I really like this optical illusion. Have a look at this YouTube video to see what I mean:
Category Archives: Cars
Review: A5 Dunstable Northern Bypass
Never one to shy away from an exciting review, in this article I’ll be describing the thrills and spills of doing the speed limit down one of Bedfordshire’s newest trunk roads, the highway formerly known as the A5-M1 Link Road. but is now just called the A5 after the old road south of the start point was handed to Central Bedfordshire UA and Hertfordshire County Council and renamed to A505/A5183. Apart from being a road, it has one purpose, and that’s avoiding Dunstable (and who would want to argue with that?) The road opened in the summer, but this is the first excuse I’ve had to drive it, which promised to take me all the way to M1.
Review: Skoda Fabia Mk3 (2015-)
The first thing you notice about this car is that it’s really an astonishing size for a supermini. Just a smidge wider than its previous incarnations, it’s a still a nice size for its class. The car has the top-spec SE L trim, and comes in Corrida Red which is a non-metallic paint colour.
And just when you thought you’d heard the last of the Horse and Jockey traffic lights saga…
…the Bucks Herald are at it again, and as all regular viewers to this blog know, there’s nothing the BH likes better than whinging about traffic lights. Their article at http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/more-news/updated-council-responds-to-traffic-expert-s-fears-over-new-aylesbury-lights-1-5355185 is frankly typical of their nonsense, which we all had to endure endlessly the last time that Bucks County Council stuck up a set of traffic lights. This time a new set of lights have appeared on the junction of Tring Road and Oakfield Road (basically paid for and for the benefit of the new dairy) and apparently we’re expected to believe that drivers might get confused about what a green light means!
The Highway Code is quite clear on this one – “GREEN means you may go on if the way is clear. Take special care if you intend to turn left or right and give way to pedestrians who are crossing”. Therefore, it’s safe to go as long as your way is clear, and if it isn’t, you should wait until it is. Including turning right.
Of course, as the council stated, the whole reason they did it this way was to allow traffic to turn right off-peak when the road is clear – which outside rush hours is generally not a problem at that junction – as a large proportion of traffic actually does the turn anyway, much like what happens at the Horse and Jockey lights. You might improve the junction by putting a yellow box junction in, but otherwise I can’t see what’s wrong with it. If people are confused when traffic lights don’t have hand-holding green arrows for every conceivable direction any more, we really are in trouble.
I’m also not convinced by the opinion of their “expert” either…
Just wait until the next set of lights are finished a mile down the road; we’ll have a repeat of the whinging again in six months’ time no doubt. Does this really sell papers?
Tired of tyres
A foot pump is a foot pump is a foot pump, yes? Well, no. It would appear that foot pumps (and especially their pressure gauges) are not necessarily as accurate as you might think. About a month and a bit ago, my “trusty Halfords foot pump” decided to split in half. Fair enough – time for a new one. Nearest place to get one was Tesco (a good few miles away from where I was at the time), so off I go and buy a new foot pump. “That’s odd”, I thought, when attaching the new pump on the car tyre to check its pressure. The gauge, compared to the Halfords one, was overreading by some 0.4 bar (5.8 psi). So which one was right? The answer, of course, was that I didn’t know. Given that I was going to be driving back some 400 miles a few days later, I was a bit concerned, but there was nothing I could do about it, so when I got back home I decided to do a bit of research.
The first thing to do was to get the trusty old Woolworths (remember them?) digital tyre pressure gauge out, just as a quick check. And sure enough, that was reading quite a bit lower than I thought. This got me wondering if there were actually some standards for tyre pressure gauges. A quick search on the Internet revealed that there was – and it’s called BS EN 12645:1999. EU Directive 86/217/EEC states that for gauges that measure tyre pressures up to 4.0 bar (58 psi), the maximum error must be no more than 0.08 bar (1.16 psi).
So it appeared my not-very-trusty Tesco foot pump was reading outside that range, so the hunt was on to find a pump, foot or electric, that was at least that accurate. I tried looking through some reviews on the Internet. It appears that some foot pumps were very very off in their readings; one review of a Draper footpump claimed it was 5 psi out compared to their reference gauge. So I quickly came to the conclusion that all footpumps were rubbish, except maybe the Michelin which according to the reviews had a very accurate gauge – the only trouble was that many of the reviews said that despite the 30 quid price tag the pump fell to bits very quickly.
So who makes accurate gauges? Well, my first stop was to the company that produces many of the ‘pro’ tyre pressure gauges you find in garages, tyre fitters, etc. That company is called PCL, based in Sheffield. The one you’ve probably heard of and may well have used at a petrol station is their Mk3 pressure gauge. This is not only BS EN 12645:1999 compliant but comes with a calibration certificate to prove it too! OK, so that’s got to be accurate, but no doubt dead expensive. Although not as expensive as I thought… ££ rather than £££. And anyway, that’d be no good since I would actually need to connect it to an airline.
A friend of mine suggested the Ring Automotive pumps, which are available in most of the usual suspects (Halfords et al), but I wasn’t sure how accurate it was – the web site certainly wasn’t going to mention it. So my friend ended up emailing the company, and they replied it was accurate to +/- 5%. This equates to a max error of 0.11 bar (or 1.58 psi) – which is still worse than the EU directive.
Could I find anything better? Well, it appears it’s PCL to the rescue. As well as making tyre pressure gauges that cost £££s, they also do a range of cheaper ones, and also an electric pump model. Their manual gauges are actually calibrated to BS EN 12645:1999 and cost about a fiver, but of course that’s only a gauge.
But…. hidden deep in their web site is an apparently little-known product that they do called the ATT741. It’s a “consumer” tyre inflator in that it comes in a box, with a cigarette lighter plug on one and and the thing to put on your tyres (no idea what that’s called in reality) on the other, and a box in the middle with a digital display. The good news is that the web site claims it has a reading accuracy of 1 psi. That’s 0.069 bar, which is actually better than the EU directive. Bingo! I might have found one at last! So I found a supplier on the Internet and ordered it over the weekend.
Today, it arrived. (For some reason a couple of my colleagues at work wanted a go on it as well when they discovered what it was… which was just as well because they both had quite underinflated tyres as it turned out…) So, it’s been given a good test. Reading the instruction book, the manual claims it’s the reading accuracy is 5 kPa, or 0.05 bar, which in English money is 0.72 psi, actually better than the 1 psi the web site claims. No way to prove this of course, since there is no BS EN 12645:1999 calibration, but I’m sure it can’t be that bad, after all PCL are used to making accurate gauges.
So, I’ve used it on my tyres now, which were quite a bit underinflated as well it turns out, and the car certainly handles a lot better now. And at least I can be reasonably confident that the real tyre pressure is something close to what the gauge says it is. Although, if I’m feeling particularly paranoid, I could always check it against a BS EN 12645:1999 calibrated gauge (!)
Details of the PCL ATT741 can be found on the PCL web site. And yes, the Tesco foot pump is going back to Tesco.