Author Topic: New member  (Read 21802 times)

ottawavalleyboy

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Re: New member
« Reply #30 on: March 24, 2012, 01:26:54 AM »
I had a vacuum oil drainer that I use on my truck & car, it came in handy for getting every last drop of oil.


both diesels one is just a little older design, check out the license plate....

2005 smart fortwo diesel, 95 Toyota tacoma 4x4 gasser, 2011 argo 8x8,and most recently an aircooled Lister 7.5 VA

rleonard

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Re: New member
« Reply #31 on: June 29, 2012, 02:20:49 PM »
OVB, we have not heard from you in a while.  How is the project coming along?

Bob
Faster - Better - Cheaper  You can have any two, but not all three

ottawavalleyboy

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Re: New member
« Reply #32 on: July 09, 2012, 09:37:23 PM »
Been letting the surgeon practise on me, I had my right rotator cuff repaired on the 25 of june, 4 more weeks with my arm in a sling then 3 more months of physio, so no camping fishing or working on the Lister  >:(

Looks like it will be spring before I get anything useful or fun done,  they had me on light duty prior to the repair but this is cruel and unusual punishment with the weather being what it is here..... :laugh:
2005 smart fortwo diesel, 95 Toyota tacoma 4x4 gasser, 2011 argo 8x8,and most recently an aircooled Lister 7.5 VA

ottawavalleyboy

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Re: New member
« Reply #33 on: September 24, 2012, 06:49:55 PM »
Got up & around today so decided to tackle the fuel tank as it was leaking from the shutoff valve, an old piece of junk that was handy I guess, got a proper replacement and will strip/paint it.
2005 smart fortwo diesel, 95 Toyota tacoma 4x4 gasser, 2011 argo 8x8,and most recently an aircooled Lister 7.5 VA

ottawavalleyboy

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Re: New member
« Reply #34 on: July 20, 2018, 04:13:04 PM »
This thread is ancient but I want people to know that I'm still kicking.

My right hip started to fail soon after the 2012 post to the point where I had it replaced in 2016.
But I kept all my tools and stuff, and a few weeks ago I bought a house in the country, the place has a large heated workshop/garage roughly 30' x 48',and I vaguely remember seeing a small bungalow there as well.

The closest neighbour is 1/2 a kilometer away so running the Lister shouldn't be an issue.I got a generator and frame fabbed up before I got my titanium/ceramic hip installed so there shouldn't be much to do.
Can't wait.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2018, 04:17:37 PM by ottawavalleyboy »
2005 smart fortwo diesel, 95 Toyota tacoma 4x4 gasser, 2011 argo 8x8,and most recently an aircooled Lister 7.5 VA

mikenash

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Re: New member
« Reply #35 on: July 20, 2018, 09:24:25 PM »
Hey OVB

Greetings from another former colony

Congratulations on surviving, persevering & overcoming

I like your description of a rural property with a large shed & the possibility of a bungalow in some corner.  I have something analogous to that here in NZ along with a couple of "project" CSs and the odd gen head

Good luck, Mike

ottawavalleyboy

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Re: New member
« Reply #36 on: July 20, 2018, 10:37:13 PM »
Hey Mike,
It's good to hear that my doppleganger exists in one of my most favourite countries.
My niece spent a year or so in New Zealand....I begged her to take me along....thankfully she has good sense to go with her looks and declined!
Looking forward to posting some photos with all the toys in their proper (spacious) environs.
I met a New Zealander up here some time ago and asked how long he was staying. "For good" said he....I said "you left Paradise to come to this frozen armpit of a Country?" He smiled and said " I was chasing a Canadian Girl" The poor bastard....
« Last Edit: July 20, 2018, 10:39:19 PM by ottawavalleyboy »
2005 smart fortwo diesel, 95 Toyota tacoma 4x4 gasser, 2011 argo 8x8,and most recently an aircooled Lister 7.5 VA

mikenash

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Re: New member
« Reply #37 on: July 20, 2018, 11:38:15 PM »
Yep, chasing girls to far-flung corners is a Kiwi male tradition - two of my kids have met their partners in Scotland by some odd chance - but they tend to return home when they start having children, or their children reach school age

The piece of New Zealand I am playing with is in the Bay of Plenty - a piece with cheap rural land but the most sunshine hours in the country - so I follow all the "solar" conversations with interest

I just have to wear the employment yoke for a few more years then the plan is to retire to the sunshine and put my toys to use

Cheers

BruceM

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Re: New member
« Reply #38 on: July 21, 2018, 03:03:12 AM »
If I was well enough to move,  New Zealand is my top pick.  One of the saner countries, and beautiful.

mikenash

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Re: New member
« Reply #39 on: July 21, 2018, 04:06:06 AM »
Thanks Bruce

You and a billion others I suspect

Sadly, three decades of neo-liberal politics and four decades of privatisation and five decades of increasingly-powerful farmer-lobby and business-interest groups have left NZ as a painted facade of what it used to be strung out to cover what it now is:

We have increasingly conservative mainstream political views and an almost complete dismantling of the once-universal public health, welfare and housing schemes

Privatisation of the delivery of essential services such as power, water, energy, internet has created a bunch of semi-monopolies where energy supply companies and their ilk answer solely to their shareholders and what were once "services" and "rights" for ordinary Kiwis have become unaffordable luxuries for those at the bottom while those at the top are creaming it

The bell-curve of wealth distribution which was short, fat, and symmetrical 50 years ago is now enormously wide with no distinction between the squeezed-to-death middle-class working poor and genuine poor who, together, make up the big, wide, horizon-to-horizon "foot" of the bell.  There's nothing where the "middle class" used to be, and there's a very narrow but exceedingly tall uber-wealthy 1% who own everything

The "capture" of government by farming and business lobbies has allowed developers to price land and housing out of the reach of ordinary folks (a professional couple with two good incomes will struggle to buy a house in any of our major cities) and has allowed farmers to privatise the profits of 100 years of "free" provision of infrastructure such as roads, electricity, water and waste-disposal (just dump it in the river); while the costs (housing & rental subsidies for working families, environmental clean-ups, a resurgence of third-world diseases such as Rheumatic Fever & Typhoid among the poor and homeless) are absorbed by the public purse

Despite living in an agrarian paradise, fresh produce (fruit, veges, dairy products, meat) are more expensive here than they are in the countries on the other side of the globe to which we export them; and the children of the poor are suffering an epidemic of rickets, type-two diabetes, chronic obesity and rotten teeth living on a diet of processed crap and McDonalds

Our once-pristine rivers (when i was a youth I tramped all over our hills, never owned a water-bottle and never hesitated to drink out of any stream) are down to about 5% "drinkable", 40% "swimmable" and the rest are only "wadeable" if you want to risk skin ailments

 The folks who got rich pouring factory shit and farm effluent run-off into those rivers have long since retired to mansions around Queenstown where they share the pristine Southern Alpine environment with the American and European billionaries who helicopter in from time to time to their mansions.  Meanwhile the folks who clean the toilets and mow the lawns of these mansions live in housing "schemes" subsidised by BOTH national and local government (the cost of subsidy is too high for just one branch of government to bear because of all the millions property developers have taken out of the local economy) - because housing is so expensive there that working folks were sleeping in their cars or moving elsewhere to the point that squillionaires couldn't get anyone to clean their helicopters or wash their windows

Despite all this it's still a pretty good place to live . . . in that there isn't much corruption, our cops don't carry guns, you can still see green stuff when you look out the windows and I still leave my house unlocked and my cars in the driveway with the keys in them

But our "clean green" image is just that - an image - and we do genuinely have poor and homeless folks who live in cars and whose kids are malnourised . . .

I don't have a vocabulary adequate to describe just how wrong it is for a country with the best natural resources in the world to have kids who are hungry and who go to school with cold bare, feet

Just my $0.02, as they say

BruceM

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Re: New member
« Reply #40 on: July 21, 2018, 04:16:49 PM »
Thanks for your insights, Mike.  I'm saddened to read that wealth and "democratic" capitalism has run it's usual course there as well.  I should have realized that the same inherent forces would affect everywhere, not just the US.  Here it seems that as people feel the pressure of declining real income,  they get angry and want to dump on everyone below them, economically, or who are different in any way. 

mikenash

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Re: New member
« Reply #41 on: July 22, 2018, 03:14:27 AM »
G'day Bruce

I probably shouldn't have dumped that rant on you, but what the hell - I guess you caught me at a "get it all out" moment

Yes, sadly an inevitable result of our current "system" and the first-world's obsession with "growth"

Over 150 years ago it was recognised that Capital is merely Frozen Labour - the more capital amasses, the less the "labour" classes are able to enjoy the fruits of their labour . . . .

Never mind.  Thoughtful people are always welcome here, Bruce

Cheers

BruceM

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Re: New member
« Reply #42 on: July 22, 2018, 04:11:29 AM »
Thanks Mike,
I did some more online reading about the current socio-economic situation there in NZ.  You pegged it concisely.  So sad after the big improvements there between the wars and after WWII. There is only a short window after a world war where social improvements can be made, apparently.





mikenash

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Re: New member
« Reply #43 on: July 22, 2018, 04:42:40 AM »
Yep.  Dead right

Between the wars (slowing in the depression) we began infrastructure build alongside social change . . .

(Perhaps the best example of this is that Arnold Nordmeyer who was deeply involved with our first major national infrastructure project, our first big hydro-electric scheme, was later a Minister in the first Labour Government and was the author of our National Social Welfare scheme)

In the two decades after WW11, and benefiting from work done between the wars, we had a period of modest prosperity where a working-man's wages were enough to buy him and his wife a modest house and to allow her to stay home and bring up children (a whole heap of stereotypes there - but that was the thinking of the day)  Government provided a lot of State Housing and a lot of employment, and there were no tycoons - not even any millionaires

In following decades, recognising that private enterprise could do things more efficiently, and mistaking efficiency for progress, successive governments (left and right) dismantled big government enterprises and "bought" those services off private enterprise which did what it always does in the absence of good regulations - took advantage

Perhaps the best example is electricity reticulation:  Recognising that electricity=progress, government put poles and lines to far-flung corners where there were never going to be enough consumers to pay for them; but where there were farms and households who would benefit from them.  Now, only 60 years after the most remote regions were "connected", the monopolist lines companies are telling folks at the ends of these lines "Sorry, you guys don't spend enough for us to justify keeping your lines maintained.  Either you pay for them directly or we'll leave them to rot and you can build solar or micro-hydro . . . "

Perhaps it's progress?

Cheers

BruceM

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Re: New member
« Reply #44 on: July 22, 2018, 06:31:10 AM »
Corporations are a marvelous legal fiction that function only to maximize profits for the shareholders.  It is their only reason for being. Why people think they are going to run things in a responsible manner boggles my mind. They seem incapable of reading or learning from history.

The US power industry pulled some real beauties in the US with a trumped up "crisis" for new power, and nuclear power plants that typically cost 2-4x the budget and schedule.  The recent smart meter thing was a classic-  to date there is not one single state or country where there is any data to show that they have saved any energy at all. In the US, it was a big taxpayer hand out to the power co.s.

Germany was one of the only countries who looked for the data and then said thanks but no thanks.