Okay I was actually looking at woodworking sites, but I came across the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA and saw a couple of delightful samplers by the Gould sisters – amazing work for ones so young
There’s a lot more to see – lovely period furniture in abundance on the MESDA site
Angela Thomas’ blog has an interesting piece on teens and online privacy. I too have thought that young people seem happy to share an extraordinary amount of personal information online – especially with sites like MySpace and Friendster. But some new research suggests that although kids share with friends, a very large percentage – the majority in fact – keep their personal profile private.
Cheers
Jerry
Roger McGuire has built himself what looks like a steam turbine powered motorbike – using an old (air conditioner?) blower for the engine and a home-built propane burner, and what looks like a gas tank for the boiler – very innovative 🙂
Check out his page
And I couldn’t resist a closer view – especially with the Stanley steam cars in the background
It’s his photo, but I brought up the contrast a little to improve the clarity. I wonder how many other steam bikes are out there?
Cheers
Jerry
Well, after about six years faithful service, my daughter’s postie bike (Honda CT110) began getting hard to start, and when it did, it started blowing smoke. I checked the compression and realised that the engine was down to about one-third the compression it should have. The dial read about 32 psi, when it should have been over 100. With a couple of weeks to go before my daughter was due to head overseas we just poured in some treacle-like ‘smoke free’ which brought the compression up to about 42 psi – still very low.
With the bike in storage I decided it was time to find out what the problem really was. My suspicion was a broken oil ring on the piston. I spent one evening last week removing the footpegs, bash-plate sub-frame and the exhaust pipe.
And today I set to work in earnest. It took less time than I expected. I began by removing the carby (two 10mm bolts) then followed the Clymer manual beginning with ensuring the piston was at top dead centre on the compression stroke.
I had also previously made a ‘piston holding fixture’ which you can buy as a special tool or make one from wood. The instructions were in the manual – for info you need a piece of wood 1/2inch x 1-1/4inch x 4 inches. and you just drill a 1/2inch hole in the centre and then cut away from one end until you have a fork – like this
And it worked perfectly.
But I digress… After removing the camshaft and with care to ensure that the cam chain did not slide down into the crankcase the head was removed. I used wire threaded through the cam chain to ensure it remained above the cylinder.
There was some carbon on the piston crown, and some deposits on the valves. The piston holding tool worked very well, but I needed to explore further. On removing the cylinder I found that the piston rings were quite worn, and that the oil ring was in three parts – clearly that is where the problem lies.
So it was time to remove the piston. This is secured to the connecting rod by two spring clips – not easy to see, but observing a small cutaway on the side of the piston, I noted a hint of a clip. With a pair of needle-nosed pliers it was a brief job to remove the clip from each side. I used a short piece of 1/2inch dowel to push out the piston pin and the piston was free.
After cleaning the worst of the carbon with a wire brush and fine emory paper I saw another issue – the top compression ring had at some point worn so thin that it had gouged the groove in which it sat, allowing for movement.
So it is likely we will need a new piston. But the bore seems unscratched and with luck I will be able to find a new piston to match. And that is a story for later in the week.
Meanwhile, there is a rather sad looking Honda CT110, with rags to prevent the entry of dust, sitting in my garage awaiting some new parts.
And the rest awaits reassembly on a nearby table
In the meantime, you can read more about this wonderful bike People actually race these things, and every year there is a Postie Bike Challenge in Australia where people ride these things from Brisbane to Adelaide (2005), or Ayre’s Rock (Ulluru)(2006). And this year 16-27 October the Postie Bike Challenge is from Brisbane to Cairns (over 3000kms) on some of the roughest and most beautiful country in Australia
And here is an online owner’s manual 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
Information overload has become one of the great catchphrases of the so-called information economy, and today the average office worker is dealing with and managing vastly more information than at any time in the past. Terms are bandied around like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘the greatest revolution since the Renaissance’ – to describe the events facing the contemporary developed world. Why Renaissance? Why not Victorian times or since the Industrial Revolution? Leaving aside the continuing periodisation discussion about what constituted the Renaisssance, what was it that distinguished the Renaissance from the previous several hundred years?
In the 1420s a young architect called Filippo Brunelleschi arrived in Florence. With powerful patrons trying to out-do each other in the extravagances of their public buildings, the city fathers had finally over-reached themselves. In trying to build the world’s largest church, the designers had exceeded their construction ability, and the church of Santa Maria del Fiore – Florence cathedral remained unroofed over the drum-like crossing. The problem was how to span a 45 metre space with a dome without using a timber crossing – because no timber grew that could span that space and support a dome under construction. Giotto (who designed the bell tower), Pisano, Talenti, and Ghiberti – none of them could solve the problem.
So Brunelleschi – then still in his 20s – came along. He faced three challenges:
Brunelleschi solved the problems by developing technological force multipliers, by developing new workplace organisational structures and by using innovative techniques. Sound familiar? In each case there are resonances with corporate life today.
What resulted was the largest unsupported masonry dome in Europe. Today we are dealing with new forms of business organisation that span across state boundaries, that needs to make decisions and adapt faster than ever before, supporting massive organisational structures.
Image courtesy of Finbonetti’s photostream on flickr
For Brunelleschi, technology was only part of the revolution. The rest was a philosophical outlook which resulted – at least at one level – in a set of management practices that formed a revolution no less dramatic than his many inventions, including several types of crane.
As workers in the information economy today, we too are building a cathedral. We are building a structure from within which is disseminated informational products which both reflect and shape the way we see the world.
Brunellesci lived in a world beginning to be shaped by the philosophy of William of Ockham (ca.1300-1349) who provided the basis for rational scientific thought we use today. He lived in a humanist world of new certainties that celebrated humanity based on Aristotelian principles from which we derive our disciplinary categories, and our clerically-based social organisation seen today in large corporations and in the public sector.
But his was a radically different world from before. In the Renaissance world the old certainty that somehow God would keep everything running smoothly was disappearing, and humankind found itself alone and having to take responsibility for essentially human acts.
However, from this came new optimism – the Renaissance was heading somewhere. Somehow, if humankind could keep improving things we would find the one best way to do something. There was an end-state – an exit strategy – when we would live in the best of all possible human worlds. Such was humanism.
Today, the great individualising humanist, modernist philosophy is standing on less firm ground. Humankind no longer stands proudly apart from the rest of the world, but rather perceives an uncomfortable sense of inter-connectedness. Chernobyl and global warming have taught us the arrogance of individual state-based environmental regulations.
Our world-view has changed. The world is no longer just a world of atoms. The way we understand the world is shaped by the concepts and language we use to describe it. What we make of the world is a by-product of the process by which we set about understanding and explaining the world. And there is nothing fundamentally stable about it. Each time we pin it down, we have already begun to change it. The world we are coming to understand it is the outward sign of continuous proceses interacting with each other. It is a world of change.
There remain those who yearn for a mythical pre-humanist stability based on an external Provider, or who try to cling to modernist certainties of earlier economic times. But we can no longer afford to manage change as though it were a temporary state between fixed forms of organisation, but rather as an integral part of the process of maintaining organisation. Our world is one of verbs, not nouns.
Our challenge then is to build a culture of positive change. When Brunelleschi was building his cathedral, he turned challenges into opportunities:
So Brunelleschi’s revolution was as much in logistics and organisational practices as of technology. And we are facing the same challenges. Where Brunelleschi worked with the limits of what one person could lift or carry, today we are dealing with how much information one person can process. Our force multipliers are computers and networked processes, matrix organisations, teamwork and web 2.0, just as Brunelleschi used gears, pulleys and pre-Fordist production line techniques.
But in our own way, we are building our own version of the cathedral. Our strength will depend on the interlocking network of people comprising the dome of web 2.0.
(excerpted from my book Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State)
Cheers
Jerry
