User talk:Charles01/Archive 3

Morris Major

Too late for me to start a page as it already exists. I have put the link in to the Morris Minor entry. I am actually considering an article on the pre war Morris Major. Malcolma 17:31, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Yikes (or whatever), where did that come from? Looks a nicely informative entry, too. I'll look out for your article on the earlier MM. Charles01 13:22, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Mini Clubman aerodynamics?!

I saw that you added that the Mini Clubman was aerodynamically inferior to the regular Mini - I'm skeptical that this has ever been properly tested. Do you have a reference for that - I've read every book in the ref list for that article and I don't recall ever seeing this. It sounds an awful lot like OR and I'm trying to keep this article's little gold WP:FA star and I don't want to lose it because of important facts going unreferenced! Thanks! SteveBaker 20:17, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Interesting thought trigger, Steve. The matter of the Clubman's boxy front and the resulting adverse impact on its aerodynamic characteristics featured in press comment at the time, even though back then no one outside of the Citroen fan club (which clearly included the designer of the NSU Ro80, launched 1968) was too keen to sing from the roof tops about drag coefficients - I'm not even sure I remember anyone using the phrase back then. The most authoritative UK motor journals of the time were probably (The) "Autocar" - a sort of Brit weekly equivalent of Car and Driver - and a monthly then still, as far as I recall, called "Car incorporating Small Car". The titles (or their successors) survive today, I think, in emaciated (ie excessively influenced by their publishers' marketing departments) form, but these days both might be regarded as less authoritative. I have the old ones still, I think, in the loft, but I do not have them indexed so they're not adequately accessible for present purposes. Some of the reference sources cited in the wiki Mini article to date look to be relatively generalised publications. Something that might be more specifically Mini focussed, and have more detail on technical aspects of the design, is a book written by the late Leonard Setright round the time of the Mini's 40th birthday (so presumably published 1999) and I would expect to find the matter covered there. However, I do not have a copy. I might be able to get hold of one in a public library round here (ie in England) but if, in the meantime, you have the opportunity to access a copy first .... good. The alternative approach, of course, is to observe that the relative aerodynamic merits of the two designs are apparent simply by looking at the things - at least for anyone vaguely familiar with the issues involved - and the wiki entry entitled 'Drag Coefficients' or some such title provides a pretty clear overview for the rest of us. That the Mini was a small car and not a big car is apparent to anyone who ever saw one. That a flat fronted car cuts through the air less efficiently than a curved one is similarly self evident. In the same way, you might ask the chicken why the egg is egg shaped rather than brick shaped: her reply will doubtless be unprintable, though, so maybe you can spare the chicken from the intellectual challenge imposed by the question. On the subject of aerodynamics in general, as far as I can establish, there is no single universally accepted definition of drag, anymore than there is agreed definition of brake horse power (in describing the bhp attributrable to individual car models). There is a formula - quite a complex one - that gives you a theoretical drag coefficient and if you find some of the variables hard to determine or of dubious relevance you can adjust the formula. If you are not taken by the theoretical approach you can measure actual air flow over a vehicle in a wind tunnel, but I understand that at the margin different models do slightly less well in some tunnels than in others, and of coure most of us cannot readily access wind tunnels. BLMC never had their own, I think, but will have used the one at MIRA in the English Midlands. Presumably things like panel fit, ambient temperature and air pressure, and tyre details will also, at the margin, give you different results for similar vehicles. However, between the classic Mini and the Clubman fronted Mini, we are not at the margin. For all that ramble, it will indeed always be a good thing to be able to cite something more objectively authoritative than the fact that something is a statement of the bleeping obvious, and I trust a published source can be dug out probably by one of us! Regards Charles01 11:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Ritmo

Hi, yeh I probably tought the pic was removed, so i removed the file name..sorry.--— Typ932^{T | C}  12:26, 26 September 2007 (UTC)