onetrack

This is the satirical headline story from the Bell Tower Times - Perths equivalent of The Onion. The bloke may not be familiar to East Coasters - but he's John Hughes, W.A.'s longest-lived car dealer, and a legend in W.A. He turned 90 last December, and still runs personalised TV ads and asks car buyers to call him personally, and regularly states, he's "W.A.'s most trusted car dealer". He's also Alan Bonds BIL. Yes, THAT Alan Bond. But John Hughes has managed to evade any of the Alan Bond taint, in his business dealings.

Farley seems like a reasonable sort of individual with a realistic outlook, that is less hardline than Paulines approach. I'm surprised he's thrown his hat in with ON. Perhaps he'll be the sure hand on the tiller of ON and bring some stability to the Party. Or perhaps he won't last long, and there'll be a falling out, and he'll be booted from ON.

You talkin' to me?

I thought of splined pin design as soon as he started talking about the twisting problem. I wonder what welding does to the heat treatment of the steel. The pin has to be hardened to exceptional hardness to meet roller bearing hardness levels. Arc welding puts a lot of concentrated heat into the items being welded and creates localised stresses. Another anti-twisting technique would be to install a rectangular plate bolted into the end of the pin, which plate would lock into the flywheel plates via a recess, or via blocks on the flywheels - provided there was clearance for the blocks.

Don't worry - tomorrow will bring an entirely new and fantastic world-beating project, and the tunnel will be forgotten. And then when someone brings it up again, he'll deny proposing it - because it's fake news. In fact, it's tomorrow already, and the latest dream is Trump-class battleships. And the USN is ready to order billions of dollars worth of high-tech steel for them, and no-one has even started on the plans for them yet. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-06/trumps-battleship-plan-poses-new-risk-to-aukus-committee-fears/105765176

Paint the town red.

"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/

That looks like a nice spot, Octave. I trust you have an enjoyable stay.

So, I wonder how they would've performed walking on hot ground during Summer? Bitumen can get up to 70°C in Summer, and ordinary rocky clayey ground generally isn't far behind, temperature-wise.

So, essentially, Marles and his mates went to Washington to buy several new Holden Calais, but the Americans convinced them they'd be better off taking 3 knackered Captivas to fill in, while they wait 30 years for the Calais' to be built? Sounds like the deal of the century to me - for the U.S. They're probably still clinking champagne glasses over unloading three well-used Virginia subs onto a pile of hicks and suckers from Down Under, that are going to need huge levels of maintenance in the near future - that we'll have to pay for, and which can only be done by U.S. shipyards, seeing as they contain secret-squirrel power plant technology?

I bought 3 pairs of Dunlop steel-toe workboots in the mid-1990's, because they were going out cheap. I didn't need them immediately, but I thought I'd "stock up" for when I did need them. I never even got to wear them. Within about 18 mths, the rubberised soles had turned into a gooey globby mess, that just fell off the uppers. So I ended up with a set of 3 perfect leather uppers with no soles. I kept those new uppers for ages, thinking I might be able to organise new soles of some type for them. No bootmaker would even look at them, so the uppers laid around my workshop for years, until I was evicted from it, ahead of workshop demolition, in early 2024. So they went in the bin, in the huge cleanup associated with the move out of the workshop. What a bloody waste. I know now, why they were going out cheap. Dunlop carried out some disastrous product moves in that era, and it still dogs them today. No Dunlop tyre I have ever bought, or acquired, has reached its full life without carcass separation, or just blowing out. I just disposed of the last of 4 Dunlops I acquired on 4 wheels I bought to fit my Hilux about 3 years ago. They were almost new when I acquired them. One separated within about 3 mths, another separated about 6 mths later, and the third separated about 6 mths after that. They just went completely out of round, developing huge carcass distortion. The last one nearly wore out, but the tread started coming off on the inside, and that scared me a bit, because it was on a front wheel. So I ditched it for a new Bridgestone A/T697 Dueler. I haven't actually bought any new Dunlops for about 40 years, I refuse to buy them. But I keep "inheriting" the darn things when they come on vehicles or wheels that I buy. They are total rubbish.

Latoya Jackson.

Here is Richard Marles interview on 7:30 on the ABC that backs what Peter is saying... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-03/aukus-deal-under-scrutiny/106756374

A great Ronnie Corbett classic, worth repeating .... "For some time, my wife’s had this ridiculous idea that I’m playing too much golf. Actually, it came to a head at about 11.30PM last night. She suddenly shouted at me: ‘Golf, golf, golf!! All you ever think about is bloody golf!’ And I’ll be honest, it frightened the life out of me. I mean, you don’t expect to meet somebody on the 14th green, at that time of night!"