Little Red Terror! (Pictures)

[tassuperkart]

Pilots License???? LMAO. Not unless you include my passion for flying radio controlled planes i design and build myself from scratch!!!!
No Im an airplane mechanic!!!

I gotta say gents, I for one like this girl and I hope she hangs around this here forum for a while!

L8r
E

[Reswob]

I don't know, you might have a light aircraft hobby. I have no idea what you've got tucked away on your property in Huon.

I'll be here asking stupid questions for a long time yet....

[tassuperkart]

[Damo]

Pilots License???? LMAO. Not unless you include my passion for flying radio controlled planes i design and build myself from scratch!!!!
No Im an airplane mechanic!!!

I gotta say gents, I for one like this girl and I hope she hangs around this here forum for a while!

L8r
E

Maybe if you keep yer old trap shut, she may just hang around a little longer than most!

Is this where we encourage her to have a sticky beak through "post up a pic of yourself" to see just how old you are Santa?


Damo

[Reswob]

Ah well Damo, you know the way it is with Tasmanians. They are a lot like Tasmanian devils. They make a hell of a frightening noise but that's all it is. Noise. They've actually got a soft interior. All bluff and no bite. Just got to play it all by ear.

[TurboZ.Dude]

Is this where we encourage her to have a sticky beak through "post up a pic of yourself" to see just how old you are Santa?

Get a life Damo! :lol: Just kidding m8.

Several people have told me or asked me why I haven't dumped my "piece of junk." But it's my junk and I like my junk.

That's the spirit! Don't give in to those clowns! A lot of us N12 owners probably have been told the same thing! People used to say to me, "why don't you take your piece of the junk to the junkyard where it belongs?". Now people tell me, "why did you fix up a piece of junk like that, it doesn't deserve a paintjob!"... :lol:

[Reswob]

Hey TurboZ.Dude,

I think that people are always going to say these kind of things about N12 pulsars/cherries because they are Datsuns. Datsuns have very little resale value nor are they status symbols and the people that tell us to chuck our cars on the scrapheap are people who places those two values on cars.

I've also noticed that with modern cars they seem to have over-engineered them or something. They appear to have electrical problems that people can't seem to solve (or maybe the dealers don't want them to be fixed because they make money.)

I had a read of your website and your story kind of sounds similar to mine. Both our cars are family hand downs with sentimental value. They are kind of like family heirlooms with a difference; not something useless like a piece of crystal ware but things that can service a purpose and do interesting things. I really know nothing about cars but your vehicle sounds like mine before the spark plugs were replaced.

I made this decision about how I would approach car ownership back in 2007. That VK Commodore that I mentioned a few posts back is now dead. I T-boned an 85 Ford Lazar and wrote-off the Commodore. It was only radiator damage. If I knew about car mechanics I would have been able to save that car. To be honest, that car was a bit lemonish (had a habit of things going wrong when you needed it for something big, like to pass a driving test) but I did grow up in that car traveling up and down the south-east coast of Australia. It was the same age as me and that seemed appropriate. I learnt how to drive in it. I knew all it's personality quirks and learnt to love it for that reason.

I was sitting in the middle of the road in front of the Commodore's fading yellow headlights in the puddle of radiator fluid trickling down the road as its lifeblood drained away. I got the shakes and went into shock. Someone had to pull me off the bitumen. I was in tears because I felt in that instant I had lost a real connection with my childhood and the world that I grew up in was dying. A few months later the budgie died of loneliness. A year later my Mother was dead.

I determined that if I ever got a car of about my age I would learn how to maintain it (money might be a problem!) so at least one part of the past does not fade into oblivion.

Soppy I know, but I am an artist. We do these things.

[TurboZ.Dude]

Hey TurboZ.Dude,

I think that people are always going to say these kind of things about N12 pulsars/cherries because they are Datsuns. Datsuns have very little resale value nor are they status symbols and the people that tell us to chuck our cars on the scrapheap are people who places those two values on cars.

Yup, that's exactly my point.

I've also noticed that with modern cars they seem to have over-engineered them or something. They appear to have electrical problems that people can't seem to solve (or maybe the dealers don't want them to be fixed because they make money.)

Result of lack of new technology... they improve and re-improve existing designs to the point where the improvements get too complex and actually start to make the durability and maintainability worse. Well, that's how I feel about it, not necessarily a completely valid assessment though.

I really know nothing about cars but your vehicle sounds like mine before the spark plugs were replaced.

Well, I replaced my plugs a thousand kilometers ago, and the plugs show perfect combustion (light brown tan on the plugs)... but yes, it doesn't sound 100% perfect. The valves make quite a bit of noise. Because the parts are worn, the tappet clearance is very hard to get 100% perfectly adjusted. I have to leave the clearance slightly too large which then causes a knocking valve noise.

I was sitting in the middle of the road in front of the Commodore's fading yellow headlights in the puddle of radiator fluid trickling down the road as its lifeblood drained away. I got the shakes and went into shock. Someone had to pull me off the bitumen. I was in tears because I felt in that instant I had lost a real connection with my childhood and the world that I grew up in was dying. A few months later the budgie died of loneliness. A year later my Mother was dead.

Darn, that's a sad story!

Soppy I know, but I am an artist. We do these things.

I understand your lines of thought. My father is a classical musician, and music is very strong in my family (if that's a proper understandable sentence, sorry, I'm not a native speaker). Because of this, all family members are very sentimental, including myself. I can't even think about taking my car to the junkyard!

Jan

[Reswob]

Hi TurboZ.Dude,

I think the attitude many people have about old cars is also the product of our throw away, consumerist society. People just buy things ready made from the shops. They have not worked hard for them, so they never learn to appreciate things for what they are and to be content with what they have.

I don't have the knowledge about mechanics to make a valid assessment but I have read and heard of peoples' experiences with cars made post-2000. It seems that they have all these problems that relate to hooking up a computer to the transmission, steering, brakes and everything else. I have a feeling that these cars aren't going to age that well. At least with my little beast, I don't have power steering, fuel injection or an air conditioner. That's less stuff to go wrong.

Ah, you know what is best. I don't know about values or tappet clearance. I just rely on my intuition to tell me when something is going wrong. Just before I brought in my car to be serviced, it was starting to making a funny whirring, chuffing sound that was beginning to make me worry. I didn't know what that was though. I could hear a bit of that in your car.

So what sort of music are you into? (Your English is fine.) Before university and college took over my life I used to take piano exams. I reached grade three. Now that I am in Sydney I don't have a piano. I will buy one if I get a house.

[TurboZ.Dude]

Geez, this is getting a bit off-topic... well, OK, I asked for it. But I think somebody will soon ask us to "get back on topic".

Since you ask, I listen to Jazz, Soul, R&B, Rap, Hip-Hop. I used to play the piano (Jazz) but I didn't have the patience to practice. So I haven't taken any degree exams, I would probably not pass grade three even today.

Well, tappet clearance is a clearance you need to have between the (adjustable) tips of the rocker arms which push the valves open, and the valves themselves. That is due to heat expansion. If you don't have a clearance, when the valves get warm and expand they will not have space to close completely (the rocker arms will prevent the valves from closing due to lack of clearance), and that causes a lot of other problems. Power loss being the least problem. In the worst case the valves can start to melt, which results in engine breakdown. But that's the limit of my knowledge... if you want to know more, ask Damo, Evan, or Callum. There are quite a few other knowledgeable people over here too but I don't remember their names... sorry guys!

[Kimmo]

http://reswobiandreaming.blogspot.com/

Sweet! I spose the eye colour's a guess?

I tend to get along well with Aspies; I prefer ideas to small talk myself. My main online hangout seems to attract em, too...

As for sketchy electrics, I doubt it's an intentional thing in order to create more servicing business; that sort of crap would have the potential to harm a brand's reputation for a long time. It just doesn't seem worth it next to say, specing more often service intervals. I'd say it's simply a consequence of increasing levels of equipment being regarded as standard. More stuff = more stuff to go wrong.

And yeah, the whole throwaway thing shits me to tears too. I reckon we should be making stuff like cars out of carbon, ally and stainless, and mandate some sort of modularity whereby the things can last a century or more because they go together like Lego and can be repaired and upgraded indefinitely. And a car should weigh well under a tonne. Sports cars should be like 500kg.

Fuck capitalism; it's as broken as our life support system.

Ah, I found the lowdown on that pic...

The Marsupial Lion, or Thylacoleo carnifex, is one of the most difficult animals to draw well in my opinion. I think that is this because it has many features that make it look like a felid and perhaps other things too, like possums and koalas, but it also has some very unique anatomical structures. As a result, we have one very strange looking beastie. To produce this image I found a photo of a mounted skeleton with the skull in a three-quarter view (google "Thylacoleo" images and you'll probably find the image I used) and I layered the muscles on after the method Mauricio Anton in the book he illustrated for Alan Turner. It is called The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives. Firstly I filled in the temporalis and masseter muscles which are the ones that work the jaws. Thylacoleo had a very large fossa temporalis, through which these powerful muscles inserted, providing the animal with a very savage bite. (Steve Wroe wrote a lot about this). To bring this point across, I made these two muscles very bulky, so they bulge out over the zygomatic arch; think about the jaguar which as the strongest bite for it's size of any extant felid.

Next I rounded out the whisker pads that would have sat in from of the bulge of the premolars. I had a look at the infraorbital foramen of Thylacoleo and I decided it was comparable to felids. This hole allows the nerves to pass through the skull to feed into the nerves linked to the whiskers. Cats have a large infraorbital foramen that feeds a dense bed of nerves in the whisker pads making this structure look bulky. Therefore, I ensured that Thylacoleo was well-endowed with good, dense whisker pads. The teeth were pretty hard to draw right and this animal as an unusually broad face due to the premolars projecting out to the sides more than usual. Wroe has suggested that it used its long, blade of its third premolars to bite at its prey rather than just relying on it's incisors to stab its prey to death. Naturally, when its snarls as I have illustrated it here, it should be able to expose them.

For the coat I drew from the African leopard (Panthera pardus) for the sandy-orange ground colour and from quolls for the white spots. Leopards can often have green eyes. It is thought that this animal relied on stealth more than anything else to hunt, perhaps like a modern leopard. The structure of its feet are quite possum-like and it probably had a plantigrade stance, meaning that it could not run fast. However, it was probably a good climber and perhaps hunted more like an ocelot (Felis pardalis). This South America cat's modus operandi is to sit on a tree limb and wait for unsuspecting prey to pass underneath. It this instant it pounces onto it and dispatches it. It is intriguing because it suggests that Thylacoleo could have been the inspiration for the legend of the "drop bear" in Australia and indeed in life it would have had a stocky build a bit similar to one.

Awesome : )

[greengoblin]

+1 to fuck capitalism, the monetary system has almost reached it's limits

google "the zietgeist movement" and "the venus project" awareness is all we have in a society that conditions you to accept that's the way it is

[SET23L]

Pilots License???? LMAO. Not unless you include my passion for flying radio controlled planes i design and build myself from scratch!!!!
No Im an airplane mechanic!!!

I gotta say gents, I for one like this girl and I hope she hangs around this here forum for a while!

L8r
E

im with you E
its good to see alot more women getting involved in cars in general, but old cars is even better
louie

[Reswob]

I posted a reply here but it didn't seem to work...

It's only off topic if you say it's off topic. Cars are as much a product of our society as they are of engineering. School smarts are not everything. No matter what they teach you in class they cannot give you street smarts. It's been a steep learning curve since I left the parental home this January.

As for the Thylacoleo and all palaeo-art, the colour is speculative as it does not fossilise. However this species only went extinct a few thousands of years ago. They have apparently found Aboriginal rock art depicting this animal showing that it had stripes, a tufted tail and pointed ears. There are some people willing to buy my art and I am planning to us my car to transport my works.

The way Aspies go, I am pretty eccentric even for that diagnosis. That's partially because I am female. The male Aspie is a different species to the male. However it is shown that Asperger's Disorder is an example of an extreme male brain. That could be the reason why I'm pretty fascinated by mechanical things and why I am tomboyish. As a child I gravitated towards toy cars or animals. I used to behead my dolls.

As for capitalism, it sucks but every political system goes sour when it gets to extreme. Go extreme left and you get Stalin. Go extreme right and you get Hitler. It all amounts to the same level of suffering to the people.

[TurboZ.Dude]

As for capitalism, it sucks but every political system goes sour when it gets to extreme. Go extreme left and you get Stalin. Go extreme right and you get Hitler. It all amounts to the same level of suffering to the people.

Well, that means it's time to head to an entirely new direction and abandon the entire left/right/center/whatever party politics kind of thinking.

Extreme in any direction isn't good, but thinking in party politics limits the opinions and thoughts to a small number of different 'boxes'. We need experts from every possible work scenario for any certain political post, not these politicians who hardly even know what they are talking about or deciding on. For example; a traffic minister should have real life work experience such as truck driving for 15-20 years or something like that (preferably diverse experience) before being allowed to apply for the traffic minister's post.

Parties should not exist at all, only work groups that contain only necessary experts that do the thought work etc. The work groups can then present their ideas and suggestions to the parliament or whatever. As the members of the work groups are experts in the field, they can explain very well to the broader audience what their idea/suggestion all is about.

Well, this is just a thought. I'm tired of hearing this and that about communists and fascists and capitalists and socialists etc.

Perhaps I am a bit radical, I hope I haven't upset anybody. I don't know if there are politically active / semi-active people here...