Yes, indeed. Someon needs to make a set of wrenches labeled

17/32 if you have a good set, 9/16s if you dont. Just keep your wrenches in order, and pick the very next one.

Ah yes, that one is annoying. The one that really drives me nuts if torque vs power, which I swear 80% of gearheads don’t understand.

I’m an engineer and I prefer the imperial system. Oh, I didn’t always feel that way. While learning in theory land (where there is no air resistance, all ropes are inelastic, and all cows are perfectly spherical) the metric system does make the math easier. Not necessarily easy, mind you, just easier. Anytime the math…

“Mass, speed, energy, and gravity are all bound together in a wibbly-wobbly kind of way.”

I have no trouble with 10’s, but the 12’s are never around.

If done by amateurs, automotive jobs should never be measured in minutes, or even hours. It’s best to meausure in number of evenings, or cases of beer.

I’m not sure that if that assassination was a success that the iraq war had necessarily gone better, but it certainly could have.

And yet the world today is crawling with super sneaky secret squirrel special forces dudes.

No, I’m positively pro immigration. Also, I would not suggest this if I was in anyway likely to end up in the cross hairs.

One could argue that we are better off with “them” trying to kill our president because:

Yes, the chain of incentives is not difficult to trace here.

No, I’m assuming that assasination attempts wont necessarily turn into full fledged wars. I mean if they do, we are no worse than we were before, we still got the same war. However, there is a chance that they wont, and then we’re better off.

What I find interesting is that it’s against the laws of war to assassinate members of other governments, but it’s perfectly ok to attack their army with your army in order to capture them.

In other news, demand curve slopes downward. More at 11.

Well there you have it. A methed out, 20 year old crack head barreling down the highway in 80,000lbs fumes belching jagarnaut. He is only 20 miles from metropolis city, where crowds of cuddly orphans have gathered with their parents to watch the parade. Disaster cannot be far behind. Crowd screams in horror. Crying…

I think its safe to say that any consumer that knows what a timing chain is, is not going to be bothered by the noise it makes. However, most consumers don’t fall into that category.

I don’t believe that the chains themselves have gotten quieter. I think we’ve gotten somewhat better sprockets, and mostly much better covers to quiet things down. I think the popular thing to do now is to make them out of laminated metal/ruber/metal material.

The chain is made out flat metal plates, connected by pins. Over time the holes in the plates become oval, allowing the pins some slack and making the overall chain longer. It’s not exactly stretch, but we call it that.

Timing chains are loud. One of the original solutions to this problem were nylon sprockets. You can see how this could not end well.