Sagitar

Has anyone tried the Casio EX-F1?

And please don't forget that BP shareholders include your pension funds and lots of people like me who invested our retirement funds with them. Even after the government has had its tax on sales and its VAT, BP has to pay corporation tax on its profits and I pay 40% income tax on the dividend that my shares generate. There cannot be many companies that generate more money for the government than does BP.

Doesn't this depend almost entirely on the quality and strength of the signal at your location? We live in the shadow of a hill and there is no way that we can get a decent signal without a proper external antenna on a mast high above the house. I think there are maps that show the general signal strength by area and you might be able to get your local supplier to do a signal test for you if you are intending to buy from him.

If you can afford to run an IS 220, you can afford a few quid for a tyre inflator, (there are several foot pumps on Amazon currently for under £10 - or you can buy one that runs from the cigar lighter for about £25.00) then you can top them up whenever you want. The most common cause of tyre carcass failure is under-inflation resulting from drivers failing to do regular pressure checks. I know which cost I would rather bear.

Does that mean that you did not check your tyre pressures for several months? Tyre pressures should be checked weekly and it's difficult to see how the caps would seize if they were removed and re-fitted this frequently.

My experience is similar (see overall figure below) but at the risk of boring, I have to say that it's necessary to check consumption manually over a significant mileage to get accurate figures. The dashboard display in my car is always very optimistic (32.9 indicated versus 30.6 real). The data on the Spiritmonitor site shows real data for a range of drivers and makes interesting reading.

HTC TyTNII - Excellent for me because I use the Gps on it with Memory Maps when I am fell walking. I do not otherwise use many of the on-line facilities but it works well as a phone and Blue Tooth connects reliably without taking it out of my pocket. My favourite 'phone would still be the Palm Treo if only the walking map software suppliers supported the Palm O.S.

I have a roomy garage with an automatic door and an entrance directly to the house. So I rarely stop on the drive, but normally drive straight into the garage and close the garage door before leaving the car.

Well you set mine up, so don't blame me . . . . . . . :P

Interesting - that's where I started, but I am now up to 39 front and 42 rear. Should have said I am on Dunlop SP Sport Maxx.

My IS 250 auto went in for service yesterday, with about 13,000 miles on the clock. The tyre wear measurements were: Front left 4 6 4 Front right 4 6 4 Rear left 5 5 5 Rear right 5 5 5 Uneven wear on the outsides of the tyres was visible early on and I raised tyre pressures by 2 p.s.i. all round as a consequence. It did not solve the problem entirely and recently I raised the pressures by a further 2 p.s.i. The rears are fine but I still have uneven wear across the fronts. Given that these are the tyres that take the steering load, is this kind of wear typical or could I do better?

satin

I have no collated evidence, but my impression locally is that the newly laid roads are the quietest, presumably because the mastic material fills the voids between the chips and gives a continuous surface. As the mastic material wears away, the chips are exposed and the rougher surface is noisier. The noisiest surfaces locally are those where a quick resurface has been done by spreading loose chips on top of an adhesive.

It's well optimistic on mine, showing 32.4 mpg overall at present as opposed to the real figure below.

sweet

In the days when I designed aircraft hydraulic systems, we used nitrogen because it was safer. It is more inert and less of a fire risk than compressed air. Some of our systems operated at very high pressures (1500 p.s.i. plus) and were in close proximity to hydraulic fluid and fuels, so it was worth being careful. Incidentally, the characteristic that causes nitrogen not to support combustion also means that it will not support human life, so if you are going to use it, store or generate it in a well ventilated area. It is not poisonous, but it will asphyxiate you. Bottled nitrogen can also be more convenient than carting a compressor around, with the maintenance implications, especially of water traps. In the laboratory where we assembled prototypes and tested systems we used piped high pressure nitrogen from a battery of large bottles stored on the outside of the building. The performance of nitrogen as a working fluid, in terms of heat transfer and the relationship of pressure, temperature and volume is essentially no different from that of dry air. Their molecular mass is very similar (the air to nitrogen ratio is about 1.03 to 1) so their thermal inertia is also very similar. I know nothing about F1 but I would guess that their logic is not dissimilar from that of the aircraft industry. The arguments about leakage through tyre walls appear to me to be fatuous. Such leakage rates are very low and tyres should be checked weekly. Any difference in pressure loss over such a short period due to differences in the nature of the gases will be so small as to be unmeasurable with normal equipment. The argument that topping up with nitrogen will reduce the need for frequent checking is equally weak. If you get a slow puncture or a faulty inflation valve it wont matter a damn whether your tyre is filled with air or nitrogen. A commercial organisation may well decide that it is more convenient to store or generate nitrogen than to run an air compressor and if I were offered a nitrogen top up at no cost, I wouldn't hesitate to accept it, but I certainly wouldn't kid myself that it would make any significant difference to the way my tyres behaved. Perhaps the best argument that I have heard for nitrogen inflation in every-day road vehicles is that it comes with pretty green inflation valve caps . . . . .

You need to look for another reason. The laws of physics are the laws of physics. Nitrogen and Air respond in the same way to temperature, pressure and volume changes. They both obey the standard gas laws. So, either the ambient conditions were different, or the rate at which the tyres were worked was different. You could get a difference if very wet air was used to fill the tyre. But it would need to be wet enough to have free standing liquid in the tyre when it was cold. In that case, the water would turn to water vapour when the tyre heated up and cause a larger than normal change in pressure. It would be an unusual occurrence though, because air-lines for tyre inflation are normally fitted with water traps.

'fraid so, to the point where I nod-off when he starts to drone on. They should put him on the "grumpy old men" programme and leave him there.

draughtsman

In fact it's got 10 lb less draw weight than the one it is replacing and which I have been shooting with for the past nine years. I am getting a bit old and weak so I decided to go down from 60 lb peak weight to 50. It was very easy to tune and to get shooting well, but I did wonder whether I should get you to check the alignment . . . . . :P One of the attractions of this particular bow (made in the USA) is that they call the red and black colour scheme "Testarossa". It shoots at about 300 ft per second (about 205 m.p.h.) so just a little bit faster than the real thing, but with much better acceleration . . . . .

Not far from the Arctic circle then? What do you drive in the winter?

. . . . . . but maybe not as you know them? I have been setting up a new bow this morning. It's a compound bow, sometimes known colloquially as a "wheelie"

Franklin

Hi Dan - you have confused me somewhat. A digital SLR will normally have interchangeable lenses. I don't know of any new one for that sort of price, but you should be able to get a decent second hand one. If you don't need interchangeable lenses then you need to look at bridge cameras or compact cameras. Fraid I cannot give you any direct info in this area - I only use SLRs , but there are some good review sites. This one is among the best http://www.dpreview.com/. The other place you might like to try is the Amateur Photographer forums at http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/. People there are very helpful. Go to the Forums.

You could try a test. Keep the heated seats on all week. The next week, don't switch the heated seats on at all. You could report back the difference in mpg. If they use energy, they use fuel. Where else would the energy come from? The difficulty in measuring how much arises from the impossibility of keeping everything else constant while you do the measuring.