Superpants

'Blowouts' are no an uncommon occurance in caravans, but in reality are not the explosive destruction of the tyre you might expect. In a car that gets a puncture, you will likely notice that the tyre is deflating sufficiently early to get yourself off the road before the tyre is completely destroyed. With caravans the driver of the towing vehicle won't necessarily notice that the tyre is going flat, and will continue to drive, all the time the tyre is slowly destroying itself until it leaves the rim and you end up with an uncontrollable caravan or shreds left on the rim ripping the wheelarch to pieces. I'd therefore suggest anything that either warns you of impending danger, or gives you more time is a positive safety advantage- so both the Tyron bands and pressure monitoring would help. I attanded a very good demonstration of the combined system in 1999 at silverstone, and they do give a much longer life before the wheel leaves the rim and give you better control

X-Terminate or X-Terminator ?

Electrical fired smokes are used in theatre, so you should be able to get them from local theatrical supplier- it is however likely you will need to buy a box of twelve. There is some good info here http://www.bigclive.com/pyro.htm about building kit to fire them (as well as lots of lovely other projects to get distracted with! Worth bearing in mind that there is no smoke without flame- I'd be wary of where you place it so there is no likelihood of it igniting anything else flammable- including any dust landing on it! theatrical pyro manufacturers like lemaitre will give you safe distances in their data.

John's link is what I used to use- works very well!

One of the other advantages to the adhesives like this over some others (like the common epoxies) is that they are pretty viscous and are good at gap filling so they don't run when you are odd angles and they tolerate some variation in the bond line.

Starter for 10; Garden/ garage circuits should be fed off a 30mA RCD. It therefore sounds to me that this needs closer looking at!

3m Trade name for their feet is Bumpon which might help the search. Draught excluder tape?

Sean- you are spot on. Whilst I agree that the brakeing should be done by the towing vehicle, It sounds like the height of lunacy to me to attempt to do any towing on a public highway in a situation where one of the vehicle has no brakes at all. It's time to call recovery, use a trailer or winch or lift the vehicle.

"If you need to recover a vehicle without brakes. Use that to tow as the towing vehicle shouldn't be using brakes." I hope you don't mean anywhere near the road........ In fact I really hope that was a joke!

Fair enough- thought it worth asking the obvious!!!

Playing devils advocate would it not be cheaper to replace the element than buy a transformer?

Thanks! One of the reasons I wrote this was that I felt that it was such a perennial question here, people must be interested in the subject! Mike

With the 'aggresive' tyres, the initial contact surface area with the ground is lower than with an equivalent AT, so the ground pressure will increase, and hence the penetration will increase. Couple this with a deeper tread pattern, and even if you are static, 'damage' to the ground will be greater than an equivalent AT. Once you are moving though the interaction will get far more complicated.

Going back a few points- must (&shall) is generally used in legislation and standards to mean a statement is to be complied with, without exception. I think the confusion comes here as the document refered to is guidance. As there no law explicitly stating that the same standards have to be met, then the recommendation cannot be stronger than a should. As an aside- if you are prepared to spend £1000 on headlamps, then a little bit more expense to install a levelling system and washers shouldn't scare you off....

If you are splitting down the +Ve feed then you should ideally fuse the individual circuits as close as possible to the point you are splitting the supply, so a fuse block would be ideal. If you do this then you can be certain you have wiring that is suitably protected and a much reduced risk of sparks/ fires or other nastiness happening!

I've got a couple of the mains type ones which work really well. I like the fact that they are only about 40mm thick, so work nicely laying flat when you are under the car with no propensity to fall over at just the wrong moment.

Some Interesting figures that explain the trends: September 2011 sales figures for landrover UK 7596 China 3510 N America 2976 Italy 1075 Russia 1049 I guess from these that farmers in the UK now make a very small proportion of sales, so no suprise that the big selling markets will get the type of cars they want. Unfortunately I don't have breakdown by model.

I have tried CNCit- but their prices seem quite high & not economic to make the job a goer. I had thought about some sort of copy router or suitable jigging- this will have to be the fall back plan if I can't find a suitable manufacturer. Thanks for the scanning offer- I do however have full drawings- so no issue there.

It needs to be 3D as it is more than just a profile (so can't be laser cut unfortunately).

Can anyone recommend a good, and cheap CNC routing company who can rout 6mm ply. I have had some parts prototyped with a company that gave good service, but were quite expensive. I no need a volume of parts (at least 100, probably more) around 300mm square and am looking for a good supplier.

The arduino system is intended to get people into using microcontrollers and basic programming as an easy introduction. Whilst this will make a lot of the parts of your project easier, most of the electronics industry tends to design bespoke circuits for the application. You probably need to think carefully about the goals of your project before making any decision (and not just the written out defined goals). Arduino bypasses quite a bit of the basic hardware development you would need, but you might find you learn a lot more about hardware design and software skills by working from scratch. These skills are arguably more useful to you in the long term if you want to pursue an electronics career. Just a thought!

Whilst it's expensive, I can't say I'm suprised- handling a full sheet of floppy ally without damging it isn't the easiest job. Do you actually need a full sheet? You may well find that having it cut will reduce the costs.

Might manage to make it myself this year too- meeting up sounds like a good idea!

What about a tube from a spark plug- crude but might work?

Si- I wasn't taking it as criticism, but thought it best to better explain myself. It is absolutely right to experiment, take a few risks and learn something new (and enjoy yourself in the process), but I tend to take the view when experimenting that learning from other peoples experiences and mistakes is also important. At least knowing that something has the potential to kill you or seriously injure you will guide how you approach the problem- hence your welding mask when short circuiting batteries! I also agree this might be a bit academic if someone does have difficulty getting hold of motors, but they are starting to become more available (albeit at a price!).