Morat wrote:

the bottom line is that most of the journeys are holidays and we really don't need them.

But surely that's what the car is for? Got a trip to St Petersburgh planned for next spring so figured that while I've got a Russian visa, I may as well have a run to Moscow. Purely to get a photo of the P38 on Red Square.......

Lots of options here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_bA6MNTtA

Lpgc wrote:

Should invent a small petrol engine'd vac, would only need a petrol tank of a few millilitres to have the same power and running time as the Dyson and I could clean up emissions by converting to run on a lighter refill canister ;-)

Sounds like a plan to me but where would you find the motor? I've got a hedge trimmer powered by a 36cc engine and a strimmer/brush cutter with a 49cc motor but both are two stroke. So how do you get the oil in with the fuel if running on gas? I've also got a motor mower but a vac powered by a 149cc Briggs and Stratton might be a bit cumbersome......

It's gone up. When I posted the first link just over a week ago, they were in stock at £81, now Battery Megastore are showing them out of stock (again) and the price has gone up by a tenner to £91! But they'll still sell you one via eBay for £97. Bugger, should have got one last week.....

davew wrote:

Realise you are just being a bit provocative there Richard, but, whilst we are bringing back lead,

Not really, just making the point that had it not been for the research back in the 1980's that resulted in it being mandated that at first lead should be reduced and then removed completely, we would still be running around with lead in fuel. That may well have not resulted in the other changes over the years bought about by the knock on effects.

On the Dyson point, I've never quite got my head around the concept of a digital motor. Digital, as opposed to analogue, means it has only two states, on of off or up or down. So how can something that generates movement be digital? Digitally controlled, yes but not digital.

Most decisions have been taken by successive Governements as knee jerk reactions to whatever the latest research says. Back in the old days, petrol had lead in it but research found that many children with retarded brain development had a higher than normal level of lead in their bodies. Ignoring the fact that most paints also contained lead in those days and kids have a habit of chewing on things, someone advised the Government of the day that it was down to the lead in the atmosphere from vehicle exhausts. So, they told the fuel companies that they had to remove the lead, which they did (in stages from the original level of 4mg per litre to 1.5 mg per litre) but as the lead was there for a reason and not just because they felt like adding it, they had to add a chemical equivalent to lubricate the valves and seats. However, as this chemical was quite a complex compound when it got burnt along with the fuel it produced all sorts of chemical nasties, including some that were known to be carcinogenic. So something had to be done to get rid of them and the something was to add a catalytic converter that converted most of the nasties to nice harmless CO2. Great says everyone, so cars are now exhaling the exact same stuff as humans do which is then turned back into Oxygen by trees.

For a very short period, everyone is happy until another bit of research shows that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and too much of it is contributing to global warming so we need to reduce it. Quick fix, the Government encourages everyone to drive diesels as they produce less CO2 than petrol engines, job done. As this coincided with Peugeot producing the XU-D series of engines, the first really civilised diesel engine, the public started buying them. Encouraged by lower running costs from the economy, the public, along with fleet buyers, flocked to buy them. For a period, everything is rosy in Government land until more research shows that diesels may produce less CO2 but they also spit out particulates which are even worse than the nasties that came from burning the lead substitute additives (remember them, the ones that the cats were introduced to get rid of?). So they need to reduce those. As the emission tests are done to a set cycle which largely simulates driving in a city, simple answer. Fit a filter, the DPF, that collects the particulates when driving in the city and empty it out when the car is driven at speed for any length of time. So don't pollute the city streets but dump the crap out in the countryside instead (a sort of automotive flytipping if you like). Then came dieselgate where it turned out that manufacturers had been fiddlingthe results of the emissions tests making their diesels look far cleaner than they really were and suddenly diesel became the most disgusting fuel known to man..

So now, the answer is electric vehicles, ignoring that the electricity has to be generated somehow (producing yet more pollution) and the pollution created by the manufacture of the batteries, that's someone else's problem. Bring back the lead I say, that's what started this whole thing in the first place......

The higher the combustion temperature the more NOx is produced and it also increases if there is surplus Oxygen in the exhaust. So if an engine is running a bit on the lean side, it will run hotter and there will also be excess Oxygen left over from the combustion process. So a lean mixture will dramatically increase the NOx emissions. Maybe the one car they tested was running a bit lean?

BrianH wrote:

are banning vehicles altogether from the zones rather than allowing payment of a charge (and fining anyone who drives into them in a non-compliant vehicle instead).

Looks like the Scots are following the French model then. Under the French scheme, going into a zone (and while it started just in Paris Lyon and Grenoble, it's spreading to quite a few other cites now https://www.lez-france.fr/en/information-about-the-critair-vignette/french-environmental-zones-zcr/french-environmental-zones.html) with either a sticker for a prohibitted class or not displaying one at all, results in a €140 fine. Not sure how it is policed though, whether it is done using CCTV and looking at the colour of the sticker or whether it is by ANPR, I've no idea.

All more expensive than a Hankook from battery Megastore though. I must admit, I'm considering getting a second one. The Ascot needs a battery so I figured I'd get a new one for my car and fit the one that's been on mine in the Ascot.

The vintage looking French vans usually are just that, either Citroen H vans or Peugeot J type. Probably easier to trailer them that risk them breaking down when there's money to be made and they are bloody slow.....

Some of the vintage look vans were made by the Asquith Motor Company from Essex who used Transit running gear and came up with things like this
.
they took over a company doing something similar based in Doncaster (the Vintage Motor Company), so I suspect that's where you went.

They do look very similar except for the terminals. My understanding, having been involved with them a little at work, is that a leisure battery doesn't mind being left fully discharged but is designed to give a constant output over a long period but doesn't like being asked to supply very high current for short peroiods. Whereas a starter battery, as the Hankook is described, will quite happily give maximum output for cranking a starter. I'm sure Bolt will be able to give us chapter and verse though. All I know is that the hankook I put on mine about 3 years ago will still happily crank the engine over at a decent rate and the one I took down to my mates place in France for his P38, fired it up instantly even after the car had been left for 5 weeks.

davew wrote:

Whilst I can understand the growing NOx problems etc in the bigger cities clearly some other towns are currently (or will be..) using this as a revenue-generator scheme of course, using pollution as their primary excuse....

Which is exactly what they are doing. The French (and German) system is much better for dealing with air quality but doesn't make any revenue so would never catch on here.

There's a map here https://www.buyacar.co.uk/cars/economical-cars/523/clean-air-zone-charges-where-are-britains-low-emission-zones with various proposed zones and, although Bristol isn't listed, it wouldn't surprise me if many more cities follow suit.

We have a General Election every 5 years so the horizon for the current Government is 5 years maximum (if they manage to last that long, which it is getting increasingly likely they won't) so any plans or promises made by the current Government are only likely to be good for 5 years until a different lot get voted in. Sometimes the plans get carried over but in most cases the incoming Government don't want to make it look like the previous one had a good idea, so they come up with something different. No different to how Trump has cancelled many of the things Obama set out to do. It doesn't matter if they were a good idea or not, they weren't his idea.

Where from? I just Googled Lucas MF31 and came up with nobody wanting to sell me one.

and they say that the EAS is ridiculously complex, needs expensive diagnostics and it's much easier to spend £400 on a coil spring kit than try to fix it.... As you've now found out, with the cable and software you can do your own diagnostics and all you need to do is watch for anything that doesn't seem quite right. If you think about it, if they sold a brand new car that sank to it's knees overnight and took at least a couple of minutes to rise back up again, people would complain. It didn't when it was new so, as long as you are aware of what to look for, it won't now.

But with your sat nav, you'd never be able to get the punters to their destination......

On the topic of alternative fuels, Hydrogen could be used to run a standard ICE. You'd be able to run quite a bit of compression too as it has an Octane rating of 130 RON. With a stoichiometric ratio of 34:1 (34 parts air to 1 part Hydrogen by weight), then you shouldn't need a huge tank either.

Then there is salt water. Shell are selling the toy cars using a fuel cell that is activated by salt water, so why couldn't this be scaled up to a full sized car? Being an island we aren't short of salt water either. Or is this something that Shell hold the patent on and wouldn't allow it to be scaled up or it would reduce the amount of their petrol we'd have to buy?

Personally my view is that the renewable energy business is mostly bullshit. There's even a TV advert running for some company (it may even be Shell thinking about it) that supplies homes with renewable electricity. Now there's a good trick if you can do it. The electricity isn't renewable, you use it, you convert electrical energy into heat, light or movement. It isn't being renewed, it's being converted into another form of energy.

My prediction for the future (although I very much doubt I'll still be around to see it) is that the fission reactor will be perfected and there will be a shoe box sized one in every home and car providing an unlimited source of free energy. That is unless the likes of Shell, BP, Texaco, etc buy up the patents and research and put a stop to it......

What gets me about the London ULEZ is that if you are prepared to pay the fee, you can drive what you like. The Congestion Charge was supposed to discourange people from taking their cars into the zone but when you look, it isn't Aunt Mable driving in to have a look at St Pauls, it's trade vehicles. The ones that don't have a choice. The ULEZ charge is just an extension of that to raise even more money.

It has nothing to do with congestion or air quality, unlike the system introduced in France. To drive into Paris, Lyon and Grenoble you need to display a numbered sticker. They go from 0, for EVs, to 5 for Euro 4 diesels. A GEMS petrol P38 is Euro 3 so should be class 3, but, as I declared mine as running on LPG, I got issued with a class 1, the same as a Hybrid. When the pollution levels are high, the higher numbered classes are banned from the zones. I drove through Lyon and round Paris on 22nd July, when they had the heatwave we got a couple of days later. Due to the high temperatures and no wind, pollution levels were high so vehicles in classes 3, 4 and 5 were prohibilted. So had I been running on petrol, I would have had to take the outer ring roads instead of my usual route. However, class 3 isn't just Euro 3 petrol it is also Euro 6 diesel, so no matter how new it was, if you were driving a diesel, you were prohibited. Interestingly, a similar system will never work here as the sticker only costs €4.10 so they'd never make enough money from it. Despite Sadiq Khan offering grants to London taxi drivers to convert to LPG, there's no concessions for the rest of us.

Incidentally, the best day I ever had driving in Central London was the day they predicted would be the worst, the day the bus drivers were on strike!

Unlikely to be the IAT as that only does anything when the ambient temperature in the engine bay gets too high. It has no affect at all at normal temperatures and is only there to retard the ignition timing if the intake air tempoerature gets over 55 degrees C. Unplug it and stick a 1k Ohm resistor in it's place and see if that makes any difference but I doubt it will.