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The major party's bipartisan immigration policy is on the rocks, thanks to One Nation. The Liberals are now calling for a reduction in immigrant numbers, trying to take the wind out of O.N.'s sails. No one trusts the Liberal any longer, they're just about finished. And Labor is in the same boat, floating rudderless in a One Nation sea.

Visited the ASC when they were building the last one and refurbishing the Collins. The guide was saying they decided they wanted them to go faster so they put a heap of fairng on them.

We have seen that recently with the budget. As if they weren"t thinking about negative gearing before the election. Lying pieces of ..... the only reason ON is getting any teaction is because of the poor performance of the major partys. It is amazing how people get stuck into other people without acually thinking they may be wrong themselves.

This bloke does some good video presentations. This one gives a good explanation of what happens when hoons ride Harleys:

To summarise all of the above post, basically I've got to spend less time fooling around on this computer and more time swinging a hammer.

I've estimated there won't be much ratbiking happening until later in the year. There's a lot of shed renovations to finish before that happens, but in the meantime a bit of parts sorting and sourcing is still happening. On the shed/workshop renovation side there's still a fair bit to do. Some steel diagonal braces need to be relocated for better workbench fitment. A couple of windows need to be finished off and a couple more timber wall purlins swapped out for steel. Where one diagonal brace set is to be removed, an existing timber wall frame in that quarter section will be converted to a bracing wall with rods and bracing ply, double braced and insulated. Then a six metre long wall section leading to another shed room will be walled in for bench and shelving space. The steps leading into the other room will be removed and alternate entry to that room sorted. That gets the walls done, so then it's on to positioning existing work benches and building a couple of new ones. After that, the shelving set up. That's all the hard part. The easier, fun part will be filling those shelves and sorting out tools and bits and pieces and setting up the workship equipment. The goal is for everything to have a fixed home instead of the mayhem the shed is now. I'll also lash out and get a sparky to run permanent wiring, lights and power points. I'm over plugging leads in and out all the time. This is a bucket list goal to get the workshop set up the way it's supposed to be. It's been a cluttered half workshop/half storage area for the last eighteen years or so since I built it, and it's been hard to do any major work in it due to all the junk in there which now has to go.

Come and knock on my door we've been waiting for you.

Correct.

LA confidential

Correct OT. Nev, the D is not added to Paint, it substitutes for 'the'.

The Trump administration is removing about 900 ocean monitoring buoys from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans ahead of one of the most severe el Nino seasons on record. The buoys measure changes in the oceans to monitor global climate conditions. In Trump’s world, if you don’t measure a problem, there is no problem.

painted the town red. Nev

BUGGA? John Laws didn't mention that. Nev

It's not just heavy trucks, anything with wheels will do it. You see corrugations on a lot of tracks that mainly only have Toyotas traversing them.

If it's the heavy trucks that are causing the corrugations, how do you explain corrugations in minor roads? I have an unsealed road beside my place. It starts at the intersection with the sealed highway. The road is mainly used by light vehicles, and when a heavy does use it, the speed is low because they have either just turned into the road or are coming out of a dip where the creek crosses the road. Also, the distance between the crests of the corrugations is shorter than the footprint of a truck tyre. After following the conversations here, I get the feeling that no one watched the video which show a demonstration of how these corrugations form.

And how many proven Ukrainian submersibles could we buy with whatever cash was left after that? What war plan scenario showed that a couple of big outdated subs would win, against any believable agressor?

Random history borrowed from another thread..... 25 years ago today, a big clash of the superpowers - the “Hainan Island Incident”, which is described in a book “Pacific”, by Simon Winchester. Hainan Island incident - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org U.S. intelligence gathering plane operating in the South China Sea, whose air and water China considers its territory, the U.S. not so much. Chinese jet, flown by Lt. Cdr. Wang Wei -who had intercepted US planes before, getting close enough to display his email address on a paper sign through the cockpit- gets a bit too close this time and collides with the U.S. plane. Wang’s plane is heavily damaged, goes out of control, he ejects, parachute malfunctions, he disappears into the sea. The U.S. plane, with 23 aboard, heavily damaged but still flying, makes an emergency landing without Chinese permission (none of their distress calls had been responded to by the Chinese) at a sensitive military base on large Hainan Island (which is a long time target of US spying) on the SE coast of China, surrounded by armed troops upon arrival, who force their way into the plane. (Plane was later retuned to the U.S. , dismantled in wooden boxes, on a Russian cargo plane.) What was going through their minds…. “For the next 26 minutes, the crew of the EP-3 [US plane, after it was stabilized following a big rapid descent after the collision] performed an emergency plan which included destroying sensitive items aboard the aircraft, such as electronic equipment related to intelligence-gathering, documents and data. Part of this plan involved pouring freshly brewed coffee into disk drives and motherboards and using an axe from the plane's survival kit to destroy hard drives.[15] The crew had not been formally trained on how to destroy sensitive documents and equipment, and so improvised. As a result of the destruction, the plane's interior was later described as resembling "the aftermath of a frat party".[12] The air crew was interrogated and held for over a week, diplomatic crisis, etc etc. Among other things China learned from the plane in its possession —although the crew destroyed a lot of info and spying equipment aboard - including after landing while Chinese troops banged on the windows and shouted at them with bullhorns to come out— China learned that the U.S. could track its submarines via signals intelligence. The end was a letter, or letters, “the two sorries”, issued that allowed each country to save face. 25 years ago today (Bush’s first foreign policy crisis.) Could’ve been a lot worse. Let’s avoid this kinda stuff in future, shall we? Air and sea patrols have continued since then, but US crafts have learned to be much more careful since. Imagine if this incident had occurred while Trumpster was *resident…

I almost posted this in Funny Videos thread..... the joke's on us. It's time I sign up for Mandarin lessons.

Paint the town red.

Yep.

I ran into a bloke years ago, back in the 70's and he was doing interstate work with an F-700 with the five speed box. He jokingly said he only had to change gears three times between Melbourne and Brisbane. The only Macks I've driven were the old B model and a V8 R model. I can't remember what transmission the V8 had but it had some legs. Good torque as well. The old B model was a bogie drive with the 55 mph diff. It was more like driving a tractor than a truck.

"I see trees of green, red roses too..."

It was more likely the increased speed of trucks with pneumatic tyres that created the corrugations, not the move from solids to pneumatics. Pneumatic tyres on trucks started to appear in 1920 and by about 1925, virtually all trucks were on pneumatics, only the big heavy haul low loaders still used solid wheels and they only travelled at low speeds. People forget about the early low motoring speeds and the low speed limits. In the 1920's to even after WW2, the speed limit for "heavy" trucks in Australia was 15mph (25kmh). "Heavy" was 3 tons or more. Truckies fought for higher speed limits and were often fined for driving "at dangerous speed" - like 25mph (40kmh). During WW2, military convoys ran at 30mph (50kmh) maximum speed to save on tyre wear and preserve road surfaces. Trucks were geared to be flat out at low speeds. Ford V8's were the fastest trucks around, they could do 40-45mph, but that was well over official truck speed limits. WW2 trucks were all geared to about 35 mph maximum speed. The big Military Federals and Reos were flat out at 28mph, they had 10:1 diff ratios for heavy haulage. Bedfords were happiest at about 30mph, they start to scream their guts out at 35mph, and if you could get them to 40mph, that was their absolute limit. Roads were simply poor in the pre-WW2 era and it took a while after WW2 for roads to be upgraded. The 1950's saw a lot of road improvements, widening and sealing. When the first post-war Kenworths and Macks arrived here in the late 1950's, they could do 100kmh (62mph) - but the official maximum truck speed limit was still only 80kmh. So you risked serious fines for doing more than 80kmh. When I bought my first Mack F-700 (cabover) in 1975, the Mack did over 100kmh, but the truck speed limit was still 80kmh. It took until about 1978 to raise the truck speed limit to 100kmh, and that was only after a lot of arguments against raising it. And when you see this (video below), you start to understand that a lot of roads and drivers are still not up to their trucks capabilities. https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18cqZRTEaz/

Pete, I guess also as truck design advanced, the extra weight would play a part as well.

It shakes bolts out of trailers which is the biggest cause of flat tyres on those roads. Frustrating for the truckies blowing $500 tyres.