old man emu

You missed the sarcasm of my post.

My opinioon, from my experience, but not in road construction, is that it is the geology that makes constructing roads for heavy weights the problem. Over nearly all of the continent, the ground is sedimentary material. Very few places have the surface close to bedrock. That results in great difficulty building a sound base layer upon whihc to build a road. Also, the way we seal the surface of our roads is a compromise between cost and results. That's why we have our roads sealed with bitumen sprayed over gravel. Where the roads are made opf concrete, the failure rate os a lot less, but the cost per kilometre is much more.

There's a strong precedent for a future President to make changes to the White House. It's most recent user of that precedent was Donald J Trump.

What would we do with all the money spent on defence if peace suddenly broke out?

Amazing! This thread was started on 10th November 2024 and today should reach 190 pages of comments. That's a lot. There are still two years of Trump to go. Those two years will be very, very interesting. Following the Democrat tsunami, I think that Trump will moderate his bullying. He's in a situation now similar to the Leader of the Pack looking over his shoulder to see his Pack slinking away, leaving him standing alone, face to face with the Good Guy. The Democrats are also facing a hard battle. They really can't reverse Trump's Executive Orders until they get the Presidency themselves. Even then, the next presidential term will have to accept some of Trump's glorifying acts. The East Wing reconstruction will have to go on. Most likely the above-ground part will be modified to suit the architectural scale of the rest of the building. The below ground bit is probably a good idea, but one hopes that its uses can be mothballed under a less aggressive government.

Aussie F1 legend Alan Jones passes away aged 80.

A polite name for a fart.

I see your point. I don't have any on hand to check, but I can see that the edges parallel to the split in the 1925 design are flat. I suppose later improvements made those edges round. Probably made it easier to manufacture the pin.

The thing Australians call a split pin was patented in the USA in 1925. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7413391B2/en This patent seems to be for an upgrade of pre-existing similar items. An earlier patent was granted in in the USA in 1902, and that item is of cruder design. https://patents.google.com/patent/US691730A/en 1902 version 1925 version There have been a number of later patents issued for amendments to this design, but these have been minor tweeks. The wedge-shaped piece or bolt that is/was used to fasten a pedal crank on a bicycle is known from the 1640s The word is of uncertain origin, perhaps a shortened form of cotterel, a dialectal word for "cotter pin or bolt, bracket to hang a pot over a fire" (1560s), itself of uncertain origin. Cotter-pin is attested by 1849. It would seem that the Australian term for the item provides a better description of how the pin is used and effectively differentiates it from the bolt-like thing.

Dunno about rain, but the wind has been pretty consistent up my way. Last night an isolated strong gust passed through. No! I don't suffer from flatulence.

Jeez! He slipped in unannounced!

I heard a couple of sound bites of Trump answwering questions after the election. He seemed very subdued, not his usual bombastic self.

That's why we don't have them. We don't manufacture anything that the majority of consumers want.

They are scarce on the ground in my neck of the woods.

I couldn't think of any other place where coitter pins were used. Typical applications are in fixing a crank to its crankshaft, as in a bicycle, and a piston rod to a crosshead, as in a steam engine. In mechanical engineering, a crosshead is a mechanical joint used as part of the slider-crank linkages of long stroke reciprocating engines (either internal combustion or steam). When was the last time you saw a long stroke engine or asteam engine in common use?