircraft industry already. Even if you do, the best thing will be to get into the industry yourself first to promote it.
There are too many "armchair inventors" who are out of touch with the field in which they believe they have revolutionary inventions, unless it is really trivial like a revolutionary clothes peg. I once worked for a railway company (London Underground) as an engineer, and among other things I had the job of assessing technical suggestions sent in by members of the public, briefing the Chief Mech. Engineer on them, and writing back to the author. Most of them were completely crackpot, based on the same sort of pseudo-science as perpetual motion machinery. Typically, they considered static stability but neglected dynamic stablity, or (like the one about blowing the trains along by filling the tunnel with compressed air) neglected the fact that we needed to run trains at close intervals. (That one also neglected the fact that it costs money to compress air - they thought compressed air was free).
During my time there, being in a "think tank" type of branch, I made some suggestions for improvements myself; but to be honest I think that the outsiders' suggestions got more attention than my own did! I was particularly peeved when one of my suggestions was rejected as "impractical", yet two years later I saw that the Japanese had introduced trains with the same idea - they had invented it quite independently. Different inventors Inventing the same thing is quite common (photography, jet engines, TV etc) when a need for it arises.
He's not a particularly good poster child for someone living in poverty either, living on his island on the Thames in South West London. He's just overextended his finances, and has an overextended sense of entitlement to match.
Agreed. He is living in one of the most expensive spots in London. While "He built the house..... in the 1970s for just £20,000" might sound cheap, it is disingenuous; that figure it cannot include the land cost, which was probably 10 times that figure back then and 100 times it today.
It reminds me of the map of the world as seen by Ronald Reagan. The area of each nation or continent is in proportion to how much thought he gave to it.
Sounds to me like a lost business opportunity....... should've simply expanded their offerings to include that service.
I don't think you know Norfolk. I am suprised they have even got as far as installing land-line phones there, let alone selling Cupurtino products. I think they will stick to selling cider.
I had a little look at what office would cost me. £220($340) for the crippled version £389.99($605) for the full version.
[westlake replied:]
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive version of Office he can find. The odds are quite good, of course, that he qualifies for the academic or professional discount.
I see that tuppe666 has already replied that he does not qualify for such discounts, and neither do I as it happens.
But I also notice that Westlake has dropped the £ (GBP) prices leaving only the dollars, so I guess he is in the USA. Tuppe666's prices might seem shocking, but the fact that he gives the prices in £(GBP) first shows he is in the UK (as I am) where the prices ARE shocking. What he quotes is a fair example in that they are Curry's store prices [www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/office-software/323_3082_30146_xx_xx/xx-criteria.html], and Currys here are the dominant IT retailer. The only other retailers I could reasonably get to in person are small outfits where the prices are generally higher still, last time I looked.
Yes, you can buy cheaper on-line (even from Currys) but the average Joe would prefer the shop because the buttering-up he gets from the sales-person helps to ease his FUD about buying anything technical.
While some religious nuts are over-playing this, you are seriously under-playing it. We would not "all die", but you would certainly not want to be standing 1 km from the [projected] impact point. It would be like a 1-2 Megaton bomb going off more-or-less over your head (from the Purdue link - which I ran and found the results rather ambiguous btw). The Hiroshima bomb (also an air blast) was only about 1% of that energy and took out the centre of a city to a radius of about 2 km.
Asteroid 2012-DA14 is about the same size as the 1908 Tunguska Meteorite. Take a look at the descriptions and the photo (taken ~50 years after the event) and the descriptions. Trees were flattened out to 25 km. Here:-
it's simply about insulation. Buildings and houses can save 90% of energy used by simply insulating things like attics and walls. Boring I know.
I don't know about New York, but most houses in the UK are already insulated up to the hilt. There may be another 5% to gain if you add another yard of insulation, but it is diminishing returns. 90% less? (Do they really mean using only one tenth the energy they do now?) - no way! Even starting from a base of no insulation (like my parents' house did) there was no-where near a 90% gain. More like 30%
To get 90% gain you would need to knock all buildings down and start with something fundamentally different. Airlock doors for a start, like into a microchip factory clean-room.
Automatics still have a neutral gear. Most people don't use it
Really?
I always start in neutral if I am going off forward. I can only start in Park or Neutral and if I start in Park I must pull through Reverse on the way to Drive [P-R-D-3-2-1) which gives an irritating backward jerk. I also put it in neutral at most red lights as the engine pulling against the final drive through the torque converter will be using more fuel. Traffic lights take ages to change in the UK.
Nevermind that the parking brake is nothing more than a manual engagement of the same brake system. If the brake system isn't working for whatever reason that little manual handle or pedal isn't going to do a thing.
In the UK it is a legal requirement that the handbrake does not use the same system as the footbrake, except for the shoes themselves, which are far less likely to fail than the means of actuating them. Thus the footbrake system is hydraulic (usually) and the handbrake is Bowden cable.
As it happens, though in the UK I have an American car, but it is the same and no different from the USA models in this respect I understand, so I guess the law is the same there.
I would recommend against this practice [coasting] mainly for security reasons. You may suddenly need to accelerate to avoid an accident.
In many years of driving I have never once needed to accelerate to avoid an accident - except when overtaking, when of course I am certainly not going to be in neutral. Can you give an example of how this could occur - passing a red light and realising you need to get clear of the intersection asap perhaps? Not my style. I confess I did used to coast downhill years ago (college days) but do not do this today as (as others have said) modern cars shut off all fuel on the overrun.
Your advice on "security" grounds is very dated - it originated in the days when car brakes were quite poor, final drive ratios were quite low and the engine drag was a significant part of the effect. I actually have my Grandfather's "How to Drive a Motor Car" handbook from the 1930's that explains this. However, in all my own cars over the last 20 years (all larger cars), the retarding effect of the engine on the overrun is near negligable. I have also driven small cars where it is an appreciable effect however.
On most cars the handbrake actuates the same rear shoes as the footbrake. If the rear shoes burnt out at 60mph (or 125) with the handbrake, so they would routinely with the footbrake. They don't.
We have some people here saying that the rear wheels would lock up, start a spin etc, while others say the handbrake is useless, does practically nothing. Which is it?
In fact a handbrake would/should be capable of locking the rear wheels - if you panic-pull it full on suddenly. What you should do in this situation is (as someone else said) hold in the release button and bring it on gently, easing off a bit at any sign of yawing. Bringing the speed down safely will be a slow process, but should be done long before you finish crossing Belgium, small country though it is.
The guy certainly would not have had this experience on a UK motorway. They are so crowded he would have rear-ended someone within seconds.
It [handbrake] probably would have broken. The parking brake doesn't typically use the hydraulic system the rest of the car uses. In my vehicle, it's a wire than runs back to a separate, much weaker, mechanism.
It certainly should not break, even with "panic" strength applied, unless the cable is partly rusted through (but don't you have a roadworthiness tests where you are?).
Most handbrakes I've used can barely hold the vehicle against an idling engine, let alone one that's propelling a car at 200km/h.
In fact it could take less force to slow the car from 125 mph down to about 40 mph than from "idling" speed to zero, although it will take longer. At 125 - 40 the car will be in a high gear (high speed but low torque) and there will be a lot of wind resistance as a bonus. Moving at "idling" the gearbox will be at a low ratio (low speed but high torque), and the idling governor might (depending on the set-up) give all the throttle it needs to keep it up to idling rpm.
Handbrakes almost never get used, so they're the first thing to seize up.
Speak for yourself, I use mine at every traffic light rather than keeping my foot on the footbrake. Anyway, don't you have an annual roadworthiness test in your neck of the woods, handbrake included? The testers are quite fussy about the handbrake in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
made sense. Could you explain where the original poster made his/her mistake?
They said :
If you want to think like an engineer, stop thinking about energy. Think about power. Measure everything in power.
Power is the rate of transfer of energy. Think about one and you need to think about the other. Like income is a rate of transfer of wealth (to use a finance analogy as the GP did).
With a vehicle going along, power (measured in Watts - or horsepower in old units) is the main interest - because it determines the rate (ie speed) at which it can push through the air (and other) resistance and climb hills. In doing this it is drawing energy (measured in Joules) from its store which could be in fuel, in a flywheel, a battery, or (hybrid) combinations of these. The vehicle draws energy from this store at some rate expressible in Joules per second, which is Watts. Multiply this rate by some efficiency percentage (like 30% with an internal combustion engine), and that is the power getting to the wheels. The total energy in the store is of interest in determining the range of the vehicle
However, from the safety angle any energy store is a potential bomb or fireball, and you need to think about what will happen to it in a crash. In conventional cars the fuel tank is fairly well protected from impact; once broken it tends to catch fire. Designing a car with a flywheel would also need to consider a crash - for instance if it escaped from its casing it would shoot off like a random cannon ball. The potential damage of either fuel or a loose flywheel would be measurable by their energy content at the time. This was the point raised by the GGP.
The GP's analogy of a flywheel as a "connected mesh of weights" is a strange one and irrelevant to the point.
The power used by the gyro is likely less that the power loss due to the differential.
Power loss in the differential mechanism is miniscule. It only comes into action when cornering, and only slightly so on typical corners on the open road (like half-a-turn of one wheel relative to the other). Moreover, it is gears in an oil bath, the efficiency of which is very high.
Of course, the differential is usually bolted to the crown wheel of the final drive, with which it shares the oil bath, and turns with it. The crown wheel is being driven by the prop-shaft pinion at hundreds of rpm, and any gear inefficiency will show up more here, not that is much to worry about even so. In any case, this gyro car will also have a final drive crown-and-pinion, or some equivalent device of similar efficiency such as a chain sprocket, as most motor bikes have.
If you want to think like an engineer, stop thinking about energy.
Don't know about the GP, but I am an engineer and what I am thinking is that your post is a load of tosh.
Even during the Victorian Era, much interclass screwing around took place. Don't confuse the stereotype of exemplary chastity with, as they say, "the facts on the ground". Prostitution was all over the place. Etc.
Prostitution generally involved higher class men screwing lower class women. The other way round was rather unusual.
I could see a point occurring where it is cheaper to put batteries on a train than to run wires
I can't. Fuel cells might do it though.
Trains are actually either electric(passenger) or diesel electric(freight) hybrids. Both utilize batteries.
Eh?
Yes, trains use batteries like any car uses batteries, but we are talking about main propulsion (traction, to use the railway engineering term) batteries here, not auxiliaries.
There are plenty of diesel passenger trains in the world BTW, and there are diesel locos with direct mechanical transmission too - mostly shunters (switchers in the US?). But diesel-electric is so common that it is usually referred to just as "diesel".
That sounds kind of dumb. Why would a train need batteries for propulsion?
Because wires can be unsightly, third rails need to be maintained and secured over long distances, and there is always the occasional flooding or natural disaster that could disable an electrical line at the worst possible location when it's sharing a road with cars, or perhaps being loaded on a ferry.
Third rails are not a good idea over long distance because they need to be relatively low voltage ( under 1000V) so have significant resistance losses. They tend to be used for metro systems as they need smaller tunnels.
Overhead wires (pretty well standardised at 25kV) are unsightly, but are now more-or less standard in Europe for any new longer-distance line or refurbishment of an existing one. They are not all that expensive to put up and maintain as these things go (less than maintaining a fleet of Diesel locos).
I don't understand your point about "sharing a road with cars, or perhaps being loaded on a ferry". Sharing a road is almost unheard of in the UK (although it was once common when railway sidings reached into factories). As for loading onto a ferry, quite rare, but the main-line loco would not go onto the ferry. Only the wagons or carriages would be put on board, and they would be handled on and off with diesel shunter locos.
"breaks" for vehicle brakes keeps coming up here. Is this an Americanism?
But this is a story about Oxford FFS, the cultural heart of the English language, UK version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary
Sorry, I don't sympathise with this guy.
:- "Even major companies like Apple have suffered from their technology being copied by Chinese firms"
FTFA
Technology like rounded corners. That is when I lost my last shred of sympathy
He invented a radio with a clockwork motor driving a dynamo. The company (of which he sold his share) subsequenty manufactured radios with batteries charged by hand-turning a dynamo. Sounds far more than a "tweak" to me. Which part of his patent does he think they infringed - the handle? The dynamo? or the radio? - I have heard of all those things before. The combination of those things? - they did not use that combination of things.
I remember this guy on TV, with Mandela who was welcoming it. Of course Mandela would, as would enable him to broadcast his spin to his remote population.
I've got a great new idea that will revolutionize the commercia airline industry. Do I have to build an airplane to keep my patent.
It is extremely unlikely that you have an idea that will really "revolutionize the commercial airline industry" unless you are already so familiar with it that you will be in the aircraft industry already. Even if you do, the best thing will be to get into the industry yourself first to promote it.
There are too many "armchair inventors" who are out of touch with the field in which they believe they have revolutionary inventions, unless it is really trivial like a revolutionary clothes peg. I once worked for a railway company (London Underground) as an engineer, and among other things I had the job of assessing technical suggestions sent in by members of the public, briefing the Chief Mech. Engineer on them, and writing back to the author. Most of them were completely crackpot, based on the same sort of pseudo-science as perpetual motion machinery. Typically, they considered static stability but neglected dynamic stablity, or (like the one about blowing the trains along by filling the tunnel with compressed air) neglected the fact that we needed to run trains at close intervals. (That one also neglected the fact that it costs money to compress air - they thought compressed air was free).
During my time there, being in a "think tank" type of branch, I made some suggestions for improvements myself; but to be honest I think that the outsiders' suggestions got more attention than my own did! I was particularly peeved when one of my suggestions was rejected as "impractical", yet two years later I saw that the Japanese had introduced trains with the same idea - they had invented it quite independently. Different inventors Inventing the same thing is quite common (photography, jet engines, TV etc) when a need for it arises.
He's not a particularly good poster child for someone living in poverty either, living on his island on the Thames in South West London. He's just overextended his finances, and has an overextended sense of entitlement to match.
Agreed. He is living in one of the most expensive spots in London. While "He built the house ..... in the 1970s for just £20,000" might sound cheap, it is disingenuous; that figure it cannot include the land cost, which was probably 10 times that figure back then and 100 times it today.
It reminds me of the map of the world as seen by Ronald Reagan. The area of each nation or continent is in proportion to how much thought he gave to it.
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/38-the-world-according-to-ronald-reagan
[Scroll down]
Sounds to me like a lost business opportunity. ...... should've simply expanded their offerings to include that service.
I don't think you know Norfolk. I am suprised they have even got as far as installing land-line phones there, let alone selling Cupurtino products. I think they will stick to selling cider.
...... and it is an asteriod until it contacts Earth's atmosphere.
Read the GP again, this time with your irony detectors switched on.
[tuppe666 wrote :]
I had a little look at what office would cost me. £220($340) for the crippled version £389.99($605) for the full version.
[westlake replied :]
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive version of Office he can find. The odds are quite good, of course, that he qualifies for the academic or professional discount.
I see that tuppe666 has already replied that he does not qualify for such discounts, and neither do I as it happens.
But I also notice that Westlake has dropped the £ (GBP) prices leaving only the dollars, so I guess he is in the USA. Tuppe666's prices might seem shocking, but the fact that he gives the prices in £(GBP) first shows he is in the UK (as I am) where the prices ARE shocking. What he quotes is a fair example in that they are Curry's store prices [www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/office-software/323_3082_30146_xx_xx/xx-criteria.html], and Currys here are the dominant IT retailer. The only other retailers I could reasonably get to in person are small outfits where the prices are generally higher still, last time I looked.
Yes, you can buy cheaper on-line (even from Currys) but the average Joe would prefer the shop because the buttering-up he gets from the sales-person helps to ease his FUD about buying anything technical.
Whooooooosh !!
While some religious nuts are over-playing this, you are seriously under-playing it. We would not "all die", but you would certainly not want to be standing 1 km from the [projected] impact point. It would be like a 1-2 Megaton bomb going off more-or-less over your head (from the Purdue link - which I ran and found the results rather ambiguous btw). The Hiroshima bomb (also an air blast) was only about 1% of that energy and took out the centre of a city to a radius of about 2 km.
:-
Asteroid 2012-DA14 is about the same size as the 1908 Tunguska Meteorite. Take a look at the descriptions and the photo (taken ~50 years after the event) and the descriptions. Trees were flattened out to 25 km. Here
www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/feb/08/tunguska-asteroid-comet-1908-siberia
it's simply about insulation. Buildings and houses can save 90% of energy used by simply insulating things like attics and walls. Boring I know.
I don't know about New York, but most houses in the UK are already insulated up to the hilt. There may be another 5% to gain if you add another yard of insulation, but it is diminishing returns. 90% less? (Do they really mean using only one tenth the energy they do now?) - no way! Even starting from a base of no insulation (like my parents' house did) there was no-where near a 90% gain. More like 30%
To get 90% gain you would need to knock all buildings down and start with something fundamentally different. Airlock doors for a start, like into a microchip factory clean-room.
Automatics still have a neutral gear. Most people don't use it
Really?
I always start in neutral if I am going off forward. I can only start in Park or Neutral and if I start in Park I must pull through Reverse on the way to Drive [P-R-D-3-2-1) which gives an irritating backward jerk. I also put it in neutral at most red lights as the engine pulling against the final drive through the torque converter will be using more fuel. Traffic lights take ages to change in the UK.
Nevermind that the parking brake is nothing more than a manual engagement of the same brake system. If the brake system isn't working for whatever reason that little manual handle or pedal isn't going to do a thing.
In the UK it is a legal requirement that the handbrake does not use the same system as the footbrake, except for the shoes themselves, which are far less likely to fail than the means of actuating them. Thus the footbrake system is hydraulic (usually) and the handbrake is Bowden cable.
As it happens, though in the UK I have an American car, but it is the same and no different from the USA models in this respect I understand, so I guess the law is the same there.
I would recommend against this practice [coasting] mainly for security reasons. You may suddenly need to accelerate to avoid an accident.
In many years of driving I have never once needed to accelerate to avoid an accident - except when overtaking, when of course I am certainly not going to be in neutral. Can you give an example of how this could occur - passing a red light and realising you need to get clear of the intersection asap perhaps? Not my style. I confess I did used to coast downhill years ago (college days) but do not do this today as (as others have said) modern cars shut off all fuel on the overrun.
Your advice on "security" grounds is very dated - it originated in the days when car brakes were quite poor, final drive ratios were quite low and the engine drag was a significant part of the effect. I actually have my Grandfather's "How to Drive a Motor Car" handbook from the 1930's that explains this. However, in all my own cars over the last 20 years (all larger cars), the retarding effect of the engine on the overrun is near negligable. I have also driven small cars where it is an appreciable effect however.
On most cars the handbrake actuates the same rear shoes as the footbrake. If the rear shoes burnt out at 60mph (or 125) with the handbrake, so they would routinely with the footbrake. They don't.
We have some people here saying that the rear wheels would lock up, start a spin etc, while others say the handbrake is useless, does practically nothing. Which is it?
In fact a handbrake would/should be capable of locking the rear wheels - if you panic-pull it full on suddenly. What you should do in this situation is (as someone else said) hold in the release button and bring it on gently, easing off a bit at any sign of yawing. Bringing the speed down safely will be a slow process, but should be done long before you finish crossing Belgium, small country though it is.
The guy certainly would not have had this experience on a UK motorway. They are so crowded he would have rear-ended someone within seconds.
It [handbrake] probably would have broken. The parking brake doesn't typically use the hydraulic system the rest of the car uses. In my vehicle, it's a wire than runs back to a separate, much weaker, mechanism.
It certainly should not break, even with "panic" strength applied, unless the cable is partly rusted through (but don't you have a roadworthiness tests where you are?).
Most handbrakes I've used can barely hold the vehicle against an idling engine, let alone one that's propelling a car at 200km/h.
In fact it could take less force to slow the car from 125 mph down to about 40 mph than from "idling" speed to zero, although it will take longer. At 125 - 40 the car will be in a high gear (high speed but low torque) and there will be a lot of wind resistance as a bonus. Moving at "idling" the gearbox will be at a low ratio (low speed but high torque), and the idling governor might (depending on the set-up) give all the throttle it needs to keep it up to idling rpm.
Handbrakes almost never get used, so they're the first thing to seize up.
Speak for yourself, I use mine at every traffic light rather than keeping my foot on the footbrake. Anyway, don't you have an annual roadworthiness test in your neck of the woods, handbrake included? The testers are quite fussy about the handbrake in the UK.