OD404

Nice project! With reference to the FEA plot, I would take that with a very large pinch of salt. Firstly your peak stress is on a corner at which the stress will tend towards infinity as the mesh in that area gets refined. And if I remember correctly, Solidwork's inbuilt FEA creates its own mesh with little or no user input, which is pretty rubbish for knowing the level of error in the results (and believe me, the wrong mesh settings can give you errors of over 20% in the results) let alone correcting for it. As far as putting up an impressively "pretty" picture, it does the job, but you're better off doing what you are doing and making a prototype to test rather than relying on Solidworks to tell you if it'll break or not

I can safely say in my experience that it has absolutely no effect on your application, good or bad. I wouldn't bother to be honest.

I never edit my posts. Does that make me Jesus?

I guess like a lot of things, our view on this is scewed by the type of press the benefit system receives. It does seem to me like we hear all to often about the people claiming benefits and living off them with no intention of finding work, but I wonder what percentage of the total amount of people claiming they actually represent. I feel personally that if the system enables even a minority to live off it and feel like they don't need to go to work, then it is probably not strict enough, but with respect to anzo's first post concerning having children, we are left in a sticky situation. On the one hand you'd want to discourage procreation for purpose of obtaining benefits, but at the same time, if a child is born, we should support it if the parent(s) has no means to. Perhaps limiting how the child benefits can be spent would help (I'll admit, not having kids or the inability to support them means I don't really know how it works, so feel free to correct me )?

7mins By foot

That sounds more like it, since I work in structural analysis

Yeah mining equipment, freight locomotives, power generation and some marine applications. Not sure the turbo argument is correct as such, you might be recalling the discussion me and Andy P had about slapping one of our turbos on either mine or his engines (we both knew it was too big). Besides my speciallity isn't turbos

It's the size of a bus... Earplugs help, need them even though we have reasonable sound proofing on the test cells There really isn't much to see and the sound is just noisy rather than being something you'd enjoy listening to. In terms of nice sounding engines I'm going to agree with the first post. The 787b's R26B engine sounds amazing at full chat. I've got a vid of that somewhere, will dig it out later

We got one running here at the moment with 173mm bores, all 18 of them!!

Those warranties are rarely worth the paper they are written on! I would always advise looking at the details before signing up to them as you usually find that the only things covered for the full term (if at all) are the castings of the block, crank, head. Stuff like rust won't always be covered and electrical parts are also generally not covered. This doesn't mean stay clear of every warranty offered to you, just request detailed information on what is covered and for how long (some bits are only covered for the first year) before signing up

To give some relevant guidance to the OP, it unfortunately does come down to personal preference with disks. What I posted above is probably more relevant to situations where you are looking to reduce speed (downhill or xc applications), whereas for trials we are more interested in the initial bite of the disk which is aided by the edges of the disk...

Frictional force is determined by F=uR where F is the frictional force, u is the coefficient of friction and R is the reaction force of the pad on the rotor so assuming u is constant (same rotor and pad material) we increase F by increasing R. The equation for pressure is P=R/A where P is pressure, R is our reaction force and A is the contact area. Assuming that the pressure being supplied by the brake's hydraulic system is constant we can rearrange to get R where R=P*A. Therefore to increase R we need to increase A. The above is very simplistic, as there are other mechanisms to consider such as heat dissapation (aided by a greater surface area of the rotor) and the use of holes and edges to reduce glazing of the pads.

Don't think we'll ever see that day come

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Civilians who have died as part of these wars (Iraq and Afganistan) deserve to be remembered; In some ways more so than our soldiers. The powers that be have sent our military out to fight in these countries and casualties are to be expected. I'm pretty sure that if you were to ask any serviceman or woman going out there, they would not be as naive to think that they aren't going to be in harm's way? And yet a lot of the country seems to think we should go to these places and have zero deaths... However, civilians in these countrys have had no choice in being thrown into a conflict, and I think we need to remember that. So from that point of view the march is a good idea in my mind. The location is perhaps rather controversal (and possibly chosen because of that in order to bring it to the attention of everyone) which is why there's so much of a storm going on about it. Regardless of any "hidden agendas" of the group organising the march, I do, in principal agree with its sentiment of remembering innocent civilians who have died in these conflicts. I also feel that honouring our soldier who have died in the line of duty is a tradition that we should continue. On a side note, I have noticed that a lot of people get outraged at Islamic people calling our soliders "murderers, child killers, etc", and whilst this is uncalled for, isn't it pretty much the same as a lot of British people calling Islamic people terrorists etc? There are a lot of double standards in people's opinions these days...

No snow here, it's just wet

No offence Mike, but whether this guy is indeed Pete or not, your constant ranting on the subject is actually getting as tiresome as all of his little stories... And at least they were amusing

Xmas surprise? I'm there

Where in Northamptonshire are you? Might be interested...

Muller's Corners

Careful! I'm on your side on this debate

He's probably refering to the fact that a smaller radius will be a bigger stress riser than a larger radius and given that the radii on the square holes are a lot smaller than the radius of the circular holes, the square holes present themselves as bigger stress risers. However what is missing here is an understanding of the loading in that area. My guess is there isn't much which means that while the smaller radii will have increased stress in that area, the stress magnitude itself is not significant compared with other areas of the rim.

It honestly varies, I've seen stock rx7 engines (the REW) go beyond 100,000miles. The engine can go by two main causes, a tip failure which generally happens on tuned engine that have suffered from detonation which breaks the tip in one fell swoop or the tip goes just through wear so the engine loses it's combustion seal gradually (this takes forever though!). The other way these engines die is through water seal failure and it's this failure that people refer to when saying rebuilds every 50,000. The water seals can last over 100k, but not properly warming up the car, using rubbish coolant and tuning can all reduce their life. I'd say the average time is 60k and that's through the water seals going, which is a gradual process and if caught can mean a pretty cheap rebuild (compared to piston engines). The rx8's engine (the RENESIS) doesn't suffer as they've sorted the issues (partly by making it N/A).

They have low compression by design, so engine braking is lower (also less moving parts so less friction). I get 16mpg average from mine, there are similar power engines that do a lot better, but they need to be run a little rich to prevent detonation and knock.

Waste of time and money? Depends entirely why you decided to go to uni and what course you chose to do if you ask me (this applies to people thinking about going too). If you want to go to uni just for the social side of things then yes, you could probably get up to the same antics without all the added expense (and lectures). If you want to improve your job prospects, and are prepared to choose a course which will actually do that and to put in the effort, then it is more than worth it.