User talk:Charles01/Archive 11

Re Fiat Tipo

Dear Charles,

I note that you submitted a picture of a Fiat Tipo for wikidedia last year, outside Ely catherdral. You say that this was from your own collection.

I am a Tipo fan and wondered whether the picture, or the car itself was from your own collection. Do you own the Tipo? Also was it a recent picture?.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards Seancosens1882 (talk) 21:38, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Dear Sean

Yes, no no.

(1)

My own collection: yes, while other kids were discussing football and / or drinking extra beer I was wandering round photographing cars. I still do it. Sad or what? Well, it worked for me, and these days it helps fill a niche in wikipedia, so I can even claim an element of public interest in support of my anorak habit. Back then the "game" was to photograph new cars, so this picture will have been taken shortly after Tipos turned up in England, some time in 1989. (At that time I lived nearby in Cambridge, an easy bike ride to the south of Ely: by that time I had a Mitsubishi so I might even have driven there.) An expert on Ely cathedral restoration might be able to pin down the date further: they seem to have been restoring some part of that cathedral for as long as I can remember. The film was actually processed in late summer, but probably contained pictures taken over the space of several months so I can't pin it down too precisely.

(2)

I have never owned a Tipo. I nearly rented one once in Italy but then they supplied a Golf instead, so that as far as I remember I never even drove one. It looked like a lot of car for the money with slightly less mainstream styling than major competitors, though to my mind the Ritmo/Strada or indeed the 128 had been easier on the eye. But that's only an opinion - possibly rather a conservative opinion - and clearly not one you should wish or need to share.

(3)

So, per (1) not a recent picture but a picture from 1989 The recent bit was scanning a whole lot of my better old colour slide car pictures onto a computer and, where it felt appropriate, uploading same to Wikipedia.

I rather like the picture you noticed because I like this angle for this car. Also, more by luck than by judgement, the lighting is just about ok. Despite looking well polished there's not so much reflection that you can soo the photographer reflected in the paintwork. And the backdrop is interesting without being TOO distracting. All the same, I suspect a professional might have substituted a less interesting background and maybe found a way to reduce the reflection further. I guess I was using my Olympus OM2 which was a good camera at the time, with a mild sky-light filter over the lens, without which the reflection would have been "worse".

So much thinking before the kids have even had breakfast. Must stop. But thanks for being interested.

Regards Charles01 (talk) 06:00, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

cwt

Hi, okay now I maybe understand little bit better... .:), thats very confusing unit short, long,imperial and us units and all that... maybe better to leave it alone.. rgds --Typ932 ^T·C 16:50, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Talbot Tagora

Charles, the article on the Talbot Tagora is currently under a featured article review (Wikipedia:Featured article review/Talbot Tagora/archive1). I know this is a big ask, but there are concerns over some of the references ([1] and [2]). It seems that you have a sizable archive of material that could be used to reference the article. I was hoping, you would be able to do that for me, as I do not have such resources at hand and it would be a shame if the article was demoted. OSX (talk • contributions) 12:15, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm. it's not a big ask in its own terms. However, what I think you've noticed me doing is going through the old motor magazines that I have in the loft covering roughly 1965 - 1974. The earlier ones were gifts from grown-ups grateful to free up space in their own houses and the later ones in many cases were paid for by me. I don't think I stopped buying motor magazines later when I got a relatively grown-up job of my own, but I no longer lived with my parents and the terrible truth is that I appear to have trashed most of the motor magazines I got hold of between 1975 and about 2000. I seem to have quite a lot covering the last few years >2001 but that's a bit late for the Tagora. So ... I'll happily keep an eye open and plug in more source notes for the Tagora if I come across suitable sources. And maybe I might pick up an old workshop manual at a clasic car show later during the summer (I'm in the northern hemisphere.). The Tagora's a bit 'modern' for classic car shows but there's one round here that sometimes turns up to them (generally accompanied by large angry rain clouds, for some reason). But as regards my existing "bank" of source materials, I'm not too hopeful regarding the Tagora. Then again I can't be the only one with a loft full of crated motor magazines....

Regards Charles01 (talk) 13:25, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

No worries then, but thank you anyway. OSX (talk • contributions) 02:39, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

John Hubert Arthur Coulson

I notice you found a death date for JHAC. Are you able to enter (or failing that, to tell me) your source, please? This is not so much a wiki-question as a genealogy question concerning a distant kinsman. I gather my mother knew JHAC and his sister in the 1920s/30s, but they lost contact in subsequent decades. (I gather, too, his intellect was somewhat dauntingly "to the fore" even as a youth, which I guess may be one of the qualifications you need for writing well crafted detective fiction.) Anyway, thank you, if you will, for anything you can add to my knowledge of the date and place of the fellow's death. Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:31, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I found a death date at a favorite peerage site [3] scroll down to Constance Jane Dorothy Tayler. --Tommieboi (talk) 11:26, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Bedford TD Tipper Truck image

The Bedford truck shown is an A-type and pre-dates the Bedford D-Type (also known as the Bedford TD).

The truck '533DHK' has a Date of First Registration according to the DVLA of 16 06 1955.

The D-type/TD truck was first produced at the Bedford truck plant in Dunstable, Bedfordshire in 1957.

The previous model was the similar Bedford A-type first made in 1953 and renamed the D-type when the engines used were changed to the new Bedford 'in-house' diesel.

Post war Bedfords were originally designated A-type, D-type (normal-control) plus the "Big-Bedfords", S-type and C-type (forward control with the cab over the engine).

Later with the introduction of the popular 'TK' truck the 'D' type was renamed the 'TD' and itself in time was superseded by the 'TJ'. The 'T' indicated truck, differentiating the codes from Vauxhall's passenger cars (E, F, FB, FC, HA, HB etc.) and the Bedford Vans (CA, HA, CF).

I hope this information is useful. Sunbar (talk) 11:27, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I finds this interesting and useful. However, I just got back from Snetterton (touring car racing) with the kids and need to sleep. I'll come back to it latdr in the week and see if it means I need to correct any captions I entered. Unless you already did?

Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 22:55, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

(Later) Thank you. I've now uploaded the image in question with a corrected name and nominated the wrongly labelled version for delation. (As far as I know one cannot oneself delete images one had previously uploaded: this is some sort of obscure wiki-safeguard which I may have misunderstood, but if I have correctly understood it then, I guess, it makes some sort of wiki-sense.)

Out if interest, are you aware of any reliable source one can use for identifying these older (say 1940s-60s) trucks? Those Bedford Tippers were so popular in UK when I was a kid we barely gave them a second glance, and these days they still turn up occasionally at class car shows. But whereas I have various "sources" from which I can identify old cars (old contemporary motor magazines, The Complete Catalogie of British Cars by Culshaw and Horrobin, even old copies of The Observer's Book of Cars) I am aware of no equivalent oracle covering commericial vehicles. Often googling provides a reasonable answer. That's how I (think I) identified one or two lighter commercial vehciles from other UK manufacturers like the Morris J2. But with the Bedford trucks, a cross section of googled sources left me almost as confused as I had been at the start....and uploading a (n otherwise) reasonably useful image with the wrong name into the bargain Thank you if you will have any thoughts to share on this.

Someone might even be inspired to kick off a few more wiki-entries on some of these vehicles.

Thanks again & best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 08:15, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

AC ME3000

...or better AC 3000ME? Hi, from a member of the german wp. Thank you for launching this article about this nice, little mid-engined sports car from this famous company in Thames Ditton. And espacially "Thank you" for the many pictures about cars from the 70´s and 80´s. I´ve just launched a longer article in the german wp about this car. My annotations: To my mind the article shoud be moved to AC 3000ME because this was the offical name when production and sellings have started, AC ME 3000 was the name officially be used in the prototype era, although some journalists continued the use of this older name also in production times; my sources: [4]; (I´ve posted a parallel posting on the article-discussion-page). Many Greetings --Roland Rattfink (talk) 10:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for this reaction, Roland R.

I will try and take time with your German entry and steal from it for the English wiki article! Unless you will do it first? I know little about the car. Except that when I was driving along at the enge of Brentwood here in England I saw one, and it was so rare I turned my car, stopped it, got out, and took that picture. The real miracle is that ca. 30-40 years later I still have many of the pictures I took back then when I had no grown up job and much more time for photographing cars: student life was fun back then. Now the students are worried about the future, but back in the early 1970s we still had some of that sense from our parents that we were lucky to be alive at all. Though after the 1973 oil shortages, I guess we all learned the hard way that economic growth was not a one way street after all.

The name I used for this car is one I got from a source, probably (from memory) a journalists' headline. If you think it should be reversed to AC 3000ME, please reverse it. I never changed any page name yet, so I'm not sure I would know what to do. Though no doubt I can learn how to do it if I have to! But now is the time to do it if we will. As far as I know, till now, the only page that links to this entry is the AC (auto-manufacturer page) itself. Otherwise one can simply create a redirect page. The anglophone wiki project automobile page gets very exercised sometimes about how to name car entries where a car has different names in different times in different countries. There are so many names you can use for a single little Mitsubishi depending where or when. But as long as there are redirect pages for all the people who will not agree about the "correct" name, I think that is the more important thing. I think I have four different names for an entry I translated last year on the DKW 3=6.

And thank you for liking some of the other pictures I've uploaded. Many friends - especially but not exclusively female - thought photographing cars a sign of rampant insanity, but then I find some other folks' leisure time activities eccentric. Or worse. So each to his (or her) own pleasures. And wikipedia gives a welcome but till recently unexpected "public interest" justification for some of my old car pictures.

Gruesse Charles01 (talk) 14:41, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

+ Was bedeutet Rattfink, bitte? In Nederland at the Slagerei/Metzgerei a "Fink" is a sort of single portion of meat loaf (Art von Fleishckaese) wrapped around in a thin sheet of beef. It is called Fink, I suppose, because it is the same size and shape as a rather plump Fink/Finch. Maybe also in Koelsch? Aber Rattfink? Is this something people eat in China?

To your “rambling” reaction, as you call it (a nice edit summary):

Why shoudn´t we sometimes endulge in reminiscences, especially when watching old pictures (or actual pictures of antiquated things)? Comprehensible - at least to me, even if I might be some years younger. My german version of the AC 3000ME is admittedly very long, so it would take some time to translate it in english completely. But if you want, you can “steal” as much as you want. Though I think it would be easier to grap the desired information from here [5], which was my basis too. There are so many subpages about history, standard specification etc. (just look at the overview under “information” and “site map”). Additional information can be taken from my articel-footnotes which refer mostly to english documents.

I think longer articles should be written by people with a professional or near-native level of english, mine may be good enough for reading, discussing, translating from english to german but maybe not the other way round with all these technical terms, sometimes different in american english and british english (there is a nice quotation about this last aspect in the foreword of Trevor Legate´s book “Cobra”, written by William Hurlock (former AC-director, died 1992 at the age of ca. 72), when he describes the first contacts between Shelby´s engineers and those in Thames Ditton). So I won´t plague myself with retranslating it, even because I have some ideas for the next articles in WP.de surrounding the AC 3000ME and older models. E.g. I´ve seen two nice pics with AC 2-Litre-Saloons or the green AC 428 at the 1973 London Motor Show ... - I wonder who was the photographer ;-)

The AC 3000ME you have photographed might be chassis-Nr. ME...108, the car that was featured in the first sales brochure, intrinsically the last prototype/pre-production car (so the prototype-name AC ME 3000 would be correct in this case), the car which is now under restoration at AC Heritage in Brooklands [6]. That car did a lot of road testing in 1979/80 with AC-engineers and Robin Rew from Silverstone who has created the rare turbo version and did a lot of other improvements to the chassis, the gearbox and the engine. But other early production cars where canary yellow too.

Concerning the english article: To my mind he ideal way would be to trasfer it to "AC 3000ME" including the whole history and maybe the small discussion-page with history too. In WP.de we have a practical button in the header of each page but there isn´t an equivalent in the header of WP.en, but the tool must be the same; it´s just unclear to me where it is hidden in WP.en. The AC (auto-manufacturer) page has the right subheading right now ("3000ME") and the facts are in there too (“For AC, such delays meant that the first production cars (now renamed 3000ME) were not delivered until 1979...”). Additionally there is one other article, "Ford Essex V6 engine (UK)", referring to the AC 3000ME (I have just standardized it from AC 3000_ME).

Concerning the DKW you´re right: You have to be an insider to find the differences between the Meisterklasse/F 89, the Sonderklasse/F 91, the 3=6/F93/F94 and the 1000/1000S (but look at the grills, the engines, the tire-size...). A Porsche 911 might be a 964-, 993-, 996- or 997-series..., for non-insiders a Bristol 406 looks very similar to the 409. Or look at the pre-war cars. And you Englishmen had the badge-engineering... ;-)

A last “rambling”: My name is just a nick without real meaning. I was just looking for a name with an alliteration on R and so I found [7]: I didn´t knew the cartoon before, but in my youth I´ve loved the Pink Panther and the series started in the year of my birth and it´s the everlasting struggle of good and evel, yin and yang .... The idea with “fink” as a meat loaf from the Netherlands was totally new to me, although I like cooking. But now back to the articles... Viele Grüße, --Roland Rattfink (talk) 18:22, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi you can move the page using the move button, it should preserve the page history also --Typ932 ^T·C 21:55, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Lancia Flaminia

I have conducted a reassessment of the above article as part of the GA Sweeps process. I have found some concerns with the article which you can see at Talk:Lancia Flaminia/GA1. I have placed the article on hold whilst these are fixed. I am letting you know as you are a major contributor to this article. Thanks. Jezhotwells (talk) 22:21, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Category:Articles needing translation from French Wikipedia

Please help translate commune articles from French wikipedia!! Your contributions are greatly needed!! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:56, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Fiat Topolino dimensions

In this edit, you introduced dimensions for the Fiat Topolino, and credited them to an old 1960 Practical Motorist. If you own that magazine, can you double check it? I've updated the dimensions based on another source, because the ones you provided seem far too large. They would make the Topolino larger than a Morris Minor. I've parked a Minor next to a Topolino, and I know that is far from true.—Kww(talk) 02:40, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

I've crated up that old magazine so I'm not sure how quickly I can extract it. But I agree completely the logic of what you write. Whether the error came from my source or from me, the values I entered appear to have been wrong. Thanks for correcting them. Regards Charles01 (talk) 12:00, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

My user page

Thanks for correcting the typo. The page anyway needs a bit of a revamp, there are many others lurking. I don't mind when it is obviously constructive like this and is not changing my meaning.

Best wishes, keep up the good work. SimonTrew (talk) 16:23, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Lancia Flavia

Hello, can you check again the fuel capacity for Lancia Flavia?, I think there is error now with 5 litres. --Typ932 ^T·C 18:44, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that had to be wrong. I've put in the figure from the French wiki article for now. Digging through the old motor magazines can take a little longer! Regards Charles01 (talk) 19:39, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks --Typ932 ^T·C 19:41, 20 September 2009 (UTC)