jboningtonjagworth
J Bonington Jagworth
jboningtonjagworth

Mike the Bike woo hoo! Never seen that photo before, thanks.

This is an X-Ray of his legs. He’d have had problems getting through airport security carrying that much metal.

Yes it is (found the same image on the innertubes). Cast your mind back to any John Wayne Western, Stagecoach for an example. The stagecoach has an articulating front axle, and a fixed rear. The horses pull and steer the stagecoach, but they don’t carry any weight. It’s a drawbar trailer.

“Semi” refers to the trailer, being an abbreviation of “semi-trailer”. It does indeed mean “half”. A full (or draw bar) trailer has steering axle(s) at the front and dead axle(s) at the rear. The entire load sits on the trailer, and the tractor unit pulls and steers it. A semi-trailer has the front sit on the rear of

Thanks for that. I spent all morning watching the videos, and it brought back a lot of memories. I had something more than 10 Minis back in the day.

He might be in Oz, but he’s a Kiwi. There is free migration between the two countries. As Rob Muldoon (NZ Prime Minister) stated: “migration of New Zealanders to Australia has raised the average IQ of both nations”. His accent is Kiwi, but not strong. I am an Oz national and I can tell the difference. It comes in the

Not UK. UK still uses miles. He’s a Kiwi. Two easy tests for Kiwis.

Count/non-count. Fruit/fruits. When I talk with my sons and address them as “fruit of my loins”, they say “bugger off”. Were I to say “fruits of my loins”, they would say: “daaad, you’ve made a grammatical error”.

Two nations separated by a common language. All of the Japanese-sourced materials I have use American-English. It’s mostly OK, but I’m very uncomfortable with some usage, such as non-count nouns. I point out to my students that both are acceptable, the equivalent of Yamagata ben vs. Tokyo ben, but they will be getting

They should invite this one. 1924 Curtiss Mitchell, as built by a certain Honda Soichiro.

How about this one? Honda AS285E from an S600. 606cc giving 57PS@8,500rpm. I’m sure there was more to come if you went looking. That’s a very pretty thing for 1964.

Because Kei cars make up about 40% of the market, with most of the rest being sub-2 litre 5 door hatches. “Trucks” pretty much don’t exist, except as commercial vehicles. There aren’t any restrictions on where you can drive a Kei. You see plenty on the expressways, and I recently drove one on a 4 hour trip, mostly on

In the UK we didn’t see the Pinto (car) but we did get the Pinto (engine). It replaced the Kent, and wasn’t seen as an improvement, except that it could be stretched to 2 litres where the Kent was stuck at around 1600cc.

BMC didn’t “steal” Datsun’s blueprints post-war. For a start, there weren’t any (significant) British occupation forces in Japan. The Datsun engines were licensed (and improved) versions of BMCs A Series and B Series engines. Some parts are interchangeable, some are not. I know that a popular improvement for any A

“Foxy” in this case means smelling like an unwashed dog. It’s English English. Not American English.

Front struts. Rear A arms. I had an ace run up Jebel Tubka in the Moroccan Atlas. A wide, well engineered gravel mountain road that had been freshly graded. Keep the front wheels on the embedded gravel where there was plenty of grip. Twitch the rears onto the loose gravel. I was a mere mortal driving like an oversteer

CP. Gutless, noisy with wanky steering and gearchange. The Civic was shite compared with my contemporaneous FIAT 128. Both were equally infested with tinworm, but the FIAT redlined effortlessly and had ace handling.

All air-cooled VWs are gutless, thirsty and prone to pumping carbon monoxide (poison gas) into the cabin via the heater. They also have evil rear suspension. No Power on Earth would tempt me to an air-cooled VW, unless I was planning the Final Solution

They are fishing for squid.

Honda Soichiro was quite an innovative manager. In the 1960s he used the motorcycle racing team as a training instrument. Young junior engineers identified as talented would be seconded to the team for a couple of years. There, they were encouraged to move fast and take risks.