Search results

In your avatar you look much younger than 74. How do you do it?

Hate to be picky, but I still have the instincts or reflexes of a (retired) career English teacher. There is a significant difference between "dual" and "duel".

I ride a step-thru (Ariel Rider C class), and often carry a load of groceries. I read a lot of comments on the need to balance loads left and right, but I do not find this true at all. I often load everything in the left basket (because that's the side from which I approach the bike), and...

When I got my first driver's license at age 16, the brakes went out on my parents' '41 Pontiac one block from the police station (where I took my driver's test--small town, of course). Many of the cars I drove in those days ('30 Model A Ford, for example), had lousy brakes. On the Ford, the...

Something that puzzles me is that most videos of road bikers show them gripping the upper part of the handlebar, rather than the drop part. Riding in that extreme tuck must be very uncomfortable. Or maybe there's another reason?

Boeing's latest screw up was having a "door plug" pop out at 16,000 feet after taking off from Portland. No serious injuries resulted. My wife and her daughter are flying to Minneapolis in April. I sure hope it's not in a Boeing aircraft.

Bellingham has been replacing old style walk signals with countdown signals--though not everywhere yet. Very handy to see the walk signal counting down, so you know whether you have time to make the light. Handy for pedestrians, too.

Except on our old on-speeds of many decades ago, all we had were (rear) coaster brakes.

Thanks for jogging my memory. Of course the 747 preceded the Dreamliner.

"Titanic of the skies" also has a nice sound to it. I was teaching on Whidbey Island (Langley HS) when Boeing was prepping the field at Everett for building Dreamliners. A gulley crossed under the road from Everett to Mukilteo, and they put in a railroad up that gulley to haul Dreamliner parts...

Or, "the flying Dutchman of the skies." The Netflix special on Boeing's problems is very revealing. For the first half of its history, the company was known for serious quality control and safety; then they merged with McDonnel Douglas, and maximizing profits became the new operating paradigm...

I would call hot water heater a redundancy.

For what it's worth, my Ariel Rider C class uses a Tongsheng motor, which is very quiet. In fact I can barely hear it even if intentionally listening. I use most PAS level 1, and occasionally level 2.

Drilling out a lock with ordinary high speed bits is problematic. It's heat that kills HSS bits. The best alternative I know of is cobalt bits (not titanium oxide coated). Cobalt will drill stainless steel because it can withstand high heat.

Okay, time for pressure cooker tales. When I was in college, a buddy and I had an apartment with a little kitchen, a hot plate, an aluminum pressure cooker, and a big sack of red beans and another of rice (these were our principal diet, as we were very poor). So of course, we decided to pressure...

Wow. I grow green beans, and have found that simple boiling for 3 to 4 minutes gets them done perfectly. In the time it takes to get a PC up to pressure.

The way I wrote that makes no sense. What I mean is better to be dead rather than dorky (in the view of those who cringe at the thought of being dorky).

I like my vegetables al dente, but a pressure cooker overcooks them so they turn out as mush. My parents liked them that way, but not for me. Good for meat, though, especially tough cuts.

I should have known better than to look into an ebike forum to learn about cosmology.

Do bikes still come with the reflective plastic plates that are wedged into the spokes? The advantage is that they rotate as you pedal and that makes them more visible. Mounted fore and aft, they show a driver what you are. But seems many people regarded them as dorky, and removed them. Better...