jim s

Any news Doc? This saga is surely solved one way or another?

"Rolls-Royce Merlin engine with a 3rd bank of cylinders grafted on 1 side" any background info on this? i know there were quite a few merlins floating around in the 60's and 70's ( i even had possession of one for a while) but that would be a tremendous engineering feat...

surely he would have the cambered surface on the bottom complete with a couple of degrees of negative angle of attack... can you imagine on a tz750 having that starting to lift and then getting (exponentially) more lift...

Rodger was a real gentleman - i recall going to a midweek test day at Baypark and noticed his van and small entourage in the pits with him out on the track on his (1300?) Mcintosh . as i was getting my own bike ready i noticed him looking over everytime he went past the start/finish straight, and his crew (busy giving laptimes etc) would in turn look (glare) at me too... Just as i was about to go out on the track myself Roger pulled in and rode over to me to tell me about a patch of sand in the braking zone at the end of the back straight, then rode back out past his crew and carried on . Very

Quite a few have done this (its on my list too...) a bit of organising with the barge across manapouri and then over the pass . by all accounts Feb/ early March is the time most likely to give moderately settled weather. "Sailing Taranto" on youtube gives a bit of info on the area, and encouragement to go as well. The boaties guide to fiordland i understand will give a mine of info. I'd be keen to hear first hand from people that have done this trip as well

just thinking as i set off for town today (turning the toyota's heater onto max as i was half frozen from doing farm work in the rain) Do EV's have heater's? surely they do but it must wreak havoc on the battery... Julie-ann Genter would do well to go and work in southland for a winter and hopefully reset her outlook

managed to dig a few pics out....Possibly the best day i've had exploring on the bike. i recall a few months after we were there they had something like 450mm rain in a day and the road in was wiped out for the medium/long term..

Hampton Downs?

Count me in as another sailor who has the bike bug... racing was my sole focus for most of 20 years and i had a lot of fun with relatively minor injuries. Road bikes still appeal but the roads are too busy these days. A group of us did a ride way way up into the seaward kaikoura range a few years back - so spectacular but a few places you had maybe 250mm to ride on v 100's of metres of fall...i'll see if i can dig out a few pics

about 25 years ago i read a book all about Chernobyl. about the first half of the book ran through the ins and outs of nuclear power stations and i recall that there were different types/methods used but some of the (earlier?) types needed 450 years of being fully manned after they were de-commissioned to prevent a meltdown... I'm sure the modern ones will be a lot better but who wants to let that gennie out of the bottle

The bracket is mounted quite low on the transom so you may get by with another short shaft if good one was found at the right price. our 20' has a yamaha 8 thats been to the moon and it's still easy starting and reliable, plus the two strokes are a fair bit lighter than the four strokes...

I see a bit of work cutting the bend sections to match the required shape , a little bit of lathe work and welding plus material cost. Quality work done quickly - if he charged much less he could well go out of business .

It's impressive that after 47 years or so the working parts are likely still good and it's only corrosion that's getting the better of it...I use a small Foundry for one-offs at reasonable prices in my engineering work . A possibility is to replace the casing half (or halves) and save on doing any other mods/retrofitting. Perhaps send me a pm if that interests you.

Any chance of some photos of the problem pieces? Where are you located? It may be perfectly viable to restore.

Our off the grid diesel generator at 1500rpm uses around 0.9 litres/hr unloaded and about an extra 0.3 l/hr for every KW we draw of it - i'd expect a similar thing to happen to your consumption .no free lunches sadly applies to the humble volvo or in our case an LD20 also.