old technology

 

A common thread in conversations is how this or that is 50-year-old
technology or looks like it came off a bike 20 years old... Engine
layouts and turn signals are the most recent incarnations.

It's 2006, well into the middle of the first decade of the (ta-daaa!)
Twenty-First Century! and still we have sidewalks made of concrete
poured into wooden frames just as the Romans had two thousand years ago.
Towels are still fuzzy cotton like the Egyptians had 2500 years ago.
Ductile iron pipe for sewage is probably going to look like it has for
the past hundred and fifty years for at least the next 500 years.
There's no particularly good reason to do it any differently. Certain
technologies are going to be with us in pretty much the same for for a
long, long time.

Which brings me back to motorcycles with internal combustion engines. We
could burn hydrogen, methane, propane, butane, ethane, octane or
whatever and still we'd have to have some kind of tank to hold it in and
some way to make it quiet as it leaves the engine. Cylinders ... yeah,
we need those. The questions will still be these: How many, which way
goes the crankshaft, and which way go the pistons? All the combinations
have been tried. Thumpers, both ways. Twins with angles 0, less than 90,
90, more than 90, 180 degrees; with crankshafts going either way for
each angle. Triples and fours as inlines, vees, and flats. Even the
occasional sixes. Valves beside, valves above, cams beneath, beside,
above, and within. Carburettors, fuel injection; ignition systems simple
and fancy; brakes of everything from leather to unobtanium.

Turn signal: ... a light on the end of a stick. Gosh, how stylish does
that have to be? Okay, put it in the front of the rear-view mirror;
that's cool. Integrate it with the tailllight, that's cool. But there's
only so much innovation to be had with turn signals. Yet some of us can
tell immediately that some turn signal design is ... twenty years old!

You know, when you're stuck in some alien junkyard and all you can find
is hulks of spacecraft from hundreds of years ago, which were already
hundreds of years old then, you pick one, integrate your ship's systems
into it as well as you can, and then get the hell out of there. If you
survive, nobody's going to care that you did it with outdated
technology. (I wonder if anyone else reads David Brin.)

So my bike may be based on a design with roots in the 1930s. It works
... and it works well. And the turn signals have LEDs in them, so there.

--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com>
faq:  http://www.timberwoof.com/motorcycle/faq.shtml

 

I want a flying motorcycle. They had them in Battlestar Galactica 35 years
ago, so where is it?

 



They all moved to that forest moon that was the base for the new
Deathstar's shield generator and crashed into trees.

--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com>
faq:  http://www.timberwoof.com/motorcycle/faq.shtml

 


Timberwoof wrote:


Nice post. Some folks on here think it's a some sort of a lame insult
to refer to my bike as "50 year old technology" but in my eyes, that's
a good thing. It means it was a *damn* good design. We live in a
buzzword society. Most people don't even know *why* they're engine
*has* those buzzwords, or ignore the fact that it's co$ts them more in
the long run...
--
Rayvan

 

On Tue, 30 May 2006 23:35:50 -0700, Timberwoof


Not really.(Turbines, for example.)


Yeabut... the Great Age of Internal Combustion has only lasted ~100
years. I think in 50 more years it will be very different. I bet we'll
be off the petroleum economy. I bet motorcycle power plants won't be
anything like what you see now. While you can buy and run a 70 year
old bike that seems so similar to today's machines, I think that's
going to change, big time, in the next few generations.

--
Turby the Turbosurfer