Bluecold's discussions

I’ve used an original Dieter Rams designed stereo once. It was shite. Steel sheet painted to look like aluminium. It looks good from a distance. Up close, and actually using it, it falls apart.

Over the pond, this competes with the Alpine A110. I can’t fathom why one would buy this over the Alpine. Read more

aah no that probably didnt help. But 12.9 is really strong steel for bolts. 12.9 means 1200mpa yield (material starts to stretch) strength, which is 90% of the maximum strength (so to pull the bolt apart you need 1333mpa). Read more

Yep, it takes a lot of force to wreck a 12.9 bolthead like that. Read more

Some cars need their engines to preserve their character. Some cars don’t. The mini was good despite the terrible bmc a series. The Citroen DS was amazing despite the ancient 4 cilinder in the front. Those cars are prime examples for electric conversions. Read more

Hatchback is only car-related as far as I know. Read more

Aww that would be something, but I have a trip planned end of may (north of scotland), and I don’t think I can swing the days off, as I need my days off to get my car finished on time to go to scotland. Next one I’ll try to be there. The stories from the first europpomeet were really cool.

The VW Up! GTI has less horsepower and more mass than the 1987 Peugeot 205 GTi 1.9. Both cars served the same purpose, being a small hot hatch. Even after 30 years of fruitless attempts, the 205 GTi still reigns supreme over every small hot hatch ever produced by VAG.

hot take: I don’t consider aeropress good. Everybody raves about it, but for me all the cups I had (roughly five) were all dissappointing, and all from very reputable shops. Read more

The true reason can be found in that the vast majority of sound systems currently on the market cannot adequately deal with the lower fundamental of the male voice (85Hz). Most sattelite-subwoofer systems blast everything below 100Hz via the ‘subwoofer’, so a portion of the voice of men comes from the sattelite, and a… Read more

Get him to go 20 mph and shift from third to second to third to second without lurching. Read more

since you need to make special pullars and such to mount the bar, I think there isn’t much difference in difficulty of doing either a panhard or a watts linkage, while the latter has been done before by others on the interwebs.

Fun fact. This is the only Type AA remaining can be found at the Louwman Museum: Read more

well, welding or brazing a bike frame is difficult. As is proper bike fitting. As is wheelbuilding. But also keeping track of the myriad of British, Japanese and Italian standard thread sizes, combined with the onslaught of recent bottom bracket ‘standards’. Read more

FIAT figured out that the world of the future would be a world in which even the top of the gauge cluster (which no sane person would ever need to touch) needs to be covered in soft-touch material. And if you don’t, car journalists would collectively shit themselves and whine incessantly about a ‘low quality… Read more

Lets preserve the dignity of everyome involved and don’t talk about recumbents.

eehhh. the 335i is a genuinely fast car. You’d have to look at the 318i E92 to get the slowest version. 142 horsepower in a car with a dry weight of over 1400. That’s awful, and barely better power to weight than the e30 shown above. Read more

Packaging plastic is also a no-go. This plastic is almost always a laminate of at least a carrier layer (OPP or PET) and a sealing layer (PE for critical airtight packs, proprietary coating for most other stuff). Additionally, an aluminium layer can be present, or other oxygen/gas barrier layers. Read more

Also, differences in wet traction are larger than differences in dry traction. Read more

On the other hand, my parents’ 2001 Ford Windstar (properly exotic car in the netherlands) was very very slow, especially when packed with 6 people, their luggage, and a roof box. At that point, the car was probably north of 5500 lbs (4100lbs dry), with motivation coming from an anemic Vulcan V6 coupled to a 4spd auto… Read more