She’s also right…..not that anybody seems to have noticed! :rolleyes:

Maybe this Nobel Prize is really for the American People…..for voting Obama in!

P.S. Does anybody else think it is funny that until Grey Area named Obama nobody else mentioned ‘him’ by name? 😀

So Professor Shauna Wilton thinks Thomas the Tank Engine:

“…portrays a world blighted by a ‘conservative political ideology’ and a rigid class system which stifles self-expression. And they are sexist.”

“…women are under-represented in the stories and what few female characters there are tend to have ‘secondary’ roles or be bossy.”

Well, she’s not wrong about that (despite being a woman :diablo:) but maybe she should think about who wrote the original stories…

…the Reverend Wilbert Awdry…..any clues there? :rolleyes:

Once the manufacture of sleeves was sorted out…

Most of us know the story of Bristol sorting out the problems with the sleeves produced by Napier but I stumbled across some figures (that I’m not sure I believe) the other day.

If the five inch bore of the Sabre was scaled up so the bore was one mile in diameter (bear with me :o) the Napier sleeves would be about 100 feet ‘out of round’…

…the Bristol sleeves would be about 2.5 feet!

I wonder why they are called “Quill drives”????

Because they are thin and flexible like a quill pen…..at least that’s what I’ve always understood.

One thing they seem to be used a lot for on aircraft engines is to damp-out torsional vibration; a quill shaft will transmit the same torque as a larger–diameter hollow shaft but will twist more readily, evening out instantaneous differences in rotational speed.

I think the Napier Sabre used quill shafts to drive the supercharger; they ran the whole length of the engine inside the hollow sleeve-valve driveshafts!

Even the pistons would have to be redesigned (or reversed :confused:) if an engine was run in the opposite direction, the same magnetos could be used (with the plug leads reversed) but don’t forget the oil and coolant pumps.

The man taking the BBMF tour said that the Merlin and Griffon rotated in the same direction, it was just the gearing that made the props rotate in different directions.

Sorry, but the man taking the BBMF tour was wrong.

I think the Griffon turned the other way so that the rotation of Allied engines was ‘standardised’…..not sure that made much sense though after all the Merlins produced (for the P-51 for example)…

…or possibly so naval aircraft ‘swung’ the other way therefore missing the island on an aircraft carrier? :confused:

All designed to embarass the pilot on take off!!

So which was your favourite engine to sit behind…..Merlin, Griffon, Centaurus?

I can’t ague with that…..it still surprises me how quickly the fire spread in the roof of the Bradford stadium.

I’ve spent the last few years in my job travelling round these provences, and as much as I feel enlightened by my cultural exhanges, I still wonder WTF is going in in certain modern EU regions ?

There is certainly a problem in Russia; according to the BBC website Russia had 18,000 fire deaths in 2008!