Circuit Symbol

George Lucas invented Darth Vader and I expect his legacy of bad spin-offs will beat that record

Clive Sinclair was an atheist and if you look at the build quality of the average Sinclair Research product you might become an atheist, too

The brits traditionallty split their motorcycle crankcases vertically, to maximize oil leakage through the gaskets.

Those dumb Japanese, Honda and Kawasaki, split their crankcases horizontally, which required us to change the oil, not just add it.

Everything designed in Britain in the 1960s was legally required to leak oil. That includes the Concorde and the QE II.

I suspect Shell was at the bottom of it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Non sequitur?

Jeroen Belleman

Thanks to Sir Clive, I made a fortune out of Sinclair 'add ons' :)

The Japanese initially started off by copying the British bikes. Then they immediately set about looking for ways they could be improved. Once they'd got ahead, they set about continually improving the improved designs, even if they were only competing against themselves. The British just sat back and complacently did nothing; just kept on turning out the same old designs year in year out. Within a decade, the British motorcycle industry as it had been known for 70 odd years was in terminal decline. There's a lesson there somewhere for all of us.

I rode the QE2 from NYC to France once. I had scheduled an engine room tour but that was canceled because they'd had a fire. Our trip took an extra day too, limping along.

Never rode the Concorde, which is just as well.

The Japanese also put a multi-plate clutch inside the crankcase, in the oil.

It was absurdly easy to replace the clutch plate stack.

A guy near here has a new Royal Enfield. It is pretty.

The two major factors were the management and the unions, who both deserved each other:

The management saw research as an unnecessary expense that could be dispensed with once there was a product which worked, however badly, and which could be made and sold. Real engineers hardly ever got into management and didn't last long if they actually treid to practice engineering.

The unions had the management over a barrel and extorted every last penny out of the firms, with restrictive practices hampering any attempts at improvement. Many of the production line workers would have been unemployable in any other job and even the better ones were totally unmotivated to produce a good product.

I was lucky enough to work in a firm (in the same industrial area as a major and much maligned car plant) that had neither of these disadvantages and I still marvel at how good their products were and how they managed to survive and make a profit whilst maintaining those standards.

He also had a freakishly high IQ - which says a lot about what IQ tests measure - and was chair of UK Mensa for ages.

When working in Cambridge UK I got to hear a lot Clive Sinclair stories, most of them about how his obsessive penny-pinching managed to sabotage a lot of good ideas.

He did spend money from time to time - Chris Curry of Acorn Computers started worked for Clive Sinclair for years and ran for Parliaments as the National Front (facist) candidate in Cambridge with Clive's financial support.

Triumph's TR series 3 through 6 were very well received and remain highly prized to this day. However, for some reason, the TR7 was never liked (except by Phil) from day 1 and remained the poor relation for decades after its launch. Only recently has there been some change in sentiment towards it. Amazing what the passage of time can do to our perception of a design.

Oil fire was it? (just trying to beat Phil here).

They're made in India nowadays. I think some Indian outfit bought the name and the designs and setup a plant over there. I have to say all credit to them. They've made a big success of it and the stuff they produce is selling like hot cakes and is very positively reviewed. Naturally though they've retained all the old original model names, the bikes themselves have been brought up to date with all the latest technology.

Sounds about right. The sixties and the seventies in particular were a period in Britain where Marxists were hell-bent on destroying the country and wanted to bring production to a halt on any old pretext. The 'management' spent most of their time in the nearest pub having 3 hour long 'liquid lunches' which didn't help the fortunes of the companies they were supposed to be running much, either. When Thatcher got into power in '79, there were a huge number of arses in dire need of kicking. And she duly delivered and an extremely painful period of restructuring commenced.

The chrome plating is awesome.

The main trouble with the TR7 was that the original four-speed manual was made of glass. By the time it got the much much nicer 5-speed, it was too late.

I got my '78 used, for cheap, in early '82. It had an overheating problem and a broken temperature gauge, not a good combination. One educational weekend spent changing the head gasket, and a bodged-in

The TR8 was the same car with the five speed and a small V8 (originally the Buick 218 cu in), and was a good and (for English) reliable car.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm glad the 7 worked out for you in the end. Triumph also made - in that same era - a model called the Stag, which was another great concept car, only let down (as usual with English cars) by poor execution. It had a sweet-sounding little 3 liter V8, a really nicely presented body and a sumptuous interior with that wonderful typically-Triumph dashboard to die for. Initially welcomed by the world's motoring press with rave reviews, it was let down badly by overheating problems. They hadn't washed all the sand out of some of the castings. The fix was simple - once they'd discovered the cause - but by that time it was too late: the Stag's rep was ever-after stained by the overheating issue, which it never really recovered from until decades later within the classic collector fraternity. That was always the issue with English cars and motorcycles: great concepts poorly manufactured.

Probably coal.