You’ve probably seen them, you may own some, perhaps you’ve even tripped over one…

Solar Powered garden lamps seem to be practically everywhere these day illuminating small spots of grass with their relatively asthmatic led bulbs. Admittedly from the angle of light pollution, these devices are quite low polluters but they are, none the less, kitsch.

Now, you’ll have heard, whether you know it to be true or not, the argument that solar panels (photovoltaics) never produce more power than it takes to manufacture them. This is, of course, false. A photovoltaic panel on it’s own would probably pay back it’s manufacturing energy cost in a few years of use. In terms of solar kitsch however, this is not the whole story.

Solar garden lamps have several other components, the most obvious being the ultra-cheaply produced plastic casing which becomes brittle after perhaps just one season of use. Then there is the charge-controller and it’s often integrated led lamp which often has insufficient protection to avoid the tracks and solder joints from oxidising. Finally, there are the rechargable batteries which are more often than not the cheapest that money can buy. Each of these components can cause the failure of the whole lamp and as with so much other kitsch, I suspect that once it is broken, it is discarded.

Now that’s a shame. That solar panel in the top of the lamp may have paid back it’s manufacture energy alone during the lamp’s lifetime but it is probably still some years from paying for the thermoplastics, circuits and batteries that make up the rest of the lamp.

There’s probably nothing wrong with the solar panel itself. A photovoltaic is a relatively simple and very robust device which could last 40 years or more, constantly producing power when exposed to the sun. It makes me cringe to think how many of these small solar panels have ended up in landfills already simply because they were attached to fashion-fad kitsch.

If you were to salvage those panels however, it would be trivial to build them into large arrays to produce useful power for years to come.

So, whatever you do with your solar kitsch, save those panels!

Reportedly, three people were killed yesterday at 2.30pm at Scaled Composites‘ Mojave facility.

The explosion apparently occurred in a nitrous oxide system which was undergoing ground testing for flow-rates (essentially a non-ignition test). According to Scaled’s founder Burt Rutan, they had performed a lot of these tests with Spaceship One. Development was underway for Space Ship Two which is to be used by Virgin Galactic.

Another employee was said to have been badly hurt.

There is more info on this unfortunate event over at The Register.

It’s worth remembering that space flight is not the safest occupation and the high-energy systems involved have caught people out on many occasions in the past.

Quite honestly, using a motorway in the UK at peak times these days is not much fun.

Generally speaking you’re likely to sit in stop/start traffic and use substantially more fuel than if the road was clear while take an eternity to get to your destination.With the appliance of just a little technology, this could be made so much better.

Motorways are designed to be carefully controlled systems and if everything happened as it was designed to, they would work well. The trouble is, adding just one thing breaks the system: Human beings.

Human beings driving on motorways tend to be both selfish and stupid. They drive with excessive speed, fail to use proper lane discipline and ‘tailgate’ other drivers causing sudden braking and wave-effects in the traffic flow. They also crash. Badly.

I suggest then that the motorways are an ideal place for the application of modern technology. What we need is the ‘Motorway Autopilot’.

The moment you join the entry slip road at peak time, your car’s autopilot would take over control of throttle, gears, brakes and steering. As you arrive at the filter point, the other vehicles, also all controlled by autopilot would already have made a gap just 10 feet longer than your car into which you would slot yourself.

As your car is a lightweight, lightly laden car with performance sufficient to handle any gradient found on the motorway network, another gap would form in lane 2 for you and then another in lane 3. Once in lane three, you would find yourself moving with other vehicles of the same class and loading at 60mph. The car ahead would be just 5 feet away and the one behind just as close. Packing the vehicles in so tightly would allow many more vehicles to use the motorway without causing a complete standstill.

Despite only travelling at 60mph, you would arrive at your destination sooner than in the ‘bad old days’ before autopilots simply due to the free flowing traffic. This reduced speed helps to reduce pollution while the removal of the human-induced speed oscillations reduces pollution further. The reduced speed also allows leeway for the vehicles to make small adjustments to speed to allow traffic to filter between lanes.

Obviously, emergencies would have to be handled carefully by the system but even then, the autopilot would be a great help. Mechanical failures could would be trivial.

Let us say your car, travelling along in the tightly bunched traffic of lane 3 suddenly blows out a tyre. No problem!

1. Sensors on your vehicle register the blowout and immediately inform the motorway network.
2. Within a fraction of a second traffic in lanes 1 and 2 and behind you in lane 3 begin heavy braking.
3. Your car’s normal Electronic Stability Program, coupled to the Motorway Autopilot expertly guides you across the now wide open gap in lanes 1 and 2 to the hard shoulder.
4. The motorway network sends out a recovery vehicle to you automatically while immediately instructing the autopilots of the vehicles which slowed for you to accelerate back to normal cruising speed.

Even emergencies such as foreign objects falling into the road could be handled with little drama as the vehicles could perform controlled emergency stops without risk of pile-ups.

The system could be extended further to eliminate the full-time hard-shoulder and automatically and efficiently force all traffic across one lane in the event a vehicle breaks down.

Just think, you could go to sleep on the M40, not kill yourself and arrive in London in about an hour and a half with your own car.

BMW M5 versus a Nissan Silvia on the 1/4 mile.

The BMW driver is such a gentleman, he gives the Silvia a head start.

(1100bhp 8s car )

After a short week in the Vehicle Assembly Building, NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour is already set to go to the pad.

The payload module is already installed in the RSS and Endeavour will arrive the pad on Tuesday.

I just hope that with such a quick turn around they remembered everything. They would look damned silly if they turned up at the pad with 2 boosters and an ET but no Orbiter

I recently acquired a set of 17″ 8J Breyton Magics for my E34. As it turns out there isn’t much by way of information on these rims on the intarwebs so I thought I’d post a bit up.

My main reason for getting the Magics is that when I bought my E34, it came with the dreaded ‘Metrics’, a wheel which took a tyre of 230 55 M390 size known as ‘TRX’ or ‘TD’ tyres. Unfortunately for me, the only manufacturer left making this specific size of TRX fitment tyre was Dunlop who wanted a mighty £150 per corner. Furthermore, if I were to shred two tyres out on the continent, I’d be well out of luck on getting replacements.

The TRX rims had to go!

Handily, I found an ebay advert for some 17″ 8J Breyton Magics which I won for £200 complete with tyres. The new rims take a 235 45 R17 fitment front and rear (not staggered) which means I can buy tyres for just £45 a corner

The Breytons are a nice multi-spoke/many-spoke design with a deep dish (8J) which suits the oldskool looks of the E34. I’ve since seen an even deeper set on a French E34 which I presume must have been 8.5J front and rear! The wheels were actually designed for the E39 which means that while the PCD and offset is correct, the centre-bore is just a millimeter or so different. This means you can end up with a slight mis-location of the wheels on the hubs and some nasty vibrations. So, I made a quick trip over to Wheels UK at Coventry who sold me a nice set of machined aluminium spigot rings to locate over the hubs.

The 235 wide summer tyres provide more than enough grip in both wet and dry conditions for the ~150bhp M51 engine in my E34 in terms of handling although they will spin up with a spirited takeoff in the wet. There is a certain amount of ‘tram-lining’ with the current tyres (the tendency to follow white lines a channel patches in the road). I’m informed this can be mitigated by using the v-cut tread pattern tyres on the front so my next set will probably be Linglong L688s.