I feel compelled to point out that people have been saying this since at least the time of Plato, more than 2000 years ago. This raises the question: have they? Is modern-day technology the result of the stupid having overrun the world? If so: bring on the stupid. If not: they haven't managed it in 2000 years so why would they suddenly start now?
I'm okay with extradition, because surely Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Kissinger can now be extradited to East Timor for what they did there in the '70's. Or is this secretly the sort of setup where people only get extradited *to* the US, for looking for UFO's, rather than *from* the US, for being complicit in the gruesome killings of hundreds of thousands of people?
Generally, the training regimen is 'train low, sleep high' -- ride (for the large number of elite cyclists who do this) or run at low altitude/high pressure, and recover at high altitude/low pressure. This is usually done by using hypobaric chambers at sealevel exercise, although some people do commute to make this work. There is a weakest-link assumption: improving your oxygen-carrying capability by sleeping at high altitude does nothing to improve your heart's strength or any of a number of other possible limitations, so if that's what's keeping you back the altitude training will do very little to make you more competitive.
I'm not serious enough at running to qualify as 'elite' certainly, but it's been my experience as a fairly high-level, high altitude bike racer that I can outrun almost anyone I know at low altitudes, and anyone, including some pretty damn good runners, at high altitudes. (I spend a lot of time riding/training in Leadville, Colorado, at 3600 meters elevation.)
I like to drive on windy roads when it's really windy out. A minute is a really minute bit of time, geologically speaking. When someone's crying at the computer console beside you, do you console the person? Periodic acid will stain your periodic table poster a nice purple color.
Those aren't pretty, but people understand them. Isonyms haven't broken the English language so far: why not add more?
I disagree. Putting him in jail for life is incarceration, not rehabilitation, and does diddly squat for all the people he harmed. I think accountants and auditors should've gone over his financial records and penalized him all the money he made during his time at Enron, plus another, oh, say, $50mil, and put all that money into a fund split up among the people who were screwed over by his selfishness. Plus five years in jail and, most importantly, a five-ten year parole in which he was prevented from being an officer of any corporation or member of the board of directors of any corporation. Take away his livelihood, like he did to other people, keep him from doing more damage, and repay, as best possible, some fraction of the people whom his actions affected.
Nobody should get more time in prison for cooking the books (or for copyright infringement) than a person who murders. Criminal penalties should fit the crime. But so should the financial penalties, and his financial crimes were large indeed.
I'd say the same thing about Skilling and the world.com people, while I'm at it. Hit them where it hurts: get them working at McDonalds to make their car payments, and use their ill-gotten gains to help those they harmed.
Consider it a different version of "an eye for an eye": their punishment is to supply from what they have, what they've made another lose. Which, by the way, is what I believe "an eye for an eye" originally was intended to do: if you blind someone, you must then act as that person's eyes.
I think you're using the right word. Foot anatomy: the long bones that run down your foot and aren't really moveable are the tarsils. The toes are the metatarsils. I usually call the joint between them -- where your toes bend -- the ball of the foot. That's the bit you're supposed to use when you kick, in martial arts. I have my bike set up so that joint is directly above the pedal spindle, and it's also what I use when I lift weights, like I'm walking in high heels, I guess. (My girlfriend always walks like that when she's not wearing shoes because of a foot injury. It's weird to watch.) So yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing and I just lift weights weirdly.
I think I must be a weirdo: I *do* push with my soles, since that's how I push my bike pedals. Probably most people don't.
Cleats are really nice because you can pull *up* on the pedals in sprints/climbs and push more than your body weight, and they keep your feet securely located when you're hitting nasty terrain (although a good trials rider can jump a bike onto a car without cleats/clips, so that's pretty skill-dependent.)
I hadn't heard about setting the cleat way far back. I'll have to try that.
I agree that the weight is part of it. My road bike weighs like 9 kilos. I've never seen a recumbent anywhere nearly that light. But I *think* part of it is also that the geometry of a road bike is better for high-rpm at full power. In other words: I think the power curves are different, that the torque curve falls off much faster on a recumbent. Maybe it's simply because gravity's on your side with an upright: your leg is pulled down. I don't know. Climbing is acceleration (against gravity) and acceleration is a power/weight thing. Given the climbs I've seen and been on, I think that the power is lower as well as the weight being higher, but I don't have access to a dyno so I can't prove this.
And yeah, races are won on the uphills because more time is spent on the climb, if all the bikes are equal. But climbing is mostly not air-resistance-limited, and the descents are (and, more importantly, are NOT power-limited since you can't pedal that fast.) Air resistance rises as the square of drag (and power required rises as the cube) so it's not like half the frontal area means you can go twice the speed. But I'm not seeing climbers on uprights climb anywhere near twice as fast as recumbent riders. I dunno. I think it's complex and really terrain-dependent, and I wish I had some instrumentation to get a better idea of what's going on.
About the rear wheel slipping: you have a very good point. Some things to think about -- and again, I don't know the answers -- on an upright, the angle between the thrust line and the center of mass is really high -- probably almost 80 degrees. On a 'bent it's quite a bit lower, closer to 45, depending on geometry. So upright bikes generally do wheelies when too much torque is applied, unless they're on sand or gravel. I've only ever slipped a rear wheel on good surfaces (in this case, rough sandstone) when the climb was over 25% and the gearing was crazylow (1:1.2 underdrive.) The point of this being: it might be that a 'bent's force transfer, as a result of its geometry, is so good it can slip the rear wheel, where a normal bike would've long-since wheelied, so the 'bent is getting a lot more power to the ground. A LWB looks a lot more like a dragster than an upright does, and dragsters are shaped that way to get maximum acceleration.
People could make lighter recumbents than they are (generally) but I don't see any hope of a faired 'bent ever being under 10 kilos.
There are a lot of good sites on the web about making bikes of all types. The Internation Human Powered Vehicle Association has a library of links for DIY sites, some of them of exquisite sophistication, like Damon Runyard's carbon fiber bikes and some of the pedal-powered hovercraft. The reason I tend to recommend atomic zombie is that rather than buying a bunch of 4130 and jigging up a gorgeous replica Greenspeed, complete with machining and tapping details for wheel mounts, the Zombie takes a BMX, welds a new bottom bracket shell onto a stick of tubing onto the front of the BMX, bolts on a couple pieces of plywood -- and, dude, recumbent! Half a dozen non-precision weldjoints and an hour with a tablesaw and you're done! It's much more encouraging to beginners, who might not have lathes and mills. I like the website you pointed out, don't get me wrong. I'd love to build something like that. But if we want to get this critical mass of recumbent-builders going, start out with rickety dogbikes to give people a taste, then start building the superb designs.
Many of the world records in cycling were set at the Olympics in 1968 since it was held in Mexico City at 10,000 feet. Many of the more recent speed records have been set in the San Luis valley of Colorado, which has long, straight roads and 300 days of sunlight, at 7500' elevation. Air resistance is, at the speeds these people are riding, 99.99% of the effort, so it makes a simply enormous difference.
I'd have to somewhat disagree with that. For one thing: you can push *far* more than your body weight on a recumbent because you can push against the seat. I legpress something like 500 pounds and I can put that all into a recumbent's pedals -- so that's not the reason 'bents are slower on the climbs. Secondly, the climbs are slow, but the downhills, well, there's just no comparison. In the Tour de France, you're cornering-limited on many of the descents, but on longer more open descents a 'bent can double the speed of a traditional on the descent. You run out of gearing in a hurry in either case -- rarely are bikes geared for over 40 mph -- so after that it's all a matter of air resistance, and that's where 'bents really shine. I don't know that it's clear that they do as much better on downhills as they lose on uphills, but on any realistic course they certainly do vastly better than an upright bike. In the Race Across America, the best upright bikes are doing about 8 days to cross the US, while the 'bents are down in the 6 day range.
Absolutely. If you have any questions that I can't answer, I know people who can. Email me -- I believe it's on my user info page -- and I can try and hook you up. Personally, I tig-weld stuff, but I know plenty of people who use cheap buzzboxes to build things. Take a look at www.livejournal.com/users/crazybikes to see some other stupid bike projects. The book is worth the price. And let me tell you what: you have never felt so cool as the first time you take out a strange, obviously custom bike you built, and shriek down a road like you're late to your awards ceremony.
My work commute is 31 miles by car, 34 by bike. It takes me 48-65 minutes by car, and 80-95 minutes by bike. And that's a long, long commute with much of it out on country roads. Back when I was going to college 17 miles from where I lived, given the parking situation on campus and my ability to ride my bike directly to the lecture halls, it was *significantly* faster to ride than drive, like 40 minutes door-to-door on the bike and almost an hour by car. (note I was a pretty serious bike racer and wasn't dawdling along at 15 or 18 mph; I usually average about 23-25 when I'm out riding. That's not the case for people who don't really enjoy hurting a lot. Plus side: at those speeds, ya burn something like 1000 calories an hour. It's pretty nice to be able to eat a whole quart of ice cream for dessert almost every night and not worry about gaining weight.)
I don't know how handy you are, but you could consider making a 'bent. Take a look at Atomic Zombie's webpages: everything from reasonable recumbents to front-wheel-drive pure-racing designs, all made from scrap bikes and electrical conduit, welded with a cheap arcwelder. If you're willing to invest more time and energy you can build some superb designs. With my projects, I buy reasonable low-end bikes (shimano exage-level components) from local thrift stores, usually for under $40 for a complete bike, and use those partskits to outfit frames. (You do have to buy lots and lots of bike chain, usually new, since splicing used chain rarely works very well.)
Anyway, Atomic Zombie also has a book in which he goes into considerable detail about the design/construction of thirty or so different bikes. I have friends that have built most of them, and several of the people had never welded before building their first strange bikes. You can get a cheap AC welder from the likes of Harbor Freight & Salvage for way under $100.
I drive from Denver to Leadville -- 5000' to 10,000' elevation, over a couple of considerably higher passes -- most weekends. I don't manage 30 mpg, you're right, but the average round trip is about 26mpg, which isn't half bad. Really, really hard to complain about, in any case, especially given how much stuff I can put in the car. I once had a 2.2l engine block in the back. I've put five bikes in there, a jewelry display case, enough tile to redo a 20x30' room AND it still handles like a champ on windy roads. (Windy ones, too: up in Wyoming I once drove through, slalom-course-style, an ice-packed interstate with 50 mph side-winds, with semi trucks and SUV's literally being blown off the road. I drove slowly, and just chugged past them; nobody else was still moving forwards and everyone else on the highway was in either a pickup, SUV, or semi.)
But now I want to read more about the Nissan: thanks for pointing at that.
Back when my family still had our (horrendous maintenance required) '71 Jeep, we were always amazed at the places people managed to drive VW Beetles -- up simply horrendous climbs, places no SUV driver would ever go. And, as an avid bike racer, I can't tell you how much fun it is to pass SUV's on paved twisty downhills on my road bike, or on nasty rocky mud-filled uphills on my mountain bike.
The specific thing I wanted to do was replace the timing belt, which is a PITA to keep everything in alignment when the belt's off, and I have no idea where the timing marks are on the cams, for instance. Things like water pumps and oil pumps are no problem, but once I dig down in there a bit, Subaru design is weird. I rebuilt the brakes on my '92 Loyale and that made me think that some manager at Subaru had walked into a room full of newly hired mechanical engineers and said "okay, who here has never, ever worked on automotive brake systems?" and selected everyone who raised their hands and told them "now, go forth, and design the best possible system you can." Which is to say: it was a fantastic design, much better than any other car I've ever worked on (except for newer Hondas, which seem to have imitated parts of the Subaru design) but completely utterly confusing for someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of the system.
I've taken my Legacy (not even an Outback) on fairly nasty roads, passing SUV's going *so incredibly slowly* on the *SCARY* dirt-n-rocks. I wish it had a lower first gear, and get nervous when I'm crossing water that's over the tops of the wheels (since the air intake isn't all THAT high) but it's done wonderfully so far. It also handles great in the snow. Lovely, lovely car. I can drive in snow almost all year around, depending on where I'm driving, so that's really helpful. Then, on the roads, it's no WRX but it still sticks to the ground wonderfully, and it's hard to not smirk when I'm passing SUV's on tight, windy mountain roads, doing twice their speed, getting 30 mpg, with four bikes inside the car.
I wouldn't need it before then. While I'm generally reluctant to engage in copyright infringement, I also loathe paying $100 each for six books to fix my car. I'm going to mark you as a friend and ask you in a couple of months what you think of the CD, before trying to find one of my own.
Chilton's have given me egregiously wrong information (on rebuilding my girlfriend's Honda carburettor: boy did THAT go over well) but I've had fairly good luck with Haynes'. Since it doesn't seem to exist, I'll probably end up on eBay. Blah. Interesting about the new manual/diffs comment: I hadn't heard about that. Phoo and double phoo. It's still a nice car with lovely engineering.
I'm trying to get repair/rebuild information for my 2002 Subaru. It's a royal PITA. You're right: it's available. Just, the only shop manual I can find is $600, and I still haven't found good OBDII documentation. I'm sure it's out there, but their idea of reasonable price makes me grumble. I love the car but I am not sure I'll buy another car that doesn't already have a Haynes manual for it.
>People don't use windows because it is a "good" OS, they use it because everybody else does and programs are written for it.
And more to the point, people who use unlicensed versions of windows do it for one reason and one reason only: to not pay the license fee. So, some proportion of the people using it, will no longer use it once they have to pay the license fee. For some, they'll just have fewer computers (no more computer-in-each-kid's-bedroom, just one licensed one in the living room.) For others, if they have to actually pay for computer + OS, they'll go to Mac. And, for some, they'll try and stay cheap by going back to Win2000 or linux or BSD or whatever. The large majority will no doubt buy licenses one way or the other, but this will inevitably drive the number of computers running Windows down.
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>The stupid are going to overrun this world.
I feel compelled to point out that people have been saying this since at least the time of Plato, more than 2000 years ago. This raises the question: have they? Is modern-day technology the result of the stupid having overrun the world? If so: bring on the stupid. If not: they haven't managed it in 2000 years so why would they suddenly start now?
I'm okay with extradition, because surely Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Kissinger can now be extradited to East Timor for what they did there in the '70's.
Or is this secretly the sort of setup where people only get extradited *to* the US, for looking for UFO's, rather than *from* the US, for being complicit in the gruesome killings of hundreds of thousands of people?
The "special relationship" is akin to the "special relationship" that exists between a pimp and a hooker.
Generally, the training regimen is 'train low, sleep high' -- ride (for the large number of elite cyclists who do this) or run at low altitude/high pressure, and recover at high altitude/low pressure. This is usually done by using hypobaric chambers at sealevel exercise, although some people do commute to make this work. There is a weakest-link assumption: improving your oxygen-carrying capability by sleeping at high altitude does nothing to improve your heart's strength or any of a number of other possible limitations, so if that's what's keeping you back the altitude training will do very little to make you more competitive.
I'm not serious enough at running to qualify as 'elite' certainly, but it's been my experience as a fairly high-level, high altitude bike racer that I can outrun almost anyone I know at low altitudes, and anyone, including some pretty damn good runners, at high altitudes. (I spend a lot of time riding/training in Leadville, Colorado, at 3600 meters elevation.)
I like to drive on windy roads when it's really windy out. A minute is a really minute bit of time, geologically speaking. When someone's crying at the computer console beside you, do you console the person? Periodic acid will stain your periodic table poster a nice purple color.
Those aren't pretty, but people understand them. Isonyms haven't broken the English language so far: why not add more?
So *that* is why living in Manhattan is so much cheaper than living in South Dakota.
I disagree. Putting him in jail for life is incarceration, not rehabilitation, and does diddly squat for all the people he harmed. I think accountants and auditors should've gone over his financial records and penalized him all the money he made during his time at Enron, plus another, oh, say, $50mil, and put all that money into a fund split up among the people who were screwed over by his selfishness. Plus five years in jail and, most importantly, a five-ten year parole in which he was prevented from being an officer of any corporation or member of the board of directors of any corporation. Take away his livelihood, like he did to other people, keep him from doing more damage, and repay, as best possible, some fraction of the people whom his actions affected.
Nobody should get more time in prison for cooking the books (or for copyright infringement) than a person who murders. Criminal penalties should fit the crime. But so should the financial penalties, and his financial crimes were large indeed.
I'd say the same thing about Skilling and the world.com people, while I'm at it. Hit them where it hurts: get them working at McDonalds to make their car payments, and use their ill-gotten gains to help those they harmed.
Consider it a different version of "an eye for an eye": their punishment is to supply from what they have, what they've made another lose. Which, by the way, is what I believe "an eye for an eye" originally was intended to do: if you blind someone, you must then act as that person's eyes.
I think you're using the right word. Foot anatomy: the long bones that run down your foot and aren't really moveable are the tarsils. The toes are the metatarsils. I usually call the joint between them -- where your toes bend -- the ball of the foot. That's the bit you're supposed to use when you kick, in martial arts. I have my bike set up so that joint is directly above the pedal spindle, and it's also what I use when I lift weights, like I'm walking in high heels, I guess. (My girlfriend always walks like that when she's not wearing shoes because of a foot injury. It's weird to watch.) So yeah, I think we're talking about the same thing and I just lift weights weirdly.
I think I must be a weirdo: I *do* push with my soles, since that's how I push my bike pedals. Probably most people don't.
Cleats are really nice because you can pull *up* on the pedals in sprints/climbs and push more than your body weight, and they keep your feet securely located when you're hitting nasty terrain (although a good trials rider can jump a bike onto a car without cleats/clips, so that's pretty skill-dependent.)
I hadn't heard about setting the cleat way far back. I'll have to try that.
I agree that the weight is part of it. My road bike weighs like 9 kilos. I've never seen a recumbent anywhere nearly that light. But I *think* part of it is also that the geometry of a road bike is better for high-rpm at full power. In other words: I think the power curves are different, that the torque curve falls off much faster on a recumbent. Maybe it's simply because gravity's on your side with an upright: your leg is pulled down. I don't know. Climbing is acceleration (against gravity) and acceleration is a power/weight thing. Given the climbs I've seen and been on, I think that the power is lower as well as the weight being higher, but I don't have access to a dyno so I can't prove this.
And yeah, races are won on the uphills because more time is spent on the climb, if all the bikes are equal. But climbing is mostly not air-resistance-limited, and the descents are (and, more importantly, are NOT power-limited since you can't pedal that fast.) Air resistance rises as the square of drag (and power required rises as the cube) so it's not like half the frontal area means you can go twice the speed. But I'm not seeing climbers on uprights climb anywhere near twice as fast as recumbent riders.
I dunno. I think it's complex and really terrain-dependent, and I wish I had some instrumentation to get a better idea of what's going on.
About the rear wheel slipping: you have a very good point. Some things to think about -- and again, I don't know the answers -- on an upright, the angle between the thrust line and the center of mass is really high -- probably almost 80 degrees. On a 'bent it's quite a bit lower, closer to 45, depending on geometry. So upright bikes generally do wheelies when too much torque is applied, unless they're on sand or gravel. I've only ever slipped a rear wheel on good surfaces (in this case, rough sandstone) when the climb was over 25% and the gearing was crazylow (1:1.2 underdrive.) The point of this being: it might be that a 'bent's force transfer, as a result of its geometry, is so good it can slip the rear wheel, where a normal bike would've long-since wheelied, so the 'bent is getting a lot more power to the ground. A LWB looks a lot more like a dragster than an upright does, and dragsters are shaped that way to get maximum acceleration.
People could make lighter recumbents than they are (generally) but I don't see any hope of a faired 'bent ever being under 10 kilos.
... gee, no wonder none of my friends want to go bike riding with me... sigh.
You're right, of course. I just don't always remember it.
There are a lot of good sites on the web about making bikes of all types. The Internation Human Powered Vehicle Association has a library of links for DIY sites, some of them of exquisite sophistication, like Damon Runyard's carbon fiber bikes and some of the pedal-powered hovercraft.
The reason I tend to recommend atomic zombie is that rather than buying a bunch of 4130 and jigging up a gorgeous replica Greenspeed, complete with machining and tapping details for wheel mounts, the Zombie takes a BMX, welds a new bottom bracket shell onto a stick of tubing onto the front of the BMX, bolts on a couple pieces of plywood -- and, dude, recumbent! Half a dozen non-precision weldjoints and an hour with a tablesaw and you're done! It's much more encouraging to beginners, who might not have lathes and mills.
I like the website you pointed out, don't get me wrong. I'd love to build something like that. But if we want to get this critical mass of recumbent-builders going, start out with rickety dogbikes to give people a taste, then start building the superb designs.
Many of the world records in cycling were set at the Olympics in 1968 since it was held in Mexico City at 10,000 feet. Many of the more recent speed records have been set in the San Luis valley of Colorado, which has long, straight roads and 300 days of sunlight, at 7500' elevation. Air resistance is, at the speeds these people are riding, 99.99% of the effort, so it makes a simply enormous difference.
I'd have to somewhat disagree with that.
For one thing: you can push *far* more than your body weight on a recumbent because you can push against the seat. I legpress something like 500 pounds and I can put that all into a recumbent's pedals -- so that's not the reason 'bents are slower on the climbs.
Secondly, the climbs are slow, but the downhills, well, there's just no comparison. In the Tour de France, you're cornering-limited on many of the descents, but on longer more open descents a 'bent can double the speed of a traditional on the descent. You run out of gearing in a hurry in either case -- rarely are bikes geared for over 40 mph -- so after that it's all a matter of air resistance, and that's where 'bents really shine. I don't know that it's clear that they do as much better on downhills as they lose on uphills, but on any realistic course they certainly do vastly better than an upright bike. In the Race Across America, the best upright bikes are doing about 8 days to cross the US, while the 'bents are down in the 6 day range.
Absolutely. If you have any questions that I can't answer, I know people who can. Email me -- I believe it's on my user info page -- and I can try and hook you up. Personally, I tig-weld stuff, but I know plenty of people who use cheap buzzboxes to build things. Take a look at www.livejournal.com/users/crazybikes to see some other stupid bike projects.
The book is worth the price.
And let me tell you what: you have never felt so cool as the first time you take out a strange, obviously custom bike you built, and shriek down a road like you're late to your awards ceremony.
My work commute is 31 miles by car, 34 by bike. It takes me 48-65 minutes by car, and 80-95 minutes by bike. And that's a long, long commute with much of it out on country roads. Back when I was going to college 17 miles from where I lived, given the parking situation on campus and my ability to ride my bike directly to the lecture halls, it was *significantly* faster to ride than drive, like 40 minutes door-to-door on the bike and almost an hour by car.
(note I was a pretty serious bike racer and wasn't dawdling along at 15 or 18 mph; I usually average about 23-25 when I'm out riding. That's not the case for people who don't really enjoy hurting a lot. Plus side: at those speeds, ya burn something like 1000 calories an hour. It's pretty nice to be able to eat a whole quart of ice cream for dessert almost every night and not worry about gaining weight.)
I don't know how handy you are, but you could consider making a 'bent.
Take a look at Atomic Zombie's webpages: everything from reasonable recumbents to front-wheel-drive pure-racing designs, all made from scrap bikes and electrical conduit, welded with a cheap arcwelder. If you're willing to invest more time and energy you can build some superb designs. With my projects, I buy reasonable low-end bikes (shimano exage-level components) from local thrift stores, usually for under $40 for a complete bike, and use those partskits to outfit frames. (You do have to buy lots and lots of bike chain, usually new, since splicing used chain rarely works very well.)
Anyway, Atomic Zombie also has a book in which he goes into considerable detail about the design/construction of thirty or so different bikes. I have friends that have built most of them, and several of the people had never welded before building their first strange bikes. You can get a cheap AC welder from the likes of Harbor Freight & Salvage for way under $100.
I drive from Denver to Leadville -- 5000' to 10,000' elevation, over a couple of considerably higher passes -- most weekends. I don't manage 30 mpg, you're right, but the average round trip is about 26mpg, which isn't half bad. Really, really hard to complain about, in any case, especially given how much stuff I can put in the car. I once had a 2.2l engine block in the back. I've put five bikes in there, a jewelry display case, enough tile to redo a 20x30' room AND it still handles like a champ on windy roads. (Windy ones, too: up in Wyoming I once drove through, slalom-course-style, an ice-packed interstate with 50 mph side-winds, with semi trucks and SUV's literally being blown off the road. I drove slowly, and just chugged past them; nobody else was still moving forwards and everyone else on the highway was in either a pickup, SUV, or semi.)
But now I want to read more about the Nissan: thanks for pointing at that.
Back when my family still had our (horrendous maintenance required) '71 Jeep, we were always amazed at the places people managed to drive VW Beetles -- up simply horrendous climbs, places no SUV driver would ever go. And, as an avid bike racer, I can't tell you how much fun it is to pass SUV's on paved twisty downhills on my road bike, or on nasty rocky mud-filled uphills on my mountain bike.
The specific thing I wanted to do was replace the timing belt, which is a PITA to keep everything in alignment when the belt's off, and I have no idea where the timing marks are on the cams, for instance. Things like water pumps and oil pumps are no problem, but once I dig down in there a bit, Subaru design is weird. I rebuilt the brakes on my '92 Loyale and that made me think that some manager at Subaru had walked into a room full of newly hired mechanical engineers and said "okay, who here has never, ever worked on automotive brake systems?" and selected everyone who raised their hands and told them "now, go forth, and design the best possible system you can." Which is to say: it was a fantastic design, much better than any other car I've ever worked on (except for newer Hondas, which seem to have imitated parts of the Subaru design) but completely utterly confusing for someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of the system.
I've taken my Legacy (not even an Outback) on fairly nasty roads, passing SUV's going *so incredibly slowly* on the *SCARY* dirt-n-rocks. I wish it had a lower first gear, and get nervous when I'm crossing water that's over the tops of the wheels (since the air intake isn't all THAT high) but it's done wonderfully so far. It also handles great in the snow. Lovely, lovely car. I can drive in snow almost all year around, depending on where I'm driving, so that's really helpful. Then, on the roads, it's no WRX but it still sticks to the ground wonderfully, and it's hard to not smirk when I'm passing SUV's on tight, windy mountain roads, doing twice their speed, getting 30 mpg, with four bikes inside the car.
I wouldn't need it before then. While I'm generally reluctant to engage in copyright infringement, I also loathe paying $100 each for six books to fix my car. I'm going to mark you as a friend and ask you in a couple of months what you think of the CD, before trying to find one of my own.
Chilton's have given me egregiously wrong information (on rebuilding my girlfriend's Honda carburettor: boy did THAT go over well) but I've had fairly good luck with Haynes'. Since it doesn't seem to exist, I'll probably end up on eBay. Blah. Interesting about the new manual/diffs comment: I hadn't heard about that. Phoo and double phoo. It's still a nice car with lovely engineering.
I'm trying to get repair/rebuild information for my 2002 Subaru. It's a royal PITA. You're right: it's available. Just, the only shop manual I can find is $600, and I still haven't found good OBDII documentation. I'm sure it's out there, but their idea of reasonable price makes me grumble. I love the car but I am not sure I'll buy another car that doesn't already have a Haynes manual for it.
I very much enjoy your apt reference.
>People don't use windows because it is a "good" OS, they use it because everybody else does and programs are written for it.
And more to the point, people who use unlicensed versions of windows do it for one reason and one reason only: to not pay the license fee. So, some proportion of the people using it, will no longer use it once they have to pay the license fee. For some, they'll just have fewer computers (no more computer-in-each-kid's-bedroom, just one licensed one in the living room.) For others, if they have to actually pay for computer + OS, they'll go to Mac. And, for some, they'll try and stay cheap by going back to Win2000 or linux or BSD or whatever. The large majority will no doubt buy licenses one way or the other, but this will inevitably drive the number of computers running Windows down.