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chitoryu12 posted:The dash was digital readout, something you sure as hell didn't see coming in this late 80s grandpa car. Didn't these have a voice synthesiser at some point? The British motor industry tried that on the 80s Austin Maestro and Montego - the top-spec versions had VFD digital dashboard and then a voice synth which would, at the touch of a button, tell you your instant and average fuel consumption, fuel range and average speed as well as verbal warnings about fuel level, oil level, engine temperature etc. Except that not only was this 1980s digital technology; it was British 1980s digital technology. The dashboard was co-developed by Lucas and Smiths and then fitted to an Austin. So the voice synthesiser would usually nag the driver to fill up with fuel just as they pulled out off the forecourt with a full tank, would overreact to oil surge when cornering and would warn you that you'd left the lights on as you drove down the motorway at 70mph. And the quality of the synthesiser is terrible - the voice actress sounds like she's talking from the bottom of a pond. Worst of all, it wasn't even a very imaginative digital dash - where's the tachometer shaped like the engine's power curve? Where are the fighter jet motifs? 
BalloonFish has a new favorite as of 19:39 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 19:34
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Uncle Enzo posted:I'd never heard of these things. It seems like the idea is that it runs all the time no matter what and you can occasionally heat other stuff up with it? Seems bonkers to me. The house I spent most of my childhood in had an AGA exactly like the one in the picture (cream colour, four ovens, two hotplates and a warming plate). It was oil-fired, which must be the only way to make them remotely financially practical to run given what gas/electricity costs (I think you can still get solid-fuel ones which you have to top up every day). The whole idea is that you have a very small, central heating unit which slowly heats up the cast iron structure, which is designed to channel/conduct the heat in varying amounts to different parts. It takes about 48 hours for everything to reach the proper temperature if you fire it up from cold (and a similar amount of time to cool down if you switch it off) and then it's on all the time. The environmental footprint must be horrendous and I'm sure they must cost much more than just having a normal oven. Like that Telegraph article implied, they're very much a British rural upper-middle-class status symbol but these days they must surely be considered obsolete. But they are fantastically convenient and I haven't come across a better, easier device for cooking. You have three ovens all at different temperatures, plus a warming oven, so you can do multiple stages of cooking at once, plus two hotplates - one for boiling, one for simmering. There's no waiting for the thing to warm up (it's just 'there') and all the ovens have a very even, steady heat. You don't really have to clean it, either, as any spills or spatters just get burnt up and you sweep out the ovens/plates every now and then. The one we had was also hooked up to the hot water but the tank was too big for it to raise the temperature much above luke-warm by itself, but it must have helped reduce the load on the oil-fired boiler at bit (probably not by anything like enough to offset the AGA's running costs, though). Same went for the central heating - there were no radiators in the kitchen/dining room (one big room) and even with the heating off the AGA kept the ground floor of the house comfortable unless it was really cold weather. If it was a really hot summer the AGA would go off for a couple of months and we'd use an electric hob and a microwave. Basically, I'm they're great if you're Swedish (and/or blind - the guy who invented it was blinded in an industrial accident and wanted a cooker that was easy to use) or if you live in the British countryside where the weather can be poo poo at any time of the year and you can afford the running costs. And you don't give a gently caress about the carbon footprint or fuel consumption.
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Jan 9, 2016 10:49
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twistedmentat posted:I also recently came across someone who wanted a car with manual windows because he felt that was more "authentic'. Dude is only 22, there is no way he ever was in a car with manual windows unless his parents had an old beater around. Pfft. It's all about sliding windows for that authentic 'difficult to open while driving, poo poo air flow and tendency to leak' experience. But you've probably never heard of them...  Really the whole original Mini is fractal levels of obsolete and failed technology. All it did was show every other manufacturer in the world the correct way to do a small front-wheel drive transverse-engined family car without all the brilliant but pointless design wankery.
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May 8, 2016 11:46
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Shai-Hulud posted:Flipup windows is where its at! Hah! This is going to sound like a punchline but I swear it isn't - aside from the Mini my other car is a Citroen 2CV. So I don't own a car with rolling windows, powered or otherwise. The Citroen does have a manual rolling roof though. You also have to grease the steering every 500 miles and it has a starting handle - on a 1988 car. Obsolete technology all the way. sarcastx posted:This reminds me of another thing: pretty much any non-commercial airplane. Piston aero-engines don't even have distributors (well, kinda, but not in the coil+points+condenser+rotor arm sense like on a car). They use magnetos which were obsolete tech on cars in the 1920s. But they provide an entirely self-contained ignition system that generates its own power so it makes good sense for the purpose. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most GA piston engines use constant-flow single-point fuel injection now? It's still 1940s technology but it's a step forward from carburettors. Of course there'll still be thousands of C172s and Cherokees around with their carburetors, manual mixtures and cold-start primers. But yeah, the attitude to the environment is pretty obsolete by car standards. I guess it's just reliability, safety and tried-and-trusted technology, and the lack of any real drive to change, that keeps the old designs in use. As well little (or no) exhaust silencing most engines run very rich mixtures to keep the cyinder head temperatures down. And the power/size figures are laughable compared to a car - a 5.2-litre Lycoming makes 160 horsepower. But of course it can produce that power running virtually flat out for hours at a time for thousands of hours total. And the entire engine only weighs something like 110kg. So it's one of those cases of still being really fit for purpose but the world of technology has moved on around it.
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May 9, 2016 00:30
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Has The Secret Life of Machines come up in this thread? As a TV show it is itself obsolete now. Even Channel 4 wouldn't commission three seasons of a bandy-legged balding guy in a tweed jacket who does his own animations for the show, accompanied by his friend with less screen personality than the average YouTuber, shambling around his Sussex farmhouse, making homemade light bulbs or turning their lathes into fax machines. But that's what it is - the social history and inner workings of common domestic and office machinery, packed with all-too-real practical demonstrations, and all made with a delightfully unpolished charm. Because it was made in 1989 to 1993 even the 'cutting edge' is now obsolete, such as the last days of 'click and bang' telephone exchanges, the latest in 4MB RAM and 105MB hard drive PCs, or electronic fuel injection. The entire VCR episode is now worthy of being put in a museum.
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Dec 7, 2017 14:31
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Wacky Delly posted:It has and it is a very easy youtube hole to fall down. Tell me about it - something in this thread made a spark in my brain a couple of days ago and I thought "I must tell them about The Secret Life of Machines!!!'. So today ('working from home') I had a quick look to see if any clips were on YouTube and, hey, the entire run is! So I've just finished watching Tim build a homemade fridge and Rex talk about the exciting life of fridge warranty repairs and it looks like I'll be working somewhat past normal office hours! I don't think I've seen the series in about 15 years but I can clearly remember it on its original run, even through I was only about four when it aired. I just liked the cartoons and the fact that it had cars and weird machines in it at the time. But I really think it was this, combined with that at the same time my Dad began rebuilding a pair of 1940s Morris vans in the garage, which gave me my love of all things mechanical.
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Dec 7, 2017 15:32
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Der Kyhe posted:The hydraulic everything in Rolls Royce Silver Shadow is most definitely "obsolete" and at least to a degree failed technology. My understanding is that the leading way of fixing, refurbishing and recalibrating the system still today is "Don't". It's not impossible, just very expensive - like, even with the values of Silver Shadows no longer being rock bottom it can still cost more than the car is worth to diagnose and repair a hydraulic fault. The One Weird Trick is that most of the system was licensed from Citroen, so a Citroen specialist can do a lot of the work, and obtain a lot of the parts, for a fraction of the price of an R-R expert using official R-R parts. Citroen hydropneumatic tech is a good case of (sadly) obsolete and commercially failed technology. Self-levelling and height-adjustable suspension, power brakes working off a 2000psi engine-driven pump rather than your puny foot, variable ratio and effort self-centring steering, headlamps that follow the steering angle of the front wheels and more!
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Sep 7, 2019 23:55
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Arsenic Lupin posted:What happened to the values of Silver Shadows? I'm really curious. Here in the UK at least, all the grotty Shadows that had been run into the ground by strip club owners, slum landlords, scrap merchants, independent music label 'executives' and dodgy wedding car hire companies have finally died and gone to R-R heaven over the past decade. Which means that the ones left are at least half-decent or the rare minority which were actually maintained and looked after properly. So the quality of the 'stock' is generally better and, with Shadows being anything between 45-36 years old, being noticeably rarer than they once were and having lost a great deal of their dodgy image, they're treated more favourably by the classic car market. So Shadow values have been on the slow rise for a while now. These days its the Silver Spirit and the lower-spec 80s Bentleys that are the 'cheap Rolls-Royces' and can be seen in reserved spots in car parks round the back of Northern mill-town nightclubs, adult video warehouses and single-store discount supermarkets.
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Sep 8, 2019 08:40
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Unperson_47 posted:Wow, I've never seen anything like that. That is cool as hell. It is really cool. Years ago when I first used Sibelius software I remember thinking 'I wonder if they ever had a typewriter for this in the old days....?' then, thinking about it for a bit decided it would be impossibly complicated because of all the variables (which symbol, which line or space, where's the next symbol going to go, how do you choose whether to progress to the next space or put another note on a different line at the same point and so on). Good to know that I wouldn't have hacked it as an old-time typewriter entrepreneur!
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Oct 6, 2019 21:29
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. The Soviet military did studies about eyestrain and painted the instrument panels of their aircraft, submarines and tanks in an odd blue/green colour for this reason:  They were also quite fond of the old system of panel lighting where the markings on the dials were painted in radium and a UV blacklight in the roof would make the markings glow without requiring floodlights or back-lighting - a technique that allowed you get radiation exposure and sunburn while flying in the middle of the night. It was a method banned in the US in the late 60s (having been effectively obsoleted by workplace safety requirements before that) but the USSR was still building aircraft with radium dials (and weird blue instrument panels) well into the 1980s.
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Dec 5, 2019 21:14
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spookygonk posted:Sounds like a Harmonium. Technically that would be a reed organ. Reed organs suck (they draw air through the reeds) while harmoniums blow (push air through the reeds)  I have an 1890s Mason & Hamlin reed organ, picked up from a house clearance for £20 about 12 years ago. It also has a 'Vox Humana' tremulant with the cardboard fan powered by a turbine. It basically all works - the vacuum bellows and reservoir have small holes along the 'valleys' of the folds and the main bellows valves have gone a bit stiff so it doesn't 'breathe' as efficiently as it should but it can sing nicely at full volume with enough footwork. The treble end is a bit screechy but it generally has a really nice warm, rich tone to it. The only broken part is a wooden lever in the octave coupler mechanism and some of the hooks that pull the treble stops into action when you use the Full Organ knee lever have came adrift inside the case during a house move. My ambition is to have the space to properly strip it down, replace/repair the vacuum assembly as required and properly restore and re-voice it. BalloonFish has a new favorite as of 00:51 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 00:46
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Peanut Butler posted:hell yeah A gratuitous picture of my organ 
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Feb 27, 2022 18:42
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Oh, how pretty. Mason & Hamlin remain a prestige piano maker, so I bet their organs were pretty good. By all accounts M&H were considered among the best of the mass-production organ makers in the 19th century - they were well respected for the tone and voicing, the high quality of the materials used, especially the brass and steel in the reeds, which other manufacturers, selling more to the consumer/household market, often skimped on - in fact they deliberately made their reeds in odd shapes and sizes so they couldn't be copied or swapped into an inferior competitor's instrument. They largely resisted the trend to offer more and more stops and gizmos. Where other manufacturers packed loads of sets of reeds into their organs, affecting both the 'breathing' and the sound, M&H kept providing their reeds with generous-sized air cells so the sound is amplified and resonated and large empty spaces under the swell shutters. Where they did up the number of reed sets, they fitted multiple vacuum valves so that the sound and tone weren't strangled by making one set of valves do too much work. It is interesting how so much of 'modern' consumerism existed in the reed organ industry. America made over 2 million reed organs between 1870 and 1900, and you can see all the parallels with the auto industry - the mass production of quite complex mechanical objects, the development of ranges and sub-brands aimed at different markets and budgets, celebrity endorsements (M&H had a range of prestige 'Liszt' instruments), an options list (you could choose a basic model of organ and then select the exact specification or gadgets), the arms race of competitors trying to out-do each other with features (some of which were useful and many of which were gimmicks), the financing and hire-purchase agreements to finance them and all that sort of stuff. Hirayuki posted:As Tom Waits said, the only thing better than roses on your piano is tulips on your organ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWo4ufMkG4
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Feb 28, 2022 00:14
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Sweevo posted:The C5 was much-mocked at the time, but it's one of those cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not knowing how to do the e-bike thing correctly. Sinclair tried again in the early 90s with a folding e-bike called the Zike, but battery technology still hadn't caught up and it was slow and under-powered just like the C5. But things like the C5 and Zike had to fail so that people could get it right later. Yeah. I've actually had a go driving/riding a C5, albeit around a former airfield rather than on the actual roads. In isolation, as a personal transport device, it's actually a really neat design. It's a great upgrade over being a pedestrian or a cyclist and would work really well if we lived in mixed-density cities with local amenities linked by grade separated cycle paths and streets where pedestrians have priority. Unfortunately (as the pics show) it exists in a car-orientated world with roads occupied by cars, trucks and lorries. And it was hampered by the state of battery and motor tech. As well as being a vehicle with no weather protection (other than an optional cagoule) in the famously balmy, warm and predictable UK.
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Feb 23, 2024 19:56
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LifeSunDeath posted:different watch but same vibe: I love the idea of a guy spending $49.95 on the novelty Time To gently caress watch and just waiting for some hottie to ask him what time it is...and when it finally happens it's five seconds past the time so he has to fill 25 seconds of time before he can lead into the reveal.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:13
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