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Post by dit on Oct 7, 2011 10:53:22 GMT
(I was sure there would be a thread for these, but I've searched and can't find one. If I'm wrong, will a mod or admin please merge for me? Cheers)I enjoyed reading this from 2009 - one of James' better ones, which funnily enough relates to a conversation going on in the 'Chat' thread at the moment. www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-may-baby-on-board-2006-07-01
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Post by pie on Oct 8, 2011 12:01:20 GMT
That was a good one. He really does have a way with words!
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Post by xjsarah on Oct 8, 2011 19:31:13 GMT
LOL!! ;D A damn good read, that was.
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Post by dit on Oct 22, 2011 19:14:06 GMT
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Post by flatin5th - Knight of the NC on Oct 22, 2011 20:11:54 GMT
I dont know whether or not I agree with that! I 'm not sure what he was saying in the end! I have always fixed my own cars, and now my sons are fixing theirs! We have just prepped our Alfa GTV for its MOT - but it only needs new suspension bits and pieces. Eldest boy has a state-of-the-art (ish) japanese rocket ship (Evo 8 430 ;D ) and he fixes that himself - but does need to borrow some specialist kit for the trick transmission! We all understand the workings of our cars, so we can tell if something is wrong, and what to do to put it right! I think it a combination of being too tight to pay other people for something we can do ourselves, and quite liking playing with cars! |
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Post by eolise on Oct 22, 2011 20:13:07 GMT
Ow, yea, sweeet!  |
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Post by dit on Nov 18, 2011 0:17:07 GMT
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Post by dit on Jan 27, 2012 20:46:52 GMT
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Post by liverbird on Jan 27, 2012 21:27:46 GMT
I agree entirely, then I read this' "I am overcome with a visceral urge to mount it. Why? Because I've discovered the Forty-Eight model...." *THUD* I will be 48 next week Surely it is a sign?!?!!!! Alas, he was blathering on about bloody motorcycles. Ho hum. |
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Post by FizzyLogician on Jan 27, 2012 22:01:42 GMT
I think he just trashed my tires. But at least I don't have to become anorexic.  |
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ElerVim
Filthy Mayhemer
"If there is one thing I like in a woman, it's me." - TGL in Sweden
Posts: 598
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Post by ElerVim on Jan 28, 2012 0:53:40 GMT
Note to self: I agree with Dit; my weight is perfect. "I prefer women with what is sometimes termed ‘definition'; you know, the ones who look as if they've been inflated properly." ::sporfle:: |
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Post by pie on Jan 28, 2012 5:15:01 GMT
He is very, very funny. ;D And what a brilliant photo. (For the record, skinny is indeed comfortable when it's natural. I can't inflate myself even if I try...but I'm sure it'll catch up with me down the track. ) |
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Post by Vivienne on Jan 28, 2012 15:22:56 GMT
Would that be the hourglass shape cause that's what I am, didn't happen til after my darling son was born and have kept it these 28 years.
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Post by slfriend79 on Mar 29, 2012 23:25:39 GMT
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Post by From Afar on Mar 30, 2012 0:07:51 GMT
I can't inflate myself even if I try...but I'm sure it'll catch up with me down the track. ) Pie your lucky.... I was around 7 stone for ever.... Then my mid thirtys hit..... All I can say is "oh dear" |
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Post by jacqui on Mar 30, 2012 19:44:39 GMT
Thanks for posting, that made me laugh out loud several times ;D |
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Post by slfriend79 on Mar 30, 2012 22:12:46 GMT
Thanks for posting, that made me laugh out loud several times ;D It was a great read, wasn't it. |
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Post by dit on Mar 23, 2013 12:43:57 GMT
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Post by RedMoon11 on Oct 22, 2013 0:32:50 GMT
James May on: Confusing Electricity
 I'm restoring an old motorcycle. That sounds like a recipe for chipped tea mugs, engine numbers, owners' clubs and all the other rather turgid stuff that attends the preservation of old machinery, but, fortunately, it's a bit more cheerful than that. Woman, having grown tired of the 20th-century marvel of the affordable motor car, has decided that she should learn to ride a motorbike instead. The idea terrifies me a bit, but so does letting the cat go out at night, and I still do it. So what I've bought her, in barn-find condition, is a Honda C70 step-through. It's a modest widowermaker of just five horsepower, but you can mount a basket on the front, and you can't with a Fireblade. For several weeks now, when I find an hour to myself, I step into the shed and continue my tireless work rebuilding this sparkling icon of post-modern personal transportation. I've painted it bright blue, but I'm going to have the protective leg-shields, the front mudguard and the side panels vinyl wrapped in a bright floral pattern, so people will know it's hers.* Yes - or do I mean no? - it's not a car, but putting it all back together isn't that different. The frame is largely a pressed-steel monocoque, rather than a tubular type, so that's not unlike very narrow car bodywork. There are only two wheels, obviously, but things like the brakes and the bearings work in pretty much the same way. It's a bit like rebuilding one side of a Mini. And there is one aspect of this that admits no distinction between car, bike, or anything else with an engine in it, and that is the electrics. For some time in its early years, electricity was known by its full title, which was "the miracle of electricity", but I have no truck with this. Electricity is the responsibility of a mischievous imp at best; it may be the work of Lucifer himself. I'm no fool, and I know my weaknesses, electrical comprehension being one of them. So when I took this thing apart, I checked time and time again that the colours of all the wires and connectors matched up, and labelled any that might outwit me when seen in the watery light of a fading torch. I also took dozens of photographs. But when I put it back together again, it didn't work, just like the Christmas tree lights of popular lore. But I can explain the tree lights. The act of coiling them up, storing them in a damp attic for exactly a year and then unravelling them again disturbs something that causes them to malfunction. The same might be true of the bike's wiring. How, though? I've been through it all, and it's only bits of wire, and it's all joined up properly. Please don't write in and tell me it's a bad earth or a dud battery, because I understand all that. What I don't really understand is what electricity actually is. Neither does anyone else, in fact. It's a flow of electrons in a wire. This is just a cop-out. Electrons are in the realm of conceptual physics, a device for thinking, and that sort of thing doesn't make an indicator flash. And how do they flow? Like machine-gun fire? Like migrating wildebeest? Not good enough. It's like the flow of water through a pipe, and the battery is just like a water tank in the attic. This is arrant and apparent nonsense, because the battery on the bike is lower down than the headlight. And water in a pipe is either there or it isn't there, it doesn't suddenly emerge and blow your eyeballs out if you touch it in the wrong way. It's all rubbish. No one I know, which includes a professorial physicist or two, can actually explain what electricity is. Just because a battery made a light bulb come on in the school lab, and we were told smugly that it was because we'd made a complete circuit, doesn't even begin to frame an understanding of the inside of an iPad. It's naught but a Victorian conjuring trick that has been sustained in the world by blind faith and acceptance, like religion. Look, I keep being told that the electric-car future is with us. Are we sure about this? We are delving into the occult, things that we cannot fully divine and that the diurnal world is somewhat reluctant to reveal to us. Is it wise? Tell you what, I'll do a deal with the proponents of our electrical salvation. Come and make the Honda work, and then you can make a start on the next Nissan Leaf. Meanwhile, I've locked up the shed, and I'm off to the pub. The beer pump is mechanical.
www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/James-May-on-electricity-2013-10-21
He's restoring an old motorcycle for Woman to ride
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Post by RedMoon11 on Nov 20, 2013 12:04:58 GMT
I've painted it bright blue, but I'm going to have the protective leg-shields, the front mudguard and the side panels vinyl wrapped in a bright floral pattern, so people will know it's hers.* This made me smile when I read it. Is this partly why he wears the floral shirts on TV so people know he's hers  I wonder what the asterisk* at the end of that sentence was for, there was no aside at the end of the column expanding on it. |
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Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 9, 2013 19:37:49 GMT
James May on: A Visit to the VW Factory
 I now believe that, in the future, humanity will merely eat and drink. Our bodies will not be temples, they will be elaborate biological retort stands there to supply the head with blood and oxygen and keep it at a height suitable for viewing Facebook or playing the FIFA football app. Every now and then, I make a TV programme about science or engineering or something equally facile. They do reasonably well, but they are mere media ahems compared with anything by Jamie Oliver or any other fat-faced foodie. It's like being a pub singer support act to a Boston stadium gig. No one is really listening. Everyone is only interested in food. My mate Oz Clarke was destined for a life as a dry cleaner, for ancestral reasons, but instead has made a great living interfering with his own mind using the agricultural produce of France and Australia. There are three supermarkets within a 300-yard radius of my house, but no car dealer, no petrol station and no Kwik Fit. There is a hardware and tool shop, but its owner admits it's a bit of a struggle. There's plenty of passing trade, but it all goes straight past and into Sainsbury's for some pesto. On this basis, attempting to build cars is especially futile. Even the people doing it are thinking about lunch. The idea that a country like Britain could ever rebuild the engineering skills base necessary to set up a modern car factory is a hiding to nothing, since most of us, presented with a pressure die-casting machine, would see it as a convenient way of heating up a naan bread. (Actually, this has been going on for a while. My dad used to run an aluminium die-casting foundry, making engine blocks and the like. Once the machines were up to temperature, the workforce, a lot of it Asian, would use the hot surfaces to prepare an exciting range of exotic bread items for lunch. I think the place is a bakery now.) I visited VW's Wolfsburg factory recently, and, as ever, I was staggered anew at the sheer depth of technical expertise that comes together in the manufacture of a car. Cars are so ludicrously cheap when you look at what goes into them. Just watch, if you can, the pressing and robotised welding together of a Golf bodyshell. This is metalworking of the highest order and to minute tolerances, and since I do a bit of metalwork at home, I know how hard this sort of thing is. It's amazing. Yet the finished car is available to you for less than the price of 4,000 Big Mac meals. I couldn't help thinking it would be a lot easier to make something like pies. They are lo-fi goods, and if they are a bit shonky round the edges, you can pass them off as ethical ‘local produce' and charge a premium for their being a bit crap. That's what I'd do. VW, however, is ahead of me here. VW, it transpires, also makes sausages, and in staggering numbers. In fact, numerically, the VW Group produces more sausages than cars, although by weight the cars may just be edging it. But maybe not for long. The pack of 10 in my hand felt surprisingly weighty. "VW sausages contain a higher percentage of meat than other brands," said a man in a smart sports jacket. Cars are largely air, but VW sausages are meaty goodness all the way through. They're now in the fridge, and I'm slightly scared of them. Interestingly, I was at Volkswagen in the course of making my deadly earnest forthcoming documentary Cars of the People. Some concern was expressed that, since I'm from TopGear, I was merely going to trot out predictable jokes about the Germans and the war. But far from it. I'm a big fan of modern Germany and its products, and have been since I started going there as a teenager. Our piece is a balanced one about the triumph of the people's car over political ambition and the conceit of nations, or at least it was while they were listening. Once we'd distracted them, we got into the material about the chip shop being bombed. And it has to be said that, since VW's sausages come in official VW-spares packaging and have their own part number, they are sort of asking for it a bit. Bloody silly Germans and their anally retentive obsession with efficiency, etc, etc. But VW will have the last laugh, because VW is ready for the future. Bentley has started making designer furniture - what a waste of time. Even the electric car is a line-caught day-boat red herring. The future is bangers from the people who gave you the Beetle. They won't even have to change their branding. They can just rename themselves Volkswurst. www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-may-visits-vw-factory-2013-12-6*At least we get James' new column to read since we didn't get a new Head Squeeze Q&A video on Friday*
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Post by RedMoon11 on Mar 6, 2014 16:13:24 GMT
James On: Arguments
 One of the reasons Top Gear works as a TV programme is that the three of us agree on virtually nothing. As some dreary business tycoon once observed, when two people in a boardroom agree on something, one of them is redundant. One of the reasons Top Gear works as a TV programme is that the three of us agree on virtually nothing. As some dreary business tycoon once observed, when two people in a boardroom agree on something, one of them is redundant. To be honest, it might work because of the high production values, the superb camerawork, and the unerring ability of our soundmen to capture the exhaust note of a supercar exactly as it's heard by the driver, which is a tricky thing to do. Come to think of it, since the vast majority of our viewers don't speak English as a first language - the Australians, for example - this is a far more credible explanation for its success. And it could be that the blokes we met in Iraq, who loved Top Gear, are just waiting for Clarkson's trousers to fall down, Hammond to look gormless or me to get lost. These things are part of a universal language the grammar of which is innately understood by all, like that little hand gesture meaning "The bill, please." But that's not the point I'm trying to make. We disagree. It's healthy. We all admit to liking the Subaru Legacy Outback, but only Jeremy and I are united in our love of Sandwich Spread. Hammond doesn't like it, because it's got bits in. Only Hammond and I like those tins of beans with the little sausages (in a rich tomato sauce). Hammond and Clarkson like the Ford Mustang, but I think it's for fogeys. Hammond and I both like bicycles, but Clarkson doesn't, probably because he rides one like the teacher from The Bash Street Kids. I'm sort of with Clarkson on some early Genesis but not on Supertramp, while he doesn't get a good big band. Hammond does, but can't stand ‘In Your Wardrobe', and so it goes on. Still, at least we're agreed on the original VW Beetle. Hateful carbuncle of a car driven by people with hang-ups about all sorts of things. Yes. But I've changed my mind. Sorry. I've spent a lot of time with Beetles in the past few months, because it looms large in my upcoming Cars of the People Top Gear special. I mean, it's a dreadful thing that makes you look like a subscriber to Health & Efficiency*, but it is interesting. More interesting than, say, a Morris Minor, which is just twee. The Beetle has inner darkness, and its cutesy bum-cheek profile disguises a tortured past. That gives it appeal, like a reformed train robber. It's sort of why we like a Lambo. It seems to have a bit of previous. Well dodge. If you look deeply into the story of the Beetle, it is tainted with deceit, possible theft, warmongering, political subterfuge and plain evil. But it became a hippy icon, so the story ends happily enough. And even though some of the greatest automotive minds on the planet originally dismissed it as worthless, it eventually went on to do the job it was intended to do, which was mobilising the masses. It's just a pity so many of them were potheads and wasters. The Beetle was exquisitely modern, and very cleverly designed. And while we're at it, no, it wasn't the basis for the 911. The Beetle was designed, ostensibly, by Ferdinand Porsche, and he was more than 10 years dead before the 911 came along. That was the work of his grandson and Porsche's design chief, Erwin Komenda. Just because it was rear-engined, air-cooled and roughly the shape of one of Marie Antoinette's breasts doesn't mean it was really a Beetle. Lots of other cars used this layout, because for a time it was seen as the way forward for reasons of packaging and aerodynamics. Ferdinand's Beetle was simply an excellent expression of cutting-edge Thirties thinking that survived well into the Sixties and Seventies. Look at Subaru, for example. You may as well say the Cortina was based on the Model T because they were both front-engined, liquid-cooled and RWD. Bah.To drive an original Beetle is still a pretty horrible experience. It sounds like all of history's flatulence combined as one event. The driving position is poor, the gearchange recalcitrant, the heating and ventilation abstract. The windscreen is too small. But there's another way of seeing it. Generally, I find old cars annoying. They're not very good, which is why they're no longer made. But you can enjoy one at a more cerebral level, in the mere contemplation of what it means to the world. So if you're going to have one, it may as well be the most fascinating car ever made, and the Beetle is that car. I think I might want one. *By Lord Young of the DTI during the Thatcher era, if I remember rightly www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-on-arguments-0214-02-12
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Post by RedMoon11 on Mar 25, 2014 10:35:31 GMT
James May on: Clogged Up Roads
 Parkinson's law - I think it appeared in The Economist originally, but I can't be bothered to look it up - stated that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". The automotive update of this is that the number of cars expands to fill the road available. This is as it should be, since a road with no car on it is, temporarily, a bit of a waste of tarmac. It has to be there for when the car comes along, but until it does come along, it's like cheese in the fridge. Not fulfilling its proper function of becoming cheesy sauce. Now some people have strange ideas about all this. When the M25 was opened, it immediately filled with traffic and a lot of people pointed to this as a sign of failure in transport planning. "It's only just opened," they would wail, "and now look at it. Full of cars." That's a bit like complaining that Top Gear Live has sold out, which we obviously wouldn't do, even if it did. Really, if the M25 had filled up with stray cattle, it would have been a complete waste of money. Beer is for drinking, money is for spending and roads are for driving on. More people driving around doing more stuff is good for what once used to be called UK plc*. Now look, I realise that out in the sticks you can drive for miles and miles before coming across an old Morris driven by someone who's amazed that cars have radios these days. But the roads in the countryside are really only there to allow yokels like Richard Hammond to drive into the city occasionally and point in awe and wonder at the electric lightbulbs. In the cities, the roads are full. I live in London, and I've been doing quite a bit of driving around it this week, during the busy times. My conclusion is that the roads are operating exactly at capacity. There is not room for one more car, and removing just one parking space would bring the place to a standstill. Excellent. Maximum capacity management. If it were a mobile phone factory, the board of directors would be delighted. But there is a downside to all this. It only takes one tiny stoppage to ruin everything, and that brings me to the subject of breakdowns. The way in which cars break down is a subject worthy of a PhD, and maybe one has been done. I was once in a car with Hammond that took so long to expire that there was time for a heated debate about what the problem was before we came to a complete halt. I thought it was electrical; he thought it was fuelling. As it turned out, the main problem was that it was a car owned by Richard Hammond. When my first 911 went, on the A4 into west London, it died as instantly as a man at the epicentre of a nuclear explosion. It was going, then it wasn't. But this is a bit academic to the point I'm trying to make here. Both cars became, quite literally, clots. Complete breakdowns in modern cars are quite rare, but they do happen. I've seen two, on very busy roads, in the last two days. At each scene, there were traffic wombles putting out cones and recovery trucks trying to fight their way through the massive car park that resulted. We really don't have time for this rubbish. So here's my plan for May's Britain. When a car breaks down somewhere like London, Manchester or Edinburgh, any other driver will be able to ring a distress hotline. The recovery helicopter is then scrambled. It will be something quite big, with a massive grabber suspended below it. If the broken car hasn't moved on by the time the chopper arrives, it will be picked up and dumped in the river. And I don't care if it's a Veyron Super Sport or a carbon-fibre Lamborghini. It doesn't matter how valuable it is; it isn't as valuable as the collective time being lost to everyone else. People have bookings at fashionable restaurants, and I have to get to the tool shop. Sounds harsh? It is a bit, but you'll be able to opt in or out of grab 'n' dump insurance, which will be weighted according to the sort of car you have and how well you look after it. It'll certainly make people think. In May's Britain, you'd hesitate before driving intoLondon in a classic car or anything not wired up by Germans. But so you should. It'd be downright irresponsible. *By Lord Young of the DTI during the Thatcher era, if I remember rightly www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/James-May-on-road-capacity-2013-01-27
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Post by RedMoon11 on Mar 25, 2014 11:17:06 GMT
May on: Traffic Jams
The only solution to congestion in our big cities is to build more roads. I know this sounds knuckle-headed, and it’s terribly unfashionable, but
it’s a sort of mathematical absolute. Pending the invention of a fold-up cagoule car that slips into your back pocket when not required, cars will take up a certain amount of space. This is true whether they’re being used or not, and when they’re not in use they’re even more irksome than they are when you’re trying to drive them. Where congestion is bad – cities – few houses have driveways or garages, so cars sit at the side of the road wasting tarmac. How do we accommodate them in their increasing numbers? More roads. Simple. It will render quite a lot of you homeless, I admit, but that’s the price we’ll have to pay for getting UK plc back on the move. The alternative, and the one embraced by supposedly progressive types, is to ration car use: road pricing, only being allowed to drive a blue car on a Tuesday, all that sort of thing. But this has never made much sense to me. Reducing congestion is only appealing if you’re one of the people who is still driving. No one is going to sit at home doing nothing and think, “Well, at least the roads are reasonably clear.” More roads, then. But this isn’t going to happen. I avoid using the car around town these days, because it’s Billy Boring. Where possible, I use a small motorcycle or even my bicycle, and save the car for longer and more adventurous journeys. But the bike is no good if you have to go to Jean Louis for a new television or a really big vase. Then you need the Fiat Panda. Nippy? Wieldy? The ideal city car? Not really; it’s still just a car and gets stuck in traffic jams, the same as a Rolls-Royce Phantom does. Rage ensues, with all that means for ill health. It looks like we’re doomed. I decided to take a positive approach to this. I’m going to be stuck in the car, often for hours, and barely moving. I could moan about it, or I could find some way to use that time profitably. There’s the radio, obviously, and that’s great. At the other extreme, Renault once seriously proposed that you could learn to play the cello in the back of a small MPV, but I’m not so sure about that. It would become annoying having to climb back into the front every few minutes to move the car forward 20 feet, an action that would almost certainly see one’s foot plunge through the exquisite rosewood belly of the instrument. After a few minutes I settled on… pipe smoking. I’m 50, so I think I can get away with it. Pipe smoking is ritualistic and, as it turns out, very time-consuming, so before you know it, you’ll be there. Pipes also require a lot of kit, and that’s always nice. First you need the pipe, and if your local purveyor of pipes is anything like mine, choosing one is a very instructive way to pass a whole morning. I went for a slightly curved and long one, for a cool shmoke. Tobacco? Given that it’s just a simple weed, there is a surprising variety, flavoured with everything from roses to chocolate and the spices of India. These come in small ‘taster’ quantities, in little sachets filled from giant oily jars. All this needs to be kept somewhere, which means a pouch, and you will also need a special penknife, some extra-long matches and some
pipe cleaners to sweep tenacious dribble from out the dark interior of the thing. It’s a right laugh. So, in the Panda, in traffic, I found I could happily perform the elaborate filling and tamping ceremony. This is an excellent ruse for buying
time to compose a reply to your passenger’s last question, which in this case was: “What the bloody hell is that?” Light the match, wait for the tip to burn away (spoils the flavour, you see) and apply it to the charge; sucking, pressing down with a blazing thumb, and interjecting with the odd “Well, the thing is...” in a way that really annoys people. Soon, the whole world, with its dreary diurnal concerns – even the instrument panel – was obscured by an aromatic grey fug that rolled around the cabin like mist off a Scottish moor. What, then, is care? Happiness is freedom from it, and freedom is found in the rich, dark secrets given up by the briar. A man tapped on the window, offering some fatuous observation about how far the traffic had moved on since I’d been sitting there. “Do you mind?” I said. “I’ve got a really good pipe going here.” Marvellous. Until the airbag goes off. www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-may-traffic-jams-2014-3-17
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Post by Flying Lady on Mar 26, 2014 2:56:24 GMT
As I read that column, I had this visual blowing lazy hazes of smoke through my mind. I wonder if the pipe he mentions is the same one pictured in that fantastic Ferrari photograph from a few months ago. Let's have the actual image on tap, shall we?  |
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Post by RedMoon11 on Apr 1, 2014 12:28:04 GMT
James on: Clip-Together Cars
The problem with Meccano is that it looks so old-fashioned. Because it is. It's a 110-year-old toy, inspired by the engineering structures of the Victorian era and before, when the means by which a thing went together was something to be celebrated. So, look at the roof of St Pancras Station, the famous Palm House in Kew Gardens, any old bridge, the ancient Aga in Richard Hammond's kitchen or the exposed motion work of a steam locomotive. Bolts, rivets and linkages are openly on display, and if the decorative skills of the artisan were to be encouraged, then they were applied to the structural members themselves, not added later as an adornment. That's why Meccano looks a bit stuffy. You can't make something from Meccano without it being plastered in screw-heads, nuts, springs, exposed gearwheels and everything else in that big red box. Before the war, Britain looked like Meccano. But by the Fifties, it was starting to look more like Lego: bold, relatively featureless shapes with smooth surfaces, apparently made not from thousands of small pieces but from just a handful of big ones. Modules, maybe, but not components as such. That's why anything you make in Lego looks modern, even if you only use the grey bricks. Now look at the things around you - your mobile phone, your kettle, the interior of your car. How were they put together? It's difficult to tell, because you're not meant to know. Why the hell am I talking about toys? Because, eight years after I made my one-off Christmas documentary about my most favourite toys of childhood, I'm still making TV about toys. The subject truly fascinates me. Contrary to what some people think, I'm not against modern toys at all. I actually think computer games are tremendous. I especially like the FIFA football app, and I've now got an Xbox. Admittedly, it's still in its box, but I've been busy with my nephew building a Lego Technic helicopter. But the enduring constructional toys are deeply instructive. All of Newtonian physics can be taught with Scalextric. A train set can do a useful job around the home. Airfix is a great way of learning history. And so on. Last Christmas, you will have seen - I presume, but if not, why not? - that I built a full-size Meccano motorcycle and sidecar, by which I mean I thought of the idea in the pub and then instructed my mate Simmy to get on with it. It worked tolerably well, and it had me thinking. I once built a full-size and inhabitable Lego house (same qualifier as above), and, although there were issues with the plumbing and the rigidity of the furniture, it made a lot of sense to me. If you live in a Lego house and want to modify it, you just pull it apart and rebuild it in a different way. There's absolutely no waste. The real world of building is different. We recently had our bathroom modified and it produced a skip-load of useless rubble. What became of that? It may at best have become hardcore for a new bit of road, but it probably just went into landfill somewhere. No one could argue against the case for a reconfigurable house. Why not an infinitely reconfigurable small car? We're told that this is already with us. BMW allows you to adjust the power output from the driving seat, and all sorts of cars allow you to interfere with suspension settings. But this is merely the distracting tinsel of electronics. I want to be able to pull the whole thing apart and put it back together in a new way. I have in mind a kit of parts combining the best attributes of Lego and Meccano - Meccano for the mechanisms, clip-together Lego for the bodywork and interior. Sort of like one of those do-it-yourself Caterhams, but you decide how it comes out. If the future of the car is electric, this becomes a lot simpler. Your kit contains an electric motor - it'll be quite compact - and a battery and control system. A bit like Lego and Meccano as they already are, in fact... just a bit bigger. We all know roughly how a car is laid out underneath. Have a go at it yourself. If it doesn't work, try again. No welding, no painting, just a few spanners and bits that clip together. Children have been designing and building table-top cars for generations. If we make the parts bigger, we could actually be using them. It's easy to knock this idea. What if, for example, you got the fundamental suspension and steering geometry wrong? Isn't that a bit dangerous? Possibly. But, as I said, constructional toys are educational. If your apparently workable small car goes into a sudden and uncontrollable weave at 55mph, then flips over and disintegrates... well, you'll have learned something. www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-on-clip-together-cars-2014-03-28
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Post by dit on Apr 1, 2014 13:35:14 GMT
Many thanks to RedMoon11 for all the articles! (Plus the ones for Jeremy and Richard too)
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Post by RedMoon11 on May 5, 2014 20:45:35 GMT
James May on: Vegetables
 I've met soldiers – infantrymen generally – who like nothing more than to be on foot if they’re in a theatre of war when it all kicks off. Being on foot gives you autonomy. You can find cover in the slightest change in the terrain, you can move quickly, go virtually anywhere and be master of your own fate. Others prefer to be in a tank or an armoured vehicle. You’re stuck with it, but it’s safer. Or is it? The foot soldier buys agility at the price of vulnerability, because he has only a bit of body armour to protect him. You can shoot at a Mastiff all day long and merely annoy the occupants, but if it’s flipped into a flooded ditch by a roadside bomb, you have the problem of trying to get out before you drown. This is why the techy branch of the British forces are talking about something called the “survivability onion”. Let’s be clear: there are no actual onions in action at present, except in the cookhouse. Rather, the onion is a device for thinking. So, on the outside of the onion is an infinitely fast foot soldier, equipped with a sidearm that will lay waste to nations but weighs nothing. At the core of the onion is an invisible armoured car that can withstand a direct hit from weapons not yet invented. Neither of these things is possible, so we’ll have to consider the layers in between. Where do we want to be? Onion-inspired experimentation in thought is not a new idea. The ancient Greeks perceived of the heavens as being layered like an onion, though again not literally. “Life is like an onion,” said the American poet Carl Sandburg. “You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.” Useful allegorical device, the onion. Where were we? Oh yes, in the onion. Nearer to the middle, you will be better protected. Nearer the skin, you will be more versatile, which is a form of protection in itself. To put this in the context of the armoured vehicles I drove for the show, the Mastiff is nearer the middle and the Foxhound is further out. You will survive a bigger blast in the Mastiff, but you might avoid it altogether in the goat-like Foxhound. But if you don’t avoid it, it will look a bit NBG because it’s only lightly armoured. If it had more armour it would be more oniony. See? There are many layers to an onion, and only the theoretical molecular centre and outer edge are perfectly acceptable. Everything else is a compromise of some sort, so the debate will last longer than the flatulence from French onion soup. Let’s move this on. Can we apply the onion to cars? I hope so, having got this far. I thought there might be a straightforward performance onion, in which, towards the centre, cars become faster around a track, but less wieldy in the real world. But I realised this was a carrot, getting fatter as you move along it. Then I came up with the performance/cost onion, in which the centre is a very fast and priceless car, and the skin is a free one that still goes. The McLaren P1 is towards the centre, and pretty near the outside is that £750 Fiesta XR2 I nearly died in, a few weeks back. Actually, the performance/cost onion has been around as long as the car. The Lagonda V12 and an Austin 7 Special have been in the onion all along. But something interesting is happening. Finally, carmakers, unlike Clarkson, are beginning to understand the real value of losing weight. A couple of cars we’ve had on recently have illustrated this – the Alfa 4C and the Caterham 160. The Alfa loses weight so it can perform well with a modest engine intelligently turbocharged. But it’s still a bit too wide, so it’s too far up the carrot. The 160 recognises, as the original Lotus did, that simplicity, low power and small tyres move the excitement of driving a Caterham further out from the centre of the onion. That is, cheaper. But still well in the onion, because it’s brilliant. Not ultimately as exciting as a Superlight Caterham, granted, but better than its position in the onion suggests it should be. Most of us are dimly aware of the onion, and subconsciously crave its rich, dense heart. But the onion itself is changing. It’s elongated at the ends, where the traditional balance between performance and cost is being distorted. In fact, it’s now more like the shallot of performance. The pointy ends are the bit we’ve always chopped off and thrown away, but they’re where your next car probably lives. Next month: the kumquat of comfort. www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-may-cars-vegetables-column-2014-5-2
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 6, 2014 15:42:26 GMT
James May on: The Rotating Shaft
 I was wondering: what single thing did the most to advance humankind’s lot? Speech must score pretty highly, I suppose, as must writing, paper, discovering how to light a bonfire and Google image search, especially if you’re 14. Tools were amongst the earliest things to empower us, and it’s generally accepted that the first tool was the hammer, since a rock is a hammer if you use it as one. You could easily make a one-hour documentary about the evolution of the hammer and all the uses it has – I’d quite like to, in fact. But the problem with the hammer is that, to a man who understands no other tool, everything is a nail. It’s what makes Clarkson seem so prehistoric. I, however, would like to make the case for the rotating shaft. This is what gives apparent life and vitality to the things we like – cars, aeroplanes, speedboats, posh wrist-watches – and is the fundamental means by which such things are produced. The ancient Egyptians could spin lengths of wood between two centres using something a bit like a violin bow. These were the first lathes, and without lathes we wouldn’t have other machinery. Windmills, waterwheels, steam engines, Victorian sewing-machine foot treadles, capstans on sailing ships and the treadmills of Victorian penal institutions were all used simply to make shafts spin, and once your shaft is in motion, you can make everything from flour to gearwheels, and achieve greatness. Look at your bicycle. I still think the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of all time, and the cranked pedals you heave upon are charged simply with making that short shaft in the bottom bracket rotate. Once you’ve got that sorted, the chainwheel, chain and sprockets that set the back wheel spinning and you whooping for sheer joy are something of a formality. Even the passive front wheel works because of the rotating shaft it’s mounted on. I know the shaft is fixed and it’s the wheel that turns, but if you were Einstein sitting on the rim, you’d say it was the other way around. Round and round; a line of force – a vector – qualified by a radius so that it goes on for ever. Rather brilliant, isn’t it? Now to the engines in our cars. Layout, number of cylinders, capacity, turbocharging: this stuff is all very exciting and one of the reasons this website is as popular as it is, but it’s all done in pursuit of the same simple goal, which is to make the crankshaft spin. Then we can link it to wheels and be on our way. Given that the endgame is so simple, the means of achieving it seem quite convoluted. The pistons go up and down (or side to side if you are a Subaruist) to drive the crank in the way your legs do back on the bike. But the crankshaft must make some other shaft spin so that the valves can be operated, and they go up and down. Up and down makes round and round, but that must produce more up and down for the original up and down to happen. If you see what I mean. Our master rotating shaft, the crankshaft, might also be required to drive the shaft of an alternator, so that sparks can be produced to keep the pistons going. The gearbox – again a collection of shafts with a relationship complex enough to warrant some sort of mechanical pre-nup – simply manages the shortcomings of our original shaft’s output so that it can do useful work, and turn more shafts that eventually turn the wheels. But it all relies in the first instance on a single mother of all rotating shafts, just as the early temples of mass production needed a shaft running across the roof to drive machinery. Now look at a cutaway drawing of a car engine. Remember all that stuff is there simply to provide us with the bit we need, the shaft. It seems a bit of a palaver, doesn’t it? The electric motor makes so much more sense. It still gives us what we need, but now the rotating shaft is the only moving part. How much more elegant is that? It’s the right way to power a car, and we’ve known it since before the car was even invented, because the electric motor came first. All that remains is to bring the dragon of electricity to heel. I still want the curling echo of my Ferrari’s V8 for special moments, but elsewhere, this must be the future. Mustn’t it? www.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-may-on-rotating-shafts-2014-6-3
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 21, 2014 19:58:41 GMT
James on: His PandaJames May 19 Jun 2014
Eight years is a long time. Long enough to get properly attached. To feel pain at the end of an era... Meanwhile, James arrives in his little Fiat Panda back in November 2009 (S14 E01)I've owned my two-bedroom flat in west London for almost exactly 10 years, from October 1991 to September 2001. What larks we had together! Some of the more extreme noises may still resonate faintly in the dust of the brickwork, and I bet there's a trace of soot from the famous blazing bacon incident still to be found somewhere. An unremarkable flat, but the stage for some farcical formative experiences for which I'm grateful. When it was time to leave, I packed everything that defined me into the usual boxes and plastic crates. Then a Scottish caber-tossing team posing as a removals company came and smashed it all to pieces while supposedly loading it into a van. Soon, everything was gone, and my home was left naked and grieving. But it was still mine. There, more crisply revealed by the absence of the things normally around them, were the kitchen I'd painstakingly built myself and my funky fireplace tiling; the small holes in the wall clustering around the pristine circle that denoted where the dartboard had been, and the damage to the skirting board from the ill-advised indoor rifle-range project. It was a sad moment. I closed the door for the last time. But it was a second-floor flat, and by the time I'd reached the bottom of the stairs, I'd forgotten all about it. These days, Woman and I have a whole house to ourselves, with flowers growing in pots, an offensively red front door and a step where we can sit and eat an illicit bag of chips on the sort of musk-laden evening that Tennyson wrote about. This is definitely ours, too. Within days of arriving, a lot of knotted pine had gone onto a bonfire, and acres of artisan tiling had gone into a neighbour's skip (during the dead of night), hopefully en route to becoming part of something more aesthetically acceptable. The hardcore for a new motorway, perhaps. A lot more has changed. Different bathrooms, modified walls and doorways, a new window, that ridiculous light fitting, the usual stuff. If we emptied this, it would still stand as an archeological record of the time when we started living together. There's a lot more cupboard in this place, obviously. But we've been thinking about moving, or knocking this house down and building a better one. If we do any of those things, the memory of this one will recede like a straw hat plucked from the window of a speeding train. Who gives a toss? Home - the building, anyway - has always seemed a bit temporary to me, and our washing machine still manoeuvres itself out of its alcove when it's on the spin cycle. The place is just a wayside halt, not a terminus. Next month, however, the Fiat Panda is going, and that's a real wrench. Her outdoors is heartbroken. It's as if I've said I'm having the cat put down. I'm trading it in for an electric BMW i3, so expect some pontification about being a part of the experiment blah blah blah. That's in a few weeks' time, so now I feel I should pay my respects to the Panda, properly. It's not as if I've done this before. Never has a humble car served its owners so dutifully. If cars know stuff, the Panda must know I have a pampered Italian supercar in the garage for special days. I also still have that old Roller for collecting people from the airport. The Panda just sits there witlessly, outside in all weathers like a Derbyshire sheep, waiting to be abused. It's almost eight years old, and doesn't smell as good as it did. I have a memory of someone like Richard Hammond being sick in it. Or maybe he guffed; can't remember. Anyway, it's pretty horrible. But it's never gone wrong. Never. It's had a set of tyres and a new exhaust section, and the throttle linkage went a bit sticky. But I cured this myself, and as you'd expect, I did it properly and in accordance with proper engineering practices, by firing WD40 at it. Gaffer tape wasn't going to work. For those who complain we never test proper cars for normal people, here are the real figures. Seventy-one per cent depreciation over seven and a half years, or under 10 per cent a year on average. That's an overall capital cost of £55 a month, and I've never been able to thrash it to below 40mpg. Beat that. The Panda will now disappear into the vortex of used-car trading. If you need a cheap, small, used car and you come across LN56 YRR, buy it. You won't be disappointed, unless you're a perfumier. Please look after this bear. www.topgear.com/car-news/james-may/james-his-pandawww.topgear.com/uk/james-may/james-on-his-old-fiat-panda-2014-06-19Jeremy and James compare the contents of their car boots in November 2009
Jeremy shows off the nifty drinks cabinet which slots into the boot of his car! James, however, has nothing of the sort in his Panda.
www.topgear.com/uk/photos/topgear-14-episode-1-rehearsals?imageNo=2
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I love a man who can handle a gun 
