willedoo

It would have been interesting to watch them do it. There's a young Russian bloke on Youtube who would just grind something like that by hand with his angle grinder. He's one of the roughest I've seen. He built a V twin out of scrap in his back yard with only an arc welder and angle grinder. A couple of things he got a mate to turn up on a lathe but most of it was built by hand, except for donor Ural barrels, heads and pistons. The bottom end was all hand made.

This is the camshaft on the Howard 8hp motor. The cams look bent but they have that weird shape to work properly with the 90 degree shaft. The magneto runs off the left side of the camshaft and the external oil pump from the right end.

Both the Howard V twins, the eight h.p. and the 12 h.p. like the one above have unusual shaped cams. Their camshafts run at 90 degrees to the crankshaft rather than parallel like Harley V twins. The magneto is coupled to and runs directly off the end of the camshaft.

This sidecar outfit is a wild bit of gear. It's an older Ural frame, same type as the M-63 frame I picked up recently, but has the current type of leading link Ural front end. The engine is a Howard rotary hoe engine, the Howard Twelve, a 12hp water cooled V twin, mounted sideways. This photo has been bugging me for a while now. I know those faces and the country in the background looks familiar, but I just can't get a handle on it. They did a short video on Youtube with a couple of them doing wheelies in it while one filmed.

With hot rods, there seems to be way more ratrods now days than the traditional glossy customised hotrod of the past. I guess while it's in fashion, it makes building and owning one much easier and cheaper.

I agree with you there Marty. Making up a bike out of old bits has some honour about it, but turning a new or modern type bike into one seems to be a bit like fraud in my way of seeing it.

You see a lot of Goldwing ratbikes on the net. The motors look the part. Of all the Jap bikes, it's about the only one that fits the style. This is an older one:

From Google AI: 'Urinary Health: Ural is Australia's #1 over-the-counter urinary alkaliniser.' Maybe riding a Ural will fix prostate problems. Or make it worse.

Coincidence perhaps, the importers of modern day Urals, Ural Australia, are located at Uralla, NSW.

Twenty seven years old. At least he got the long yard and not the glue factory.

Gaming is the biggest revenue earner in the entertainment industry with 3.3 billion active players worldwide. Revenue from gaming is higher than the film and music industries combined.

I spotted this Ural M-63 frame on marketplace, same year model as the one I picked up recently. You don't often see photos of bare frames for comparison; sometimes youtube restoration videos can show some detail. The only thing I learnt from this photo is what the tank rear mounting bracket looks like, as mine has been removed. Only of any use if a stock tank was going to be refitted, which is highly unlikely. Good luck to him trying to get $1,000 for it.

It did it tonight, that's why I posted that short story.

One thing I love about my place is when showers sweep in from the ocean side at night. If they're slow moving and you are out on the verandah, you can hear the noise as they move in across the valley raining down on the canefields. Sometimes you can hear it coming for a full five minutes before it hits the tin roof.

On that subject of Beach Petroleum, this photo is their geothermal / hot rocks project on the eastern side of the Flinders Range. It was taken in 2011, and a bit better quality than than previous instamatic photo. This one was taken with my little Panasonic Lumix compact. Myself and a mate went down there for about five days to do a small job. Just to the left of the well head, you can see the Beverley uranium mine at the foothill of the Flinders, which is where we were accommodated. It's a pity the project fizzled out.

Yes, I kind of visualise the mineral grid patterns as being similar to hydrocarbon 3D grids. They can be a fairly tight pattern with lines every 400 metres over a fairly large area. They could be pegged to have a vibe point every 40 metres, usually three vibe trucks with the centre one vibing at the peg. What a boring job those drivers have, drive 40 metres, lower the pad and shake the ground, lift it up and drive another 40 metres and do it all over again, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I think these days they don't even lower and raise the pads any more; it's done remotely. The only excitement they get is when someone has a flat tyre. Lucky for the environment the 3D intensive grid work came about around the same time as GPS, so that was a quantum leap in environmental protection having GPS surveying and GPS fitted machines. I can remember the days when they would have two chainmen working one vehicle. The driver would take off from a peg holding the chain out the window while the bloke or girl doing the running would let the tail of the chain overshoot the peg, then stomp on the chain when it shot past, pulling it out of the drivers hand. The runner would pull the chain back those few metres to the peg, then wave to the driver who would jump out and knock in a peg at his end. Then the driver would take off again while the runner ran up to the new peg and they'd repeat it all over . Now it's one person in a vehicle and a GPS telling them when to stop and put a peg in.

onetrack, that's a beast, that Cuthbertson Landrover. That's what I need for getting up and down the driveway. The only thing I've ever had to do with nickel was in the Kimberleys, about halfway between Halls Creek and Turkey Creek in 1986. That was just putting in some access tracks for the geologists to have a scratch around, no grid work.

To keep within the photography thread topic, but on the same subject, this is a scan of a photo I took in 1984 with an instamatic camera. I'm not sure of the format ie: 126 or 110, Peter, red750 might be able to help there. It's a very small three wheeler drill rig that was used to drill shallow upholes on the surface of Lake Eyre South. I wasn't involved with it, but from memory they towed it with a Honda trike and the Argo buggy in the background was used to haul cables. I remember they had a heap of trikes on that job. It was right at that period in history where trikes were on the way out and quad bikes were first appearing on the market.

onetrack, there's a few in the Simpson a bit older than that one, some dating back to the early/mid 60's and later 70's. In the 60's, I think the McDills and Hale River wells were the first.

onetrack, I think you're right about the welder's signature. Now that I think back on it, I've seen a lot with signatures and a lot without. As far as a sense of humour regarding the naming of that well, It's not specifically meant as a joke. It's a Beach Petroleum well and all of their wells that I know of had beach and coastal themes in their names. I've seen a fair few of them as we used to contract for Beach quite a lot. Reg Sprigg did most of his early exploration work around the beaches off Adelaide in the 1950's and 60's with his company Geosurveys, then formed it into Beach Petroleum in the early 60's. At one stage they hired a dive instructor to teach them to hookah dive and did some seismic work on the gulf bed off Adelaide. They were a great mob to work for; of all the companies we contracted for over the years, I put Beach at the top of the list by a long way.

Peter, I don't know him. I'd have to check to see who's name goes on those abandoment markers. I'm fairly sure the information on them is a legal requirement by the various state's petroleum regulations. It could be a simple tradition of the welder adding his name to it, or more likely it's the name of an authorised person attesting to the closure of the well. That possibly could be someone from the drilling company OD&E which was based in Toowoomba, or someone from Innamincka Petroleum, or if they used a contractor to seal the well, someone from that company. Schlumberger and Halliburton were the main well services contractors out there.

Jerry, I'm assuming that's an intentional pun and not a typo.

Have a good trip Pete, a good time of year to be heading out there. It's been over 14 years since I retired from working in the back country and haven't been there since. If I got my vehicle up to scratch I'd like to do another trip out there as I've never been there on a tourist basis, always working. From the east coast of S.E. Queensland it's bitumen all the way to Innamincka now. Last time I was out there the bitumen had extended from Jackson to past Ballera, but fell short of the border. It had been a good season with a good body of Mitchell grass as far as the eye could see. In that same batch of photos, I fund this one of an abandoned well name plate at that field where we worked for a short time. Top line is Willowie No.1, the well name - ie: first well in the Willowie field. Second line, the well owner, Innamincka Petroleum. Third line the drilling contractor - Oil Drilling and Exploration Rig 30. Fourth line, the date drilling commenced. Spud is short for spudded, the term for when the bit first bites into the ground. Fifth line, the date it was plugged and abandoned. Last line, the total depth reached.

I miss working in this sort of country. It's the type of scenery where you almost expect Clint Eastwood to roll up with his poncho and mule. This was the last job I worked on out there. It was a small prospect for Innamincka Petroleum around the field they had north of Innamincka. The camera was a little Panasonic Lumix compact. It took reasonable photos and was around that time period when digital cameras were starting to produce reasonable quality images. I've still got the camera but rarely use it. If I want to take a non phone photo these days I use the old Canon 700D.

Marty, this was my favourite for leaning into corners back in the day, but it probably wouldn't hold up against the modern bikes these days. A bloke I knew back then had a Dominator SS and he let me take it for a ride one day. As far as handling goes, it ran rings around the Commando. The only issue with the SS was the annoying vibration coming through the seat right around the 60mph mark. The owner of it went on to own the world's fastest Velocette. He tried for 200 mph for a few years but the final record he set was just a bit short at 193 mph.