al_yrpal wrote:With the Concorde Airframe we 'flew' it in a hangar for months loading and unloading it to simulate taking on heavy fuel, gradually unloading it and loading the wings like they are loaded in flight, heating and cooling it to simulate air friction heating. Concorde had flown its complete life cycle before it ever took off. The answer is you build a rig to simulate working cycles and work it day and night to test it.
Where were you? My father worked on the windscreen at Triplex.
Jonathan
At the back of the RAE. We had a huge new building with the complete airframe in it. Loading was achieved with jacks and heating was achieved with incandescent heaters. Attached to the building were a fatigue lab and a creep lab. Aluminium creeps at quite low temperatures sub 200 degrees C and Concordes skin could reach that at supersonic speeds. Cooling of its skin was achieved by pumping fuel around to cool it. I believe its complete life was simulated in the years before the prototype had flown. One has to read this in the context of the Comet disaster where repetative pressurising and depressurising caused fatigue cracks at the square window corners. The RAE was heavily involved in identifying that. I wrote my first computer program there which ran on the RAEs Mercury Computer. Nearby was a chicken gun which a mate was in charge of. It fired chickens at aircraft windscreens to simulate birdstrikes
Al
Reuse, recycle, thus do your bit to save the planet.... Get stuff at auctions, Dump, Charity Shops, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, Car Boots. Choose an Old House, and a Banger ..... And cycle as often as you can......
Oldjohnw wrote:I have in he past purchased a couple of major items based on Which recommendations: a fridge freezer and a vacuum cleaner. Never again: both disasters. Possibly unlucky but given that part of the recommendation was based on reliability........
OTOH I typically sign up for a 1-quid trial to see what they think if I've got a big purchase coming up and all's well so far.
So you know the story about the testers who forgot to thaw the chicken? : - )
Autocode?
Jonathan
I did hear that yes. And yes Mercury Autocode on punched tape, ran correctly first time! Happy days...
Al
Reuse, recycle, thus do your bit to save the planet.... Get stuff at auctions, Dump, Charity Shops, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, Car Boots. Choose an Old House, and a Banger ..... And cycle as often as you can......
If you're a lazy sod and can't be bothered then Which is pretty good. Their recommendations are usually OK, might not be ideal for your use case but you won't have gone far wrong.
I suspect e-bikes are like normal bikes for a lot of folk, they do a handful of miles here and there and the Which report is based around that.
I bought a Bafang, cheap and Chinese. I bought it because there are many thousands being hammered out there, it's probably one of the most tested motors on the planet - and definitely one of the most abused. Loads of people using them to do high mileages, the spares are cheap as chips and there are several YouTube vids for every operation on one you can think of. Ideal for my high mileage commuting and easy enough to repair and get on the road in a couple of days should the worst happen. (Which over 25,000 miles it never did).
Even better it allowed me to take my favourite bike and electrify that.
The point being, Which could never have found my ideal ebike simply because I already owned the main part. Is the Bosch better? Probably, but just not for me.
kwackers wrote:If you're a lazy sod and can't be bothered then Which is pretty good. Their recommendations are usually OK, might not be ideal for your use case but you won't have gone far wrong.
I suspect e-bikes are like normal bikes for a lot of folk, they do a handful of miles here and there and the Which report is based around that.
I bought a Bafang, cheap and Chinese. I bought it because there are many thousands being hammered out there, it's probably one of the most tested motors on the planet - and definitely one of the most abused. Loads of people using them to do high mileages, the spares are cheap as chips and there are several YouTube vids for every operation on one you can think of. Ideal for my high mileage commuting and easy enough to repair and get on the road in a couple of days should the worst happen. (Which over 25,000 miles it never did).
Even better it allowed me to take my favourite bike and electrify that.
The point being, Which could never have found my ideal ebike simply because I already owned the main part. Is the Bosch better? Probably, but just not for me.
I'm not, and I can be bothered, but I still use Which. How can that be?
With tech stuff it isn't that I can't be bothered but that I don't have the expertise. It isn't unreasonable to expect good advice from an organisation such as Which but I have been let down.
Oldjohnw wrote:With tech stuff it isn't that I can't be bothered but that I don't have the expertise. It isn't unreasonable to expect good advice from an organisation such as Which but I have been let down.
We have the internet now.
You can become an expert on almost anything with just 5 minutes Googling...
Oldjohnw wrote:With tech stuff it isn't that I can't be bothered but that I don't have the expertise. It isn't unreasonable to expect good advice from an organisation such as Which but I have been let down.
We have the internet now.
You can become an expert on almost anything with just 5 minutes Googling...
You don't become an expert. Usually find someone else's best buy view. So back to square one!
Happy days...
