Sounds like an excellent plan! I'd like to run the E30 route to the far end one day. I first started dreaming of it when I ran an E30.. but I think a P38 would be far more suitable to cope with the road surface as you get further East!
Folks, my fronts are pretty buggered due to driving 10k miles with a locked up viscous so they'll need replacement for the MOT. The rears are.. as you'd expect for 10k miles with plenty of tread and even wear. Am I OK to replace just the fronts or do I need to have the same rolling radius front and back? I'm wondering if having a difference would knacker the viscous again..
Thanks!
Aviation is certainly a huge brake on progress towards zero emissions. They burn Kero by the ton and no matter how you play with the stats of passenger miles/kilo of CO2 the bottom line is that most of the journeys are holidays and we really don't need them.
Neither would sound like a real Spitfire, but the V12 would cost a zillion times more and have a lower power-to-weight ratio. Plus, you can get brushless motors in pretty much any size and configuration while the V12 would be a custom build. I wouldn't dare put my 10,000 hour labour of love up in an RC plane but it's up to you :)
My secret dream is to build an RC Sunderland with real radial engines but seeing as the engines are £1200 a pop and I'd need four... that's a hell of a lot of cash before you even start looking at the rest of it!
Brushless motors and Li-Po batteries have revolutionised RC stuff. There are some seriously impressive models out there running on LiPo and they're much more reliable than the old "gassers".
You could go fully retro and run the vacuum from a cart in the street!
There was research done by the Medical Research Council in London into particulate pollution caused by vehicles back in the 1960s. Even back then they noticed the huge spike in readings when diesel vehicles drove through the underpass they were using for the tests. I don't have the references as this is word of mouth (My Grandfather was their Librarian after he retired) but it seems that legislators have regarded what is now known as PM10 as an "inconvenient truth" for many decades.
Richard, I'm not convinced that removing lead increased the total CO2 emissions of petrol engines by a significant amount as the cats are only converting residual HC to CO2 which is basically just tidying up after the main combustion process has done the same thing in larger volumes. I always understood that one of the main reasons for switching to unleaded was to allow the introduction of catalysts which are are poisoned by lead in petrol.
On the other hand it's definitely true that the Benzene added to fuel as a lead replacement is carcinogenic, but no-one seems to have proved that its use in petrol has caused any ill effects. This could be due to catalysts cleaning up residual benzine, or maybe it's just because anyone drinking unleaded has died before developing cancer! :)
Could well be, and I'd like to see a bigger sample set. Do the GuvMint collect data from all the MOT testing stations? I'd like to think they have some idea what LPG does for emissions compared with the major fuels, otherwise they're just throwing darts in the dark (which could be how they ended up backing diesel).
Mine wasn't really dead, but after a day or so of sitting in the car it would fail to crank. I took it from 8V to about 12.3V eventually on my little charger but it never came back to being a reliable battery. Maybe a really long journey or a decent CTek or similar conditioning charger would do it, but I was starting to fear for the alternator and decided to get a new battery.
Trouble is, according to that long and not exactly thrilling pdf I link to earlier, LPG isn't that great for NOx. Better then diesel but worse than petrol.
It's a small sample size, but I haven't actually seen much research into the actual emissions produced by the various fuels.
I'm on my second Hankook, but that's after 3 years of total abuse and several deep discharges. They're great batteries!
Sounds like those vintage looking French vans with corrugated sides that get converted into Coffee stands or Pannini Wagons. The ones I see at shows arrive and leave on a trailer anyway!
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/148/1/012060/pdf
And interesting comparison of Petrol, Diesel, CNG and LPG.
Sadly, I can (and have) got lost between the bedroom and the bathroom!
I wish I had more faith in our government(s) to fix global warming but with a 5 year horizon it does look like too much has been left too late.
I don't think that vehicle ownership is going to be something our grandkids will enjoy. I think it's more likely that self driving cabs summoned by Uber (or similar) will be the main way to get around for anyone who can't walk or ride a bike. Anyone wanting to actually drive will have to go to a track, no matter what the fuel used.
The self driving cabs make sense for the government. Lower emissions, lower freedom, higher surveillance. What's not to love?
I think most of them use the Uber App nowadays ;)
They should just LPG convert some black P38s and give the punters a bit of luxury :)
Bolt, salt reactors look very interesting!
And I see that there's a possibility they could be used for Hydrogen production as an added bonus.
Gilbertd, I
Gilbertd wrote:
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!
The French system is designed to lower pollution levels and looks very sensible to me. The London system is really designed to keep the hoi polloi out of the way. "VIPs" get armoured cars, the ultra rich can pay a negligible (for them) fee to drive whatever, wherever, whenever and the normal folks are "nudged" into keeping the SMMT happy by leasing new cars every three years whether they need one or not and irrespective of the environmental impact of treating motor vehicles as disposable white goods.
It isn't clean... yet. They're starting the changeover to electricity before it is all clean. We'll have to go to 100% renewables at some point (as soon as feasible) worldwide.
It kind of makes sense, until you look at the sheer scale of the project and it starts to look mind boggling.
Just while we're having so much fun... don't forget the proposal to ban gas heating in new builds from 2025...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47559920
StrangeRover wrote:
Personally to me it seems to be a load of carp.,
What about HGV's etc that Have to use Diesel, don't see there being an EV HGV in 10 years, unless some genius lives among us!!
Vans are another issue, basically anything commercial just can't run off of Leccytric.
The Voice for LPG seems to be getting louder though, and i've seen a fair few stories regarding LPG conversions in london going stratospheric!
I myself don't see how it would be possible for all this to happen by 2030 i thought 2040 was optimistic. LOL
LPG's growth IMO is inevitable, especially in the commercial sector, and it'll also benefit us IE more stations prolly a reasonable price too!
I'd like to think that LPG is taking off but it seems to me that it is well past its peak. There are no LPG/Hybrid cars being built by manufacturers anymore (in the UK Market, to my knowledge) and the number of forecourts selling LPG is falling.
With the rise in Diesel, there are far fewer cars suitable for conversion and many petrol powered cars are direct injection and therefore not really suitable either as the injectors are not available.
The point of LPG wasn't really to allow Petrol heads to get round the costs of running big V8s, welcome though it is!