elbekko

Can't imagine what your lungs look like...

True, but considering the, ahem, gravity of this build some sinking may happen

Not sure storing recovery gear in a location that is likely to be buried when you need recovery is the best idea...

What's a floor other than a sturdy frame under the lift? If you have a large enough frame that extends far enough, I don't see why it wouldn't be stable. It'll also be stupidly expensive and in the way, so can't you just drill some holes and fill them up when you move out?

That is cool. Although I think part of its recovery power is just gravitational attraction of stuck vehicles...

Well, it's never just a switch and a relay. A taillight has, at a minimum, the taillight itself, an indicator, a brake light, maybe a fog light, maybe a reverse light. So that's a separate cable for all of those. That's a bunch of weight. Then you duplicate half of those to the instrument cluster. Then duplicate all of them for a trailer plug. You can replace all this with 4 wires and a small, simple module. Something says "I'm braking", and the taillight thinks "hmm, better turn on the brake light". Have a trailer hookup? That module sees the same signal, and lights up the trailer's brake lights. Remember when we put the towbar on my Merc? One power wire, one ground, and a 2-wire plug for the CANBus. Want a 7-pin plug? Then put in a 7-pin module. Want a 13-pin plug? Put in a 13-pin module. The rest of the car doesn't care, and doesn't have to care. Same with the taillights again. The body computer doesn't need to care if you have an old-school bulb, or LEDs, or an OLED panel. The only thing that ever needs to know about that is the taillight itself. In software development we call this separation of concerns. Don't talk directly to dependencies, talk to an abstract interface and stop caring about how it works.

Oh, god no. I'll just give a wave in the general direction of the P38. Hundreds of separate wires for everything, ECUs that on the inside look like they're from a computer from the 80s (tbf, they were). The BeCM that controls everything, and thus needs feeds to and from everything. Modern cars are a miracle of reliability, in general. Especially looking at powertrain, imagine plopping a RV8 and Flapper EFI in something now. People would be livid that they'd have to change the timing chain before 4 oil changes on a modern car. The electronics now are much better developed and much more robust internally. Most of the problems with new cars are infotainment related, because it's so in-your-face that people notice it. It doesn't matter, your car won't stop driving because your infotainment is rebooting. And if they'd just fix the network in cars, single modules would have a much reduced chance of bringing down the whole system. CANBus is a good idea, executed not-so-great, that's all. Don't forget that also started 20+ years ago. Stand-alone modules communicating on a central bus is so much better than a monolithic system. It's the same as in software development: cars now are more of an event-driven microservice architecture. People mock a taillight ECU, but I prefer it being an isolated job over the body computer having to care about how to drive the taillights. If you have memory seats, exactly 2 things *need* to know about them: the button to operate it, and the seat itself. But you can have the infotainment system listen to the same message, so it can display a "hey driver x, welcome back". Or save dashboard layouts based on the memory selection. 0 cost, 0 extra wires, the body computer doesn't need to give a single damn. Want to control the passenger seat? Easy, just send a message to that instead. If you want your diagnostics to give you more helpful codes, you'll need even more sensors that can go wrong. And then people will moan that the codes only show up because the sensor is broken. The biggest failing of modern cars is that everything is locked down. If the CANBus was well-documented and open-source, fault finding would be much easier. So would tuning, swapping out components, ... An engine swap *should* be electronically trivial these days, as you'd just need to plop in a module that translates manufacturer X messages to manufacturer Y messages. Sadly, it isn't, because everything is closed and even encrypted now. Partially because of automakers being greedy, partially because of people being afraid of the evil hackers that'll make your car shut down from the next lane over, partially because of emissions requirements that can't be tampered with. I can guarantee you the Grenadier will fix exactly none of this. They've taken all of this from BMW, who will not want their IP exposed. Fault codes will be exactly the same as you get on a BMW, because that's what Bosch developed for them, and of course they're just going to reuse that system. One can hope they did a better job of waterproofing the CANBus connections and the ECUs, but who knows. Probably not. (Sorry for the unstructured rant, that's how my brain works...)

I was about to say, maybe put on some trousers

Going for a full bird?

Last year I was inatalling a lightbar in -15 with only a Leatherman and a hammer to saw and drill holes. I think we need a support group.

Indeed. If they really want to improve electronic reliability, they'd improve the CANBus system so one bad module doesn't take out the whole network ring. Computers moved past that 20 years ago, time for cars to start using some more intelligent networks.

I think it's commonly used to smooth prints by wiping the print with an acetone rag. Haven't tried it myself though.

Once you go parametric CAD, anything else just feels annoying and clunky. Fusion 360 is ok, but I taught myself on Solidworks years ago, and still get horribly frustrated by Fusion quite often. But it has a free version, and Solidworks doesn't, so I use it anyway.

I've seen people convert those bandsaws so they can also be used as a vertical bandsaw. Seems pretty useful.

Feels a bit double for me, yes. It's good technical information on one hand, but on the other hand it's all videos from Nige's business...

That looks a fair bit chunkier than the RC car motor that's in mine

That's not a bad idea. I'll have a look at it.

I ordered the AliExpress one. Then realised I didn't check the delivery date, feb 2023... dangit. I'll take the current one apart and see if I can indeed just order the motor separately. No huge rush, don't have much time until january anyway.

The description of that one is hilarious " Suitable for welding of industrial, woodworking and equipment. " " Motor: 8kw "

So finally had a moment to have a quick look at it yesterday. This is the motor that's in there: (Note the totally-not-redneck way of improving spring tension because the rollers kept slipping when I just got it) The motor has no markings on it, but I tried to measure voltage and it fluctuated between 9V and 13V, so I'm guessing it's a 12V motor. Very clearly sounding unhappy. So I guess one of those generic 12V ones should work. I'll order one and try.

Nothing more permanent than half-finished electrics...

I had a quick google of the Fiamma stuff, and nearly fell off my chair price-wise. I still don't get how a bag, a tarp, a roll, and some aluminium poles are worth that much money. For the 270° awnings I somewhat get it, there's some R&D involved there, but still... Might be cheaper and easier to just carry and easy-up partytent. Comes with sides too.

How disappointed was your wife when it wasn't actually a broche?

It'll depend a lot on what type of 3500kg. A low flatbed with some steel beams on it is going to hit the range a lot less than a big box trailer. Same as for an ICE car, but more pronounced. An Ibex EV will be interesting either way, because it's not really the most aerodynamic vehicle to start with.

Because Apple is a terrible company that's been riding on the laurels of a very limited and closed ecosystem. If they had to support half the hardware and legacy software Windows does, they'd be 10x worse. Opinions and experiences vary, I guess. Although I don't see why you use W10 "dumbing things down" as an argument, as that's been Apple's main strategy for the past decade. Oh well, back to EVs. I've test driven two, an Audi e-Tron and a Mercedes EQC. Both were nice, was almost tempted by the EQC until I saw the price tag and realised it would be utterly useless at 50% of my usage, so no thanks. A plug-in hybrid with fairly decent range (100km) is on its way though. And that can still run on petrol for long trips and tow 3.5T. Teslas I've never liked (except the original Roadster), they've always looked terrible inside and out, and Musk is a total idiot.