Night Train

I have a series steering box for my project vehicle but I have been unable to find a drop arm for it (avoiding buying a new one for the time being). Are that any other known and easier to find drop arms that would fit the splines? Thanks.

It does also depend on how well it is concreted in and how hard the ground is. The rising posts in Manchester that control traffic are pretty substantial.

I have one on the back of my trailer. It was originally made up on a trailer board so I just cut the plastic from the trailer board and made it into a plate that is now on the trailer cross member. I think, like the black and silver plates, that they are, or were, legal on certain vehicles first used before a certain date. I don't think mine is legal on the trailer but I have a proper one to go on at some point.

Maybe it is one of those special flasks that keep hot things cold and cold things ho.... Or perhaps not. Put it on freecycle. Someone will use it.

I'm sure I've used a Series 3 to push over an unwanted security post to get it out of the ground, fairly effortless. To be honest if someone wants your vehicle then no matter what you do they can always just pick it up with a crane. Chain it to the ground and they can cut the chain. I suppose the other option is to use a tracker so that it can be traced more quickly or make it so awkward to access that you don't get to enjoy it when you want to.

This one? http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Range-Rover-Classic-Two-Door-With-a-Difference_W0QQitemZ390149661163QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAutomobiles_UK?hash=item5ad6bb61eb I am tempted to buy it for the electric parts rather then a restoration.

That is a good way to doing it. I can also imagine that set up upside down in the middle of the truck with the rope in a donut on the top of the roll cage.

The electricity is currently still mostly fossil fueled and so the 'long tail pipe' argument applies. However, the power station is more efficent then a car engine, especially on shorter cold running journeys. The reason I am building an electric car isn't so much that it will be a great saving of money or CO2 but just to be a little ahead of the game when the options are less and more electricity is from non fossil sources. I am working on the basis that oil based fuels will always be polluting and will become more so over time due to more severe extraction methods and costs whereas electricity generation should become cleaner and more renewable over time. Then the issue will fall on the electricity storage medium.

The reason why renewables seem to be expensive is because we are not paying anywhere near the true cost of fossil fuels. As in the analogy I used earlier, using fossil fuels is eating into our savings. Imagine you are earning £10k pa but because you have £1m in the bank (with no interest) you spend at a rate of £200k pa. When challenged about your spending you say that the money in the bank is free money so you might as well use it. After 5 years it wont' be there any more and you bank starts giving you an overdraft at 20%apr and yet you still keep spending. At some point the bank will close your account and declare you bankrupt. Using fossil fuels is very similar. It is the £1m that you have in the bank. When the fuel is so scarce that tar sands are being mined (Canada is mining tar sands) the cost of the fuel will begin to rise. The option is to spend this time (and a bit more money) gearing up for renewables as once the capital cost has been met the fuel resource is free. In the banking analogy it is like deciding to move your £1m savings into a high interest account and living off your income and interest payments. Your capital doesn't go away and your income is really (very nearly) free forever, albeit a little lower then you are used to. Yep, data is manipulated by everyone with something to prove or money to gain. Environmentalists will find any data that supports their version of climate change. I often imagine 'Life of Brian' "He has left us a shoe! It is a sign! We must take off one shoe! No, no, we must collect shoes!" However, environmentalists are not all wrong. There are genuine signs of global problems. Some are environmental, some are economic and some are energy. But we are not quite sure how to read all the signs and the impacts the problems will have collectively. Governments will use any reason to tax the people more. Need I expand on that? Corporations will do anything to ensure that we are hooked on their product and have no options when they increase the price. Oil companies will continue to sell oil at an affordable price, no matter how much it cost to get it out of the ground. They will do that for as long as other options are being developed outside of their control. It is done in the hope that people won't change fuels so that when the price has to rocket up we have nothing else ready to turn to and have to pay their price. When we are paying their higher prices we have no money left to research and develop alternatives and have to keep paying. We are heading into an ice age according to the ice core records and the known cyclic fluctuations of the Sun and the Earth's orbit. However, the Earth's average temperature is still climbing. There are vineyards in Kent now and I have a very actively fruiting fig tree in Manchester. One of the less understood aspects of climate change is that an average change in global temperature comes about from very chaotic, and extreme, changes in temperate regions. For example, a 2 degree average rise in temperature may come from a 5 degree rise at the equator, a 3 degree drop at the poles and the bit in between, the temperate region, madly fluctuating +- 10 degrees either way.

You could track the winch drum sideways. Mount the drum on a long splined driving shaft so that it can slide sideways. The driving shaft won't take any of the winching loads so machine the drum flanges to a bearing surface, maybe with large needle roller bearings or bronze bushing. The bearings can then roll and track sideways on a pair of tracks (like a wide fairlead roller) on the front of the winch housing that takes the pulling loads while the rope goes through a static donut fairlead. During winching the winch and donut stay till while the drum is driven back and forth against the tracks by any of the methods I mentioned above.

It isn't so much a willingness to reduce consumption as a lack of choice. If you lost your job and was signing on you wouldn't spend as much money would you. Same with fuel. Once you find that there is a limited amount available you would use less of it. Also, it isn't just motoring fuels. Homes and appliances are gradually using less energy by being more efficient. Motoring is going the same way. Unless you were restoring your Land Rover to original wouldn't you change to a more efficient engine if you could? I would happily get an old Series land Rover tomorrow if I could fit in an engine that will return 60+mpg as my car does or a 70 mile range on a charge if it was electric. In the meantime reduction of energy use is something that just makes sense for an island nation. We are not 1950's Americans. Hydrogen is a possible storage medium but there are plenty of options for static energy storage for both heat and electricity. We just need to get used to the idea that it is stored rather then made on demand. Gas, coal and oils are stored and purchased in bulk before use so electricity and heat could be the same. There are plenty of attempts to make coal clean. The UK Government are looking at new, non existant, 'clean coal' power stations until nuclear is up and running (ten year lead time and limited supply of Uranium?) However, the 'clean' aspect is through carbon capture. The Germans have found that the energy required for carbon capture creates more CO2 then it saves and the Americans have decided that after spending $9b, IIRC, on research with no solution it is too expensive. Biofuel isn't a viable alternative as we need the agricultural land for food crops to reduce the energy required to import it. There is a lot of small scale research into algae but that is a way off yet. So, until we get to the point where we can have a viable, plentyful and user friendly alternative fuel or energy supply we should be looking at serious reduction in consumption. Little dinky car for commuting and shopping and the Land Rover for serious work and play days maybe.

I guess hindsight is a wonderful thing. It isn't always possible to be watching your own winch, and others may not be as concerned. I suppose if something comes out of this then it will be a good thing for winches. Maybe a CCTV to watch the winch from the cab. Maybe a forum design/build to make a proper laying on kit for the conventional long drum winches. I would have thought that so many people here will consider hydraulic this and hydraulic that. How about a donut fairlead on a slide, powered by a small double acting hydraulic ram. A valve can be set so that as the donut reaches one side of the drum the flow is reversed and the donut moves back the other way. It could be PS pump powered and flow restricted to control the speed. Or perhaps replace the two long rollers on a fairlead with square cut screw threads geared together at one end and electrically powered at the other end. A donut fairlead could be screwed back and forth on the threads by the motor drive, reversing on a switch at each end. Or maybe not a separate motor to drive the screw threads but a geared drive from the winch drum. The reversing could be a flip over gear set as found on a lathe lead screw drive. The donut could flip the reversing gear at the ends of its travel. The reversing mech could be a pair of connected levers that the donut nudges one way and then the other at the ends of its travel. That could shunt a set of gears in and out of forward/reverse drive. The gearset needn't be large or heavy duty but the square/acme threads would be. Maybe a pair used on a vice, like these Axminster York tail Vice Screw? Someone here should be able to build that. It'll be easy compared to what has been done already. Just give me 20% on each one sold.

Almost but not quite. However we have the seas for 'a million' turbines. Britain is the windiest country in Europe and we also have a lot of coast lines and a lot of waves and tides. We also have a lot of unused mines that could be good for ground sourced heat recovery and storage. Even if it isn't enough high grade heat for power generation it could be lower grade heat for district heating. There are a lot of towns built around mining.

The altenative is to change the engine in the old Series for a later and more efficient engine.

I wonder what the brass slider on this winch on Ebay is like?

A large diameter narrow drum laid on its side so the axle is vertical would make installation more interesting. Thinking of Scammell winches here as they have paying on gear to effect an even lay of cable. Alternatively having the winch drum further away from the hawse would improve paying on. A centre winch with a small hawse at the back of the vehicle might be enough.

I remember that period of climate science. The idea, IIRC, was that based on the known cyclic variations of both Solar fluctuations and the Earths processional variances it would appear that the Earth was on a cyclic cooling curve and would be tending towards an ice age. However, since that time climate monitoring has shown no such cooling taking place and so a reason was sought for what was keeping the Earth warm when it should be cooling. That lead to the discovery of a link between increasing CO2 and lack of cooling, hence the CO2 issue. I think it is inaccurate to simply blame climateologists and enviromentalists for the inconsistancies. It is a difficult area of study and research that can only be as good as the available scientific knowledge and understanding. The same inconsistancies are also evident in economic planning hence 'The value of your savings plan can go down as well as up.'. I do think that people like to strongly represent their point of view and will latch onto any evidence, no matter how weak, that may support it. Scientist and politicians are no different sometimes when we would really rather they were. I am a lapsed climate change supporter as I accept that the climate is changing but I do not believe that we truely know what the causes are and their effects. However, I still believe in resource depletion as that is a common sense given fact that one doesn't need science to understand. This brings us back to Land Rovers and their longevity vs their fuel economy.

The aerial just needs a large ground plane, IIRC, and the roll cage would provide that. The cage would just need to be earthed to the battery either with an earth strap or through its connection to the chassis.

Methane is also a bigger contributor then CO2. It comes mainly from the decomposition of organic waste and the farming of live stock. This is where eating less meat would reduce the methane output of agriculture. However, it can be said, as is said of the long tail pipe idea of electric cars, that reducing meat consumption could lead to the long fart pipe from the farm yard to the domestic dinner table. I'm not keen on hydrogen as a fuel at the moment. It takes a lot of energy to make, store and transport it and the platinum in the fuel cell is mined in a very environmentally distructive manner. However, it could be a stop gap measure that is cheaper then nuclear and with less long term problems.

I would just grind back the rust to bear metal, bolt on the aerial and then paint the whole of the bracket to prevent rust from forming and water getting into the joint.

A lot of existing electricity generation is used to keep the grid running. All those losses have to be fed from the power stations and energy has to be sent long distances to keep the extremities within regulated limits of supply voltage. Local generation would reduce these losses but people don't generally like living near power stations of any description. What mustn't be forgotten (or not misunderstood) is that all our energy is Solar. Fossil fuels are just banks of stored Solar power that has taken tens of millions of years to develop and only a few hundred years for us to use up. Using non fossil fuels will mean using energy at the rate that we can collect it. There is plenty to collect but we are just not good at wanting to collect it when there seems to be so much in the bank. An analogy would be if you had £1m in the bank with no interest and a job earning £15k pa. You decide to give away your pay cheque each month and live the life of a hollywood celeb just on your savings. The savings will run out and then your life style will need to change when you are back to your £15k pa. It won't even cover the cost of the staff or the council tax on the mansion, etc. Rover did have a turbine car, it was in effect a small jet engine. Jet engines are not efficient. A steam turbine is efficient but only when you measure the efficiency of turning the steam into mechanical energy. The making of the steam often isn't efficient at all, especially in a car sized unit.

I suppose it is for similar reasons why people modify their Land Rovers to the point where maybe a they would have been better off just getting a different vehicle that does the job they want. Why fit Mog axles to a Land Rover? Fit a Land Rover body and a huge V8 to a Mog instead. Not that I am one to talk.

Sometimes it isn't so much what you get from the turbine as what isn't required from a fossil fuel station. One of the issues is that a renewable generator will use almost no fossil energy during it's life whereas a coal fired power station will be using coal in huge quantities for its lifetime. If we are able to source our energy fom the Sun in the form of photons, heat and wind then it means that the remaining fossil resource can be used for more important things then just burning it. I'd rather see oil, for example, used for the production of chemicals and plastics, that can't be made any other way, then for running vehicle engines inefficiently.

Having spent a few years on a MSc course studying the environment I do have concerns for changes in the Earth's climate. However, I also have an 'I don't give a toss anymore' attitude to it. If it is changing for natural reasons then we should just go with it and adapt. If it is changing because of human intervention then we should just suffer the consequences for being stupid, homocentric and selfish. So, am I no longer an environmentalist? No, I have just learnt that whatever happens, whatever the cause, we need to conserve resources. The energy use to make things, grow things and keep people warm, cool, fit and healthy and the fuels for making our chosen lifestyle work. The route to be taken should be in adjusting our lifestyle expectations to increase the time that we can have a lifestyle choice. As environmentalist, Mike Thomson, said: "We are not trying to save the planet, we are trying to save our lifestyles.". That has more truth to it then many, including environmentalists, would feel comfortable admitting. In view of motoring, both for work and for leisure, there are ways to help improve the efficiency of what we do. Keeping, maintaining and modifying an old Land Rover is far better then chucking it and buying a new one. Fitting a more efficient engine is a good move, using non fossil fuels from non food crops is another good move. Converting to electric drive is a good preparation for a future of local micro generation of electricity. For now, just driving carefully to 'save money' is a very good start. (Has anyone figured out getting a V8 to run on 4 cylinders when it doesn't need full the power?) I don't have a Land Rover anymore. I may get one again sometime but it will be an old one and only when I can be fuel efficient enough overall to justify running it for leisure. In the meantime I have a 60mpg winch equiped estate car and an electric car project. As an aside, the scrappage scheme was noting to do with recyling or environmental concerns. It was solely a means to 'kick start' the economy and raise tax revenue for the exchequer. If it was environmental then it should have been a scheme to renew failing engines, in exisiting vehicles, for more efficient ones. That would be more like the boiler scheme.