onetrack

About as defective as the bloke himself.

The scary part about getting older is seeing the younger set going ga-ga over some historic, vintage footage, from ancient times, about 50 or 60 years ago - then you look at it, and realise you were there as an adult, and everything is very familiar! I can also recall when middle nephew (about 10) came home from school and asked his Mum (SIL) if she had any old photos for a school project. When his Mum said, "How old?", he replied, "Oh, from about 60 years ago, when you were little!" His Mum was 30 at the time! 😄

That's great news, Willie. One of the problems with getting old is getting older alone. I'd hate to do that. I have a mate doing that now, he and his brother built a big shed on some rented land in the deep SW of W.A., alongside the Blackwood River, which is quite a scenic spot. However, his slightly older brother (79) recently developed dementia (last year), and has moved out of his half of the shed, into a nursing home in a small nearby town. He was assessed as being unable to look after himself. So my mate is now living alone in that big shed, and I've noticed how much he's deteriorated in the last year or so. He keeps falling over, too, as he loses his balance easily. He fell over last week in the yard, and went straight backwards onto the ground, and gashed his head open. So, being the tough old codger he is, he wrapped his head in towels and drove himself to the local nursing post (there's no local doctors or hospital). The nurse there was shocked to see him, there was so much blood, she thought he'd been shot. So then he had to wait 13 hrs for an ambulance to transport him to Busselton Hospital, 60kms away. The doc there stitched him up and sent him home, but when I rang him a couple of days later, he said he was having problems doing jobs in his workshop, and thought he might have had some degree of concussion - although the doc ruled that out with the standard tests. He's just turned 78 last month, and I'm concerned about how he will go into the near future. He's on the bones of his bum, he was never a good money manager, and his ex-wife cleaned him out and took the house, so he ended up in the shed. He's totally resistant to any idea of moving into any form of retirement village, and he can't afford it, anyway. I reckon he would do a lot better with a partner, but he's got no time for women now, so that's unlikely to happen. One of the advantages of having a woman around, is that she can at least raise help, or find you quickly when you've taken a turn for the worse.

Another little-known takeover has seen The Reject Shop sell out to a huge Canadian company, Dollarama. The Reject Shop got $260M for their business, and Dollarama has plans to change all Reject Shop store branding to Dollarama. In addition, Dollarama are going on a massive expansion drive, aiming to enlarge the range of stuff their stores sell, to compete with Target and K-Mart, and even Coles and Woolworths. Dollarama plan to nearly double the number of stores from the current 390 stores, to more than 700. In addition, Dollarama promise huge savings on their product prices, due to their massive buying power. Dollarama claim that in some cases, consumers will see major decreases in pricing of products they sell, sometimes up to half the current retail price. It will be interesting to see the result, the Canadians apparently love Dollarama stores.

You can easily purchase plug-in webcams for older computers, which would give the ability to take facial photographs.

The Poms refuse to do any repair work on their houses, they mostly live in council-owned housing and they expect the councils to fix them. When they do own their own house, they always engage tradespeople to do their repairs and maintenance.

You need to set up a Corrugations Cam at road level, running continously, to record exactly how those corrugations form! I'm amused at how the Americans insist that they're called "washboard" - but all the early American publications call them "corrugations". 😄

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!"

So Pauline is going to set up a whole new level of bureaucratic oversight, something like Trumps DOGE? Let me know how that works in practical terms - it seems like DOGE went out the window long ago, with virtually zero savings. DOGE was shut down 8 mths ahead of schedule, and it no longer exists. Musk claimed DOGE saved US$214B in Govt waste and losses - the reality is, his claims were total BS, DOGE saved nothing in the final washup, and it is reported that overall, DOGE actually cost U.S. taxpayers, by the time the cost of having to rehire important people fired by DOGE operatives, and lawsuits by Govt employees unfairly dismissed, were taken into account.

It's interesting that Trump and the MAGA mob have just lost an important gubnertorial election in Iowa to a Democrat by the name of Zach Lahn. Lahn defeated the Republican incumbent, Trump-backed Randy Feenstra. Despite Iowa being a big support zone for Trump, with the State being a huge farming State - Lahn won on multiple angles associated with health issues that the State is grappling with. Des Moines water is so polluted with nitrate run-off into water aquifers, they have had to install special filtration equipment. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in Iowa, and a lot of Iowan people (including farmers) believe high levels of pesticide and herbicide use is to blame for both problems. Trump is trying to ensure Monsanto can't be sued, and has watered down EPA laws and controls. The Iowans see it differently, they want Monsanto held to account, and EPA laws and regulations kept in place. Lahn campaigned on the MAHA ticket - Make America Healthy Again, a vocal group who claim that Americans suffer from an epidemic of chronic illnesses, driven by ultra-processed foods, environmental toxins, over-medicalisation, and corporate corruption within the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. MAHA is championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Lahn also campaigned on reducing major corporate ownership and control of farmland. This is an interesting turn of events, a Red State turning against Trumps corporate-loving policies.

Yeah, that's the beast - and the video below is the one I saw last year. Watch for the screen readout in the cabin, about 13 secs in from the start. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1499670794616183