User talk:Charles01/Archive 25

Tor Nessling

Hi Charles01. As you seem to be fluent both in English and automotive engineering, I am kindly asking you for a favour. Would you please check through the following article for correct language: Tor Nessling. If its improvement needs excessive efforts or you are not interested in it for another reason, I'm fine with it, I don't want to push work to anyone. --Gwafton (talk) 22:34, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, adequately fluent in English anyhow. Not, alas, familiar with Finnish, and my automotive vocabulary is easily challenged - eg by suspension components. But I'll enjoy looking at the Tor Nessling entry. If I do make any changes, and if you think I have damaged the meaning in doing so, please be sure to reverse/correct the results of my misunderstanding(s). Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:45, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your contributions so far. I don't know if it is relevant to clarify in this context what vuorineuvos is, one can easily find it out by clicking the link.

Terminal tractor is a vehicle which is used to load and unload roro ferries. There is no article in English yet. There are also alternative names for the vehicle; it is called Ottawa in Northern America according to a famous producer. In Britain it might have been called tugmaster (according to Douglas Tugmaster). Article in Finnish – description on one producer's website. --Gwafton (talk) 23:36, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reaction. I was indeed waiting to see how you would react before doing any more. "Terminal tractor" probably makes sense to people who live or work near ports, but I live inland. "Terminal" has different meanings and the meaning of "Terminal Tractor" was not immediately obvious to me. I've no idea if that would be a general reaction, but it would indeed be good if someone had the tie to translate the Finnish article into English (assuming the Finnish article is ok).

On what I did with vuorineuvos, it is indeed a judgement how far you rely on people clicking through to linked entries. Trouble is, if you ask them to click through for too many things, and they are short of time, they may lose the will to live or go to bed before going back to the entry where they started. Well, that of course is an exaggeration. You certainly do not need to share my judgement on this one.

(I was also wondering what to do about his other qualification. Clicking on that told me about 300 points which seems to be quite a lot, but it's not immediately clear what it means...)

I think part of the issue is that in the UK and the USA people do not worry so much about these qualifications. Everyone in and above middle management in a big corporation in the USA or India or even the UK seems to have some sort of a Masters' degree these days, and if a guy is running a large chunk of the country's manufacturing industry, the university qualifications of a US equivalent to TN probably wouldn't make it to the intro para / executive summary at all. Though they might still mention WHERE he studied if it was a famous university - Harvard or Berkeley or whatever has become fashionable since I knew what was going on in the world of higher education. In Germany (where I once lived) a man's qualifications are more important and follow him through life. When I was young I was amused that the German auto-industry seemed to be run by a lot of doctors and professors. (In England, if you are a doctor of medicine, everyone knows. If you re a doctor of anything else, nobody knows...If you are a professor, it means you work at a university.) In Italy, too, your qualification(s) follow you prominently through your working life. Same - I guess - in Finland. But in the Anglosphere, the cultural tendency has always been to downplay your educational qualifications. The Americans voted for Bush because they trusted his folksy style and his skill at concealing any sign of intellectual horse-power. In England we used to have a prime minister who was academically brilliant who liked to smoke cigars. When he saw a Television camera coming he put away the cigar, grabbed a pipe to smoke, and put on a curious quasi-regional accent that was meant to remind people of "working class Yorkshire". He was very well qualified in Economics, but as far as I know he never bothered to go for a doctorate.

Anyhow, I think I'll take another look at the TN entry later in the week, now that I know you are not entirely horrified by what I did to it. Please don't hesitate to correct anything I do with which you disagree. I suspect you know a lot more about the guy than I ever will. Regards Charles01 (talk) 12:43, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Happy New Year. Regarding Nessling's diplomi-insinööri degree, it is more or less equivalent with the German Diplomingenieur. A suitable English translation would be MSc in Mechanical Engineering I think. I remain waiting for your contributions. --Gwafton (talk) 18:03, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

In case it helps in translation from Finnish, Eddaido (talk) 02:35, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Container Tractors at Terminal

Tractor unit (far left) with
container:recycling equipment, for the use of

Thanks. If these were SAT/SISU vehicles one of the pix might even illustrate the entry on TN, but I don't know what make/type they are. Gwafton included a link to a website for Kalmar trux which seems to be the firm into which SISU (or part of it?) was at one stage subsumed, but SISU still appears to operate as an independent business, so maybe it got unsubsumed (management buy-out of the division?) .... I'm still confused. Happy year. Charles01 (talk) 09:41, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I should have tried a little harder, here's about these one's here. When I go further into Terberg machinery brochures they actually offer in this line (their names):

• distribution tractors
• roro tractors
• seaport tractors
• industrial tractors
• industrial terminal tractors

all of which look to me only a little different from each other (or much the same) - but I expect there is a logic there. Not helping any am I, sorry!

Going back to SISU. Having read this and this I guess SISU products lost their identity around 1997 and are now represented by these things. But that presumes two things: I have correctly understood what is written and that that which was written corresponds with the facts!! No confidence-builder am I. Maybe your Finnish contact can sort it out and now I'll go off and try to stop being a nuisance! Eddaido (talk) 11:49, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Kalmar products originate from Sisu terminal tractors. There is a long and messy history behind.

After SAT took over VAT terminal tractor, bus chassis, mobile crane, military vehicle and later also axle production was moved to Hämeenlinna, the former Vanaja factory, whereas the Karis factory focussed on lorries. SAT became gradually fully state owned and it was renamed Sisu-Auto in 1981 when the company celebrated its 50th anniversary.

In early 1990s Sisu-Auto was put together with some parts of Valmet, another state owned company. The new company was called Sisu Corporation and Valmet tractors were badged with Sisu logo for some time. Valmet diesel engine factory was renamed Sisu Diesel. The state separated Sisu Defence to another company Patria, in which it collected also other strategically important production. Nowadays the Patria Hämeenlinna factory's main product is armoured personnel carrier Patria AMV. Sisu Terminal Systems (STS) was moved from Hämeenlinna to Valmet telescopic handler factory located in Tampere in 1996.

In late 1990s Sisu Corporation merged with Partek and the state became a significant owner of Partek. Sisu axle factory in Hämeenlinna was sold to investors. Now the company name is Sisu Axles and belongs to Marmon-Herrington. The state wanted to get rid of the Partek shares and sold their part to Kone. It was the end of Partek; Kone sold Valmet tractors (now called Valtra) together with Sisu Diesel to AGCO. Sisu lorry production in Karis was sold to its management and its name is now Sisu Auto. Kone kept the terminal tractor production and took into use name Kalmar which was taken from a Swedish company it had taken over previously. Then the owners of Kone, Herlin family, divided the company into two parts: the container handling system division became Cargotec and Kone concentrated on lifts. --Gwafton (talk) 20:22, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. My first reaction is that the products themselves must be excellent and / or very well suited to the markets they serve if the business has survived while management were spending all their time and mental space worrying about changes in organisation and ownership structures! But presumably there were some good operational guys managing the business itself through all that. Regards Charles01 (talk) 15:54, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Good work with the language so far, I haven't noted any changes in meanings. I have to think if Nessling should be called a leading Finnish industrialist when SAT was never one of the biggest companies in Finland. I have added a photo of Nessling in Commons. It is quite large and I'll try to find another one. If I won't manage I'll clip off a portrait from this one.

It is a miracle that Sisu still exists. The follower of Nessling, Eric Gillberg, was in a difficult situation and actually treated unfairly. SAT became almost entirely state owned and during the recession of mid 1970s the company was not allowed to fire people because in a difficult economical situation it was politically unacceptable from a state owned company. In the meantime, the state demanded that SAT must make profitable business and finally fired Gillberg because he could not turn the lorry production profitable.

Gillberg changed the company structure to more delegating direction (vs. Nessling's style) and during his era the production was modernised with new machinery. During his era SAT developed the new S series (SK, SL, SM, SR) which was very smartly modulised. The same parts were used in several, very different applications and despite of low volumes SAT/Sisu-Auto could provide a wide range of vehicles for different purposes. The same cabin was used both in long-nosed and forward control models. And you could buy a ready built logging vehicle straight from the Sisu factory; normally one must buy first the vehicle and then order the outfitting from somewhere else.

But Gillberg made mistakes too. He tried to turn the bus chassis production profitable which was an impossible task under the price pressure of bulk producers. The bus chassis production was soon ended after Gillberg left. Another mistake was a contract with Scania and Leyland. One target was to get standard components, such as engines, for a good price from serial producers. Another target was using the sales networks of both companies for exports and therefore to widen their selection. The plan failed because of merger speculations of Scania and Volvo, and bankruptcy of Leyland.

Sisu Auto still lives in Karis (now Raseborg) and builds under 200 vehicles per year. Many of the parts come from the main component supplier Mercedes-Benz (cabin, engines, gearbox...). --Gwafton (talk) 23:33, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad I haven't damaged the meaning with all my changes. (No, I've still got another section to do, but I've been through most of it now for better and worse)

I have no trouble thinking of Nessling as a leading industrialist. He seems almost single handedly to have created the Finnish truck industry. But if you have a better description, feel free to substitute it. What is important, I believe, is that in the executive summary / introduction / whatever you want to call it you include something to make the reader understand why (s)he should be interested. There are various wiki-guidelines about notability, I think, but it's mostly common sense. We're (almost) all interesting to out parents and a lot of us are interesting for quite a lot of the time to our wive(s) (or husband(s)) and children. Maybe also to our friends on a good day. But to qualify for a wiki entry you need to be interesting to more people, and I think it's important to try and tell people why this fellow is of more widespread interest than the fellow they sat next to in the tram today.

Building heavy trucks seems to be a difficult business financially. A high proportion of your costs are fixed. It's hard to get started because it's hard to persuade anyone to lend you the money to kit out the factory. The cash flow management is difficult because a high proportion of your costs are fixed - ie paying back the bank loan. If you budget to amortize your fixed costs (ie pay back the bank loan) with a volume of 50,000 trucks, and you actually produce and sell 60,000 trucks, you make huge profits and you go out and buy a big house. But if you budget for a volume of 50,000 trucks and you actually build and sell only 40,000 trucks, your variable and semi-variable costs may be reduced, but that great big chunk of fixed costs still needs to be met. You run out of cash. That happened again and again with truck makers in the last 100 years. And with trucks and buses the effect is multiplied because many of your customer face the same problem. You buy a bus or truck and your variable costs will be fuel and driver wages (unless you are an owner-driver) but if the economy turns down and your load factors or productive kilometers are lower than budgeted, that will have no effect on the great big chunk of fixed costs - the money you still have to pay back to the bank. I do not think it is an accident that countries where capital intensive engineering based companies do best are countries where banks take a long term view and governments try to manage the economy for stable growth and interest rates. While countries where capital intensive heavy engineering has shrunk to a diminishing fraction of its former size are countries where the governments spend money they don't have then debauch the national currency to try and find a short term fix for their own fiscal incontinence. Ah well, the Brits may not build too many heavy trucks these days, but they seem to be much better than the Germans and Swiss at persuading Japanese automakers to set up here when the national economies are growing.

Too much ramble (mine). Happy days. Charles01 (talk) 18:03, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

You made a good point - Nessling set up the Finnish heavy vehicle industry. I don't know if there is any other cluster in Finland that owes so much to one person. Before him there had been just coach works and some experiments about vehicle construction.

There used to be a rule of thumb that a vehicle producer only has to make a black zero result from production, the profit comes from after market. When you operate with a narrow profit it can easily happen that the company gets into trouble from minor disturbances. What effects a lot in heavy vehicle market, is the size of the market area. The Swedish Scania and Volvo realised already in 1960s that they must focus on international markets. Why didn't SAT succeed, I don't know, maybe Nessling was too careful or the vehicles were just too expensive.

I have got a good example about the effect of the market size. Back in socialistic era, the world's biggest bus factory and biggest lorry factory were in East Bloc. The bus factory was Hungarian Ikarus. Sometimes the buses were good enough for even western market. But nowadays there is no Ikarus any more. The lorry factory, however, was Soviet (now Russian) KamAZ. The factory was set up in Tatarstan after a political decision. The products were never good enough for western market. But KamAZ still exists and it still is the world's biggest. What was the difference? When socialistic economy collapsed and Comecon was ended, both companies lost their international markets but Russian market was big enough to keep KamAZ alive. It shows what kind of problems you have when you operate in a small country: you must be very good to succeed. But in a big country and big market it is not so important because the customer base is big enough.

A very robust structure was characteristic to Sisu and Vanaja. Finland lived from paper industry back then and the paper mills consumed a lot of wood that had to be taken from forests where were hardly any roads. The drivers were paid by cubic metres of wood and therefore the logging vehicles were usually very overloaded (there was seldom any road control in the small roads). It happened often that serial produced vehicles stucked in forest because the engines or transmissions were too weak, or the vehicle frame cracked under the load. Sisu and Vanaja were expensive vehicles but sold well in Finland because of their good characteristics.

I read somewhere that when Leyland representatives once visited in Finland they were shocked about the circumstances where their engines were used: temperatures of -40 C sometimes in winter, damaged roads in spring times or no roads at all. --Gwafton (talk) 01:34, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Charles01. I assume the Nessling article is ready now. I want to thank you for the English lesson. If you got interested about the topic I encourage you to contribute the other Sisu related articles as well. --Gwafton (talk) 09:53, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Glad to have been helpful, and learned something at the same time. "Ready" is a questionable concept. I tend to come back and worry at things six months down the line, but yes, I've certainly done most of what I am able on this entry. And I might indeed follow one or two of those links to related subjects and worry away at them too at some stage... Finnish is a language of which I know nothing, tho I remember a Finnish girl I say next to on a flight many years ago taking great trouble to make sure I knew the key differences between Finnish and Hungarian. A nice introduction to the Finnish sense of humo(u)r. Anyhow, these days the translation programs usually give one a start if one has a bit of background knowledge on some of the aspects covered. Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:52, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Your help at checking the grammar would be most appreciated! They say that for a native English speaker Finnish is the second most difficult European language to learn (after Hungarian). If you want to compare these languages you can have a look on the Sisu SA-150 article. It is the same in English, Finnish, German, Estonian and Hungarian. Estonian is closer to Finnish, maybe you can spot similarities between the languages. Hungarian grammar somewhat resembles Finnish but the vocabulary is quite different. The relationship is often too much underlined as Finno-Ugric languages is a small language family compared to Indo-European languages. But in linguistic point of view Russian is much closer to English than Hungarian to Finnish. --Gwafton (talk) 20:54, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Kadett/Chevette

Hello Charles, always appreciate your work and it is nice to see Opel Kadett growing into an article which is finally deserving of its fairly important topic. A fun question: I reckon that the world car section (Kadett C) deserves one single illustrative picture. Any thoughts? Should it be a Latin American, US, Australian, or Japanese product? I would like to illustrate just how far from its origins the car was developed. Over to you,  Mr.choppers | ✎  06:34, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I think that you need a balance between text and images. Where you have a big block of text then you need a bigger choice of pictures because you need more pictures to stop the thing looking overburdened with wordage. BUT I also think you should only add an extra picture where it is obvious - or you can show with a little caption - that it tells you something that none of the other pictures already there tells you.

Criteria as to which picture(s). Usual stuff, mostly as in my previous para. Plus, I suppose, is it a reasonably good picture? The "world car" section set me thinking about the Argentinian Kadett (from memory T180???) because the text says it appeared several months before they launched the thing in Europe. But I didn't do it. I think we have access to a suitable picture - not wonderful but perfectly ok. But I couldn't find any source for the assertion that it came out x months before the European Kadett. There's a nice web page simply making the assertion to which I think I inserted (or maybe simply found) a link, but the webpage looked like something taken from the creations of someone's marketing department. Do I like marketing folks? Well yes, but do I trust them to get this sort of thing right.....? Hmmm. So it would be nice to have something more persuasive.

If you want one - a T-car picture - with a Chevette label I guess you can make the case for both sides of the Atlantic. For the Vauxhall camp people have already written quite a bit about the Vauxhall Chevette in te Kadett entry with which I haven't presumed to mess. We have several ok pictures of the Vauxhall Chevette and one which borders on quite good. But many of them including the one that borders on quite good are by me so I probably shouldn't presume to arbitrate between pictures of the Vauxhall Chevette. (It's different (eg 4 door Kadett C sedan) where there's really only one picture from which to choose.) Why prefer Vauxhall Chevette to Chevrolet Chevette? I suspect - but cannot prove - that more english speaking European people look at the Opel Kadett entry in English wiki than english speaking American people. Also I think the shovel nose treatment on the Chevrolet was uglier than the shovel nose treatment on the Vauxhall. But others might disagree with me...

Why prefer the Chevrolet Chevette picture to the Vauxhall Chevette picture? Well, you live there. You can make the case. Obviously there is a strong cultural bias in wikipedia overall to the North American side of the map because it's a North American originating project and there are far more mother tongue English language speakers in North America. How many of them know and care about the Opel Kadett enough to read the entry? Well, for you to judge. No doubt round Milwaukkee (sorry I forgot how to spell it) they talk of little else, but through the twentieth century in lots of parts of the US folks were persuaded to loosen their sense of Germanness more than they were encouraged to loosen their sense of Englishness. Sense of Hispanicness? Well, I already put the case for the Argentinian car.

Or someone - you? - might fill out the !"World car" section - currently simply a grouping of other folks' contributions which I grouped together under a new sub-heading - and justify a picture of the Chevrolet AND the Vauxhall AND the T180, albeit with a caption under each explaining what it's doing there and a link in the caption to the longer entry on the car in question.

You'll appreciate that my failure to mention Brazil is down to nothing more biased than the fact that I understand Portuguese even less than I understand Spanish. Mea culpa and no disrespect involved.

So much thinking - or at least placing of words on the screen before getting dressed ..... Happy day. Charles01 (talk) 07:17, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

preceding Pontiac LeMans

Here's my vote for the strangest name! Pontiac LeMans (how it appeared here) so like its "predecessor" —Pontiac LeMans, Eddaido (talk) 07:25, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'm getting to the age - think you may be too - where too long a memory can be a distressing thing in this area. Giving names to cars used to be reserved to those with loud voices aged under 40, but these days I think it may be reserved to computers with loud bleeps aged under 10. And both GM and Ford seem to have a particular preference for names they already have in the box. No doubt that has to do, at least in part, with the cost of litigation when you get into p***ing contests over who owns which names. And in preglobalisation days, if you used in US a name previously used in Australia, or in Germany a name previously used in the US or Aus or vice versa. No one much cared. But these days we all can access other folks' information and some of us (irritatingly for automakers?) like to. Capris Galaxy/ie, Escort... Charles01 (talk) 09:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

A66

Hi Charles,
I have just added the mileage conversion template to your edit of a few minutes ago. Hope you don't mind. It produced 90, rather than 91 kms of the section of the A66
Cheers! –
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones |The Welsh Buzzard| 11:25, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Don't mind at all. It's pleasingly surprising that anyone notices an edit so very quickly. The reason for the discrepancy is, of course, down to roundings. I don't suppose anyone cares, but since you started it ..... My computer actually gave the distance as 90.6 km. I converted that using a rate of 1.609 km per mile to get >56.3 miles. Then I remembered that in Britain we have been undergoing metrification for a mere 40 years and still use miles for our distances .... Though not for our fuel buying. Though yes for computing l/100km / mpg. If I sound confused, there's a reason.

I do sometimes get frustrated by the excessive roundings on some of the wiki-conversion templates, but I don't know this miles/kms template well enough to know if I have any sort of a "roundings issue" with it. The way you used it it looks pretty uncontroversial!

On a slightly serious point, there's probably scope for some of these major roads for a more systematic list - maybe using tabulated format - of distances between major junctions. Big job though. And I see that the last time I worked over a road entry with a table, in celebration of some half remembered trip, I left out the distances. Can't remember why. Happy day. Charles01 (talk) 11:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

You have since been not too far from my roots and yes, I did not mean routes (!)
Good to meet another like-minded editor. Cheers! –
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones |The Welsh Buzzard| 17:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, ever since my son started uni at Swansea (and being myself allergic to the delights queuing for half an hour to pay yet more tax in order simply get into Wales) I've developed an awareness of Chepstow which in earlier lives I wold not have anticipated. At least, I guess you are thinking of something I did to the A48 entry. Regards Charles01 (talk) 12:52, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

That is correct. For more detail read this
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones – The WelshBuzzard – 13:07, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Boys' Toys

G'day Charles01. Some of the people that live near me are quite completely mad: evidence. Mind you, I suppose its old news. The crowd seems every bit as puzzled and underwhelmed as I am. Nice car though. Regards, Eddaido (talk) 07:21, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Noted. Thank you. Whoever it was has a good camera and a steady hand. Good clear shots. As for the bizarre activities, well, I'll try not to think everyone in NZ carries on like that. And I guess it's relatively harmless when compared to some of the equivalent exercises the car would have encountered in its early years. I don't think many were sold to private buyers when new. They were intended, as I understand, for the senior politicians, on a good day, to parade around in oben ohne (topless - the car, not the politicians). Strange to think there may be people in NZ who still think it's summer. Here we've had 15 cm of the white stuff today which for this end of England is unusually much. Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:15, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I suspect the museum that owns the car would not have let it out like that without substantial recompense and so the organiser of the car act will have arranged the filming by the crew filming the role playing (advance into France following the Normandy landings) that can be seen in other linked videos. Middle-aged men pretending they have been shot and going down and playing dead, lots of flame and firing of blanks by some real guns and WWII aircraft sweeping low across the field in formation - all the usual stuff - its fun to watch for a few minutes, all the small child memories flooding back. So the car was much too glamorous for serious people like Generals, that makes sense. It looks to be in beautiful order. The car collection arose because after the election of our first Labour govt in 1935 they shut right down on imports but gave people prepared to manufacture locally licences to import raw materials. This man ended up making every car silencer for new and used cars in NZ (unless the vehicle was imported fully assembled) and of of course he made sure they lasted a short time) and he made a very tidy fortune over the 40 years that system applied. The car museum was one little way to spend it, its now a trust. Would you consider taking a look at a discussion on the Jaguar Cars talk page? Sorry about the snow , not so much fun after the first morning. Cheers, Eddaido (talk) 11:51, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

It sounds as though NZ must be well provided with lovingly maintained (or rebuilt) old timers. Well, as long as the air is dry and there's not too much salt around..... There was indeed - maybe still is? - money to be made from short life after-market silencers. Wrapping old aluminium drinks cans round the holey bits and securing the resulting "patches" with copper wire just doesn't cut the mustard with modern consumers and their regulators.

I did take a look at the Jaguar name discussion. There is so much acrimony, aggression, and sheer gratuitous discourtesy in there that it takes quite along time to figure out (you own contribution, of course, the hono(u)rable exception) what those guys are so exercised about. Clearly they have a lot of aggression to off-load, and one wishes they'd find somewhere else to do it. A cross country run, a game of rugby football (or the US alternative) or a very long angry letter to some government functionary paid to receive and pretend to read those things, possibly with copies to the world and his wife or at least to lots of other similarly tasked government functionaries, might be better places for those guys to focus their overflowing anger.

As for the name of the article, I guess there's some merit in both sides of the argument, and the significance (or lack thereof) of name changes may become more evident in the next 12 months. Or it may not. Given the inherently historical nature of the entry, I guess the more important bit in the title is the word "Jaguar", regardless of what it does or doesn't get combined with. The name change may just be the tip of an ice berg of a restructuring involving trying to offset taxable profits more effectively against taxable losses in order to reduce tax payments, in which case I don't imagine we, along with another 99.99% of wikipedia readers, will ever know enough of the matter to know whether or not we should care. It might be a restructuring reflecting the promotion of a senior director whose contribution has hitherto been under reflected in the organisational structure, who has been persuaded that a bigger title is a path to a bigger salary (or a consolation for a smaller one). It might indeed be the prelude to a sale of the business to some ambitious Chinese government controlled corporation, as I think someone suggested. But it hardly seems to justify all the misdirected aggression. So unless I suddenly wake up and realise why I care passionately, I think, with a due respect (though not one cent more....) appropriately distributed, I am happy to abstain on this one. Charles01 (talk) 20:27, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

And there I think almost all the world agrees with you. I don't know that it would save that discussion but I do wish to promote the concept of a business and its owner being two different things. Then the article remains Jaguar Cars, and the infobox contains the name of the current "owner" which may have changed for exactly the reasons supplied by you and it has no significance in any case because the ultimate (so far as we know) beneficial owner remains the same (and Indian) while the business is British I do wish my little dichotomy was recognised. See this. Am I wrong? - please tell me.
On that other matter the local fascination with Rommel results from these events (among others) - go here and use Find and Zealand. That's to say it is because they liked him. Thanks, Eddaido (talk) 22:17, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Are you wrong or right? Well, yes of course you are. I have difficulty answering that question other than from my own perspective. The English have an all-or-nothing mindset which often is the enemy of truth, because truth is almost always nuanced. The english political system is divided between government and opposition, and if the opposition is not 100% against everything government does they are perceived as weak or stupid. Then the government changes and there is pressure for a lot of time wasting reversing what the last lot did, rather than building on it. The criminal justice system requires a man to be guilty or innocent. Sometimes that aligns with truth: sometimes not. Then the lawyers bring the same mind set to a while range of civil disputes and family law - divorces and child custody disputes - where truth is almost always nuanced and the yes:no mind set that gives the legal folks a warm fuzzy chunk of satisfaction is as often as not the larger problem rather than the solution to the lesser problem. You are in a country that has inherited its mindset from the English. Happy we? Fortunately the English mostly understand only their own language and are barely aware that in the rest of Europe the legal system is concerned in the first instance to find the truth. To be sure it doesn't always work like that, but surely looking for truth is a more honest approach to justice than starting with the simplistic preconception than one side of the argument is 100% right and the other aside is 100% wrong. Or that the nation state operates "best" when power is 100% concentrated in (or very grudgingly devolved from) one place: thus the preference of British politicians, also deeply ingrained in the popular culture, of an ever more centralised nation state and the resulting flow of power and the money that follows it to London over many centuries at least since the sixteenth century. That's background.

On what I understand of the Jaguar article name dispute (which may not be all of it) I can certainly buy into the argument that a limited liability company is a legal person in its own right. It has its own identity under law. Where you can very quickly get into difficulties is where legal "de jure" form and de facto substance differ. The company was called Kassboehrer but known as Setra because no one outside Ulm could spell the other one. (Yes, I exaggerate, but still....) Through a long slug of history the company was called Jaguar and the cars were called Jaguar. Fine. At one stage the company was called British Motor Holdings. Then British Leyland Motor Corporation. Well, no one ever put those names on a car. But yes, little Leyland badges started to appear on the wings, and after the company had prostituted the once good names of Morris and Austin beyond reemption, and for certain markets only, the Austin Montego because the Rover Montego. Was it an Austin or a Rover or a Leyland Dog? Depends where you grew up and when you're thinking of. I don't remember thinking in terms of Jaguar Cars. I thought in terms of Jaguars. Cars are widely known and widely enthused over. There is a huge role for what is "customary". It's always been a "Daimler": it's a Daimler (not a rebranded BSA: BSA is a gun...). And then there was the wild cat after which the Jaguar was named, but that was a long way down my consciousness. So while you've not wrong, your not in my judgement so right that, in this, I could confidently go into battle with you.

The gas bill just arrived. Fetch me a stiff glass of mineral water.Charles01 (talk) 10:34, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

That'll be nasty, you only now enter the coldest part of your year, right? My anger fades as I think of all the relaxed discretionary spending power to be foregone for the vital business of keeping Charles01 & Co staying comfortable enough. But your tactics are seen through, you may have been wavering in that chill early morning air but you are going to stay sticking to the top of the fence aren't you. Might it be said I try to go a concept too far? Certainly not, it is the only solution to all the little similar squabbles that break out like over are minis British or German. And that's a simple example.
Anyway I didn't know the Jaguar discussion would develop the way it did. While we are on that kind of thing, The Daimler Motor Company's business became the property of The Daimler Company in (I think) 1910 so that's another little thing to be negotiated some day. Nuances musances, grumbling Eddaido (talk) 12:09, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Google translate offers alternative translations. I've just done that for myself on your above. I don't mind what the Jaguar article is called, I said Jaguar cars because that is what it is called now (I think) and calling it simply Jaguar is daft because there is a furry thing has a prior claim there. What I want (am lobbying for) is the recognition that a business and its owner are two different entities. i may not have made it clear so suck on that with the gas bill and (more) mineral water. Have a happy day, Eddaido (talk) 12:16, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah well, nobody else minds (either). Spectacular photos of your white countryside on breakfast tv. Eddaido (talk) 20:45, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

You really believe the split between business and owner is not a useful concept? Eddaido (talk) 20:21, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

No, that's not what I said. Yes it's useful and sometimes revealing, especially where - as here - the relationships between the names and corporates structures have been such a moving target over many decades. Is it necessarily the most important defining concept in an introductory para? Hmmm. The cars are Jaguars. That's critical. The ultimate holding company aka owner - and the folks apparently calling the shots - are Tata. That's critical. In both cases critical enough to be "must haves" for the intro para. Of course the business and its owner are separate entities. Is it critical to spell that out, or is it too obvious to need spelling out? I guess that's where perceptions can differ, and it really has to be judged anew for each individual situation. There is almost certainly scope for a para in the text covering the 2012 name change in the Companies House registry, and highlighting any obvious mismatches between form and substance (though if people are feeling argumentative that bit needs to be well sourced, I guess....). You could probably write a beefy chapter or six on the evolution company structure over the last 80ish years, implicitly including the relationships between the different names, though some of the detail might be considered "too much information" by some. (Myself, I think "too much information" is part of the point of wikipedia. After all, as long as there are proper section headings the reader can easily skim over the bits (s)/he doesn't want to read.) You can certainly make a good case for adding more detail to the intro para.

I'm sorry if you think - as I think you may - that I am missing the point. The real point of all this, for me, is the way that each of us approaches a wikipedia entry - or anything else - through the prism of his/her education and (at least for me) decades of experience on how the world works and expresses itself. Inevitably we have gained our education - formal and informal alike - in different ways in different places from different people. It would be mightily odd, therefore, if we saw the priorities surrounding every issue through the same prism. Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:50, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah! My day improves. I was not at all clear why you had misgivings, wondered if it might be my sometimes arguably feral behaviour (yes it still might be). My comment was not related to the Jaguar article except insofar as it would, if not eliminate, reduce the importance to the article of the (technical) change of owner. It just seemed a right moment to dash out there and push my little barrow. The article should be about the business, who or what owns the business is very important I just want ownership to be viewed by editors and written about as a different thing from the business. Its where the tanglings up occur. You know, there's a (fine, British) business making smallish cars and labelling them Mini. OK it belongs to BMW but then BMW may belong to an individual maiden lady (I diverge from reality) or a Russian oligarch and the ultimate beneficial owner with the real control might be the Grand Duke of Luxembourg - who knows. Some like to see BMW as the owner but who actually calls the shots there and does it matter to WP? I do like your idea of "too much info" it is excellent. A weekend is nearly here, Eddaido (talk) 00:43, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

My whinging about people taking up references instead of stonewalling (is that the right term?) is not aimed at Charles01 who does much good work in bringing matters out for fresh air. Best wishes, Eddaido (talk) 00:56, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

C J Barnett

Hi Charles. I returned from "retirement" and found your question. Barnett's date of birth must have been taken from CricketArchive but there is no guarantee it is correct so you should apply consensus of sources. Please let me know what you decide. All the best. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 14:00, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Just realised that the article had 1 October as you said. CA has 31 October and I've amended the article to that for now plus adding the ref. ----Jack | ^{talk page} 14:06, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks, Jack. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 17:09, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Spandau/Zwickau

Hello Charles - I made some minor alterations to Audi Type P as a result of ID'ing some photos whetted my curiosity. I changed the text to stating that the P was built in Spandau as this is implied in my source. Audi's P has also been exhibited in Spandau Zitadelle (along with an Essex, assembled in Spandau) and the chassis plate states the same. This makes me wonder what exactly Hr. Oswald means with his Zwickau references? Toodles, nice work on these oft neglected pre-war Audis.  Mr.choppers | ✎  23:38, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Good to see the entry fleshed out a bit. I just took another look at Oswald's text on this. I may copy it out at some point on this or the car's talk page, but don't have time for that now. The implication is that Rasmussen intended to use Spandau's capacity for - among other things - the Typ P. But he does not actually spell out that, once they actually produced the thing, they were made in Spandau. If your source also merits the word "implies" then I respectfully submit that nobody any longer knows where they were built. Spandau certainly seems to have had the expertise for building car bodies in the traditional way - timber frame with the craftsmen following a drawing and their carriage building fostered experience/insincts/traditions. Body building back then did not involve heavy tooling up in specialist dies etc with the resulting lead times and need for a complex production planning processes. That comes withe he pressed steel bodied which Ambi Budd indroduced to German automakers at the very end of the 1920, but more widely only in the 1930s. Then there's the chassis, which was a pretty rudimentary affair a far as I know for the Type P. And the engines which came from Peugeot. Given the rail networks and the mountains between Sochaux and Zwickau, I would imagine the engines would have been transported from Sochaux to Berlin and not cross country directly to Zwickau in the way you'd maybe do now we have a 21st century Autobahn network, which argues for putting the engines on the chassis in Spandau, but that's pure speculation: I have no reason to know that the chassis was produced in one place or the other. Anyhow, with the Typ P I infer from Oswald that the market was not specially impressed and Rasmussen lost interest (in favour of the more exciting front-drive tiny cars being developed by his formerly Audi engineers in Zwickau Audi badged but DKW badged) by the time that the Typ P was launched. The early fwd DKW cars were fundamentally dire in various respects, but they were cheap and they sold better, I suspect, than Rasmussen had anticipated. The guy was an entrepreneurial spirit with a lot of engineering and marketing flair, but I am not sure he would ever carefully have planned production logistics for the Typ P, and did not need to do so (in the sense we would think "normal") in an age before steel pressings and in a country where the economy was still shattered since the war and craftsman wages were so low that - aside from Opel - production line techniques were not yet at the forefront of automakers' thinking. Which is a long way of saying that I have not seen it spelled out where the Type P was made / assembled. Apart from the engine. But I will try and get to take a longer further look at Owwald Pages 41-42 (my edition) in case this provides further insights. Regards Charles01 (talk) 07:05, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Look here!  Mr.choppers | ✎  19:57, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I guess that does look a bit like a clue. Quite a lot of info on that plate.

I'm also wondering how it reconciles with the statement in German wiki (roughly consistent with Oswald's production volume for the Type P of "approx 400") "Bereits im Oktober desselben Jahres wurde die Fertigung nach nur 327 Stück eingestellt." Unless it was Audi number 3,100 - ie all types, whether assembled at Zschopau (ie near Zwickau) or Spandau (Berlin) plant. Actually, in terms of the volumes quoted by Oswald, that could roughly stack up.... (Hard to be sure, partly because at least in my Band 2 he gives no production volumes for Audi before 1922.) Charles01 (talk) 21:58, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The 327 examples is listed by Audi themselves, the link is on the Audi Type P page. Maybe the chassis number is conjoined with those of the DKW 4=8? Since not much aside from the engine was changed, this would make some sense. The only other early production numbers I have access to say that 1100 type C's were built (1911-1922), 1120 type G (1914-1926), 195 type K (1921-1926). This is from Auto Katalog 1980. Cheers. Also, the differing (1115 cc) displacement is nothing to worry about, it is an effect of the Germans using 3.12 rather than π when calculating engine displacement for tax purposes. They also rounded partial millimeters to 0.5. As an example, the 1,275 cc A-series engine was considered to be 1,256 cc by the German tax authorities. Good to see that Germans can also be completely illogical sometimes!  Mr.choppers | ✎  15:19, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there are plenty of instances (also in wikipedia) of "Ist" cm³ and Steuer cm³ being confused one with the other in English and indeed in German texts, though I've not seen anyone spelling out with such simple clarity the "guilty rounding" by (or at least on behalf of) the Steueramt/Finanzamt, as you do here. If ever you did or will get hold of the Oswald volumes, he spells it all out on pages 532/533 of Band 2. I suppose before the age of pocket calculators you can make a case for these roundings in the interests of simplifying life for the Beamter doing the tax calculations, though from our own perspective methinks it's simply a gratuitous complication too far. Charles01 (talk) 17:51, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Prince Henry Vauxhall

Hi Charkes01 I have just written a note on the talk page for the above article and I thought there is a good chance you are interested and might like to comment. Regards, Eddaido (talk) 09:18, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I too think of them as Prince Henry Vauxhalls. It will be interesting to see if anyone else reacts. At the very least, I would think it merits a redirect page. I'm in danger of becoming gratuitously wiki-grumpy just now courtesy of tooth ache, which is what seems to happen in England if you visit a dentist. But today for the first time since last Monday the wiki-agony really does seem to be less than before, and I haven't taken as aspirin for about 12 hours. So maybe I can almost trust myself to contribute without becoming wiki-cantankerous..... Regards Charles01 (talk) 09:50, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your response on the Vauxhall page. A week is a long time to keep faith in one's potential wellness. I hope I write this while you are most comfortably asleep!

The summer heat here is making me feel useless - some people are never satisfied. Try to think kindly of the dentist he only wanted to help, Eddaido (talk) 03:16, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Charles01 What is the news of your teeth? I hope they have returned to doing their proper job without complaint. Eddaido (talk) 11:44, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

How long do you have? But your kindness in asking is therapeutic and appreciated.

The agony went and the ache disappeared over the course of a few hours at the end of last week and I've been off aspirin for several days which is good. BUT I crunched on my (temporary) filling at a bad angle at the weekend, and a couple of bits of it fell out which the dentist kindly replaced at no extra cost on Monday. Tuesday I noticed the opposing side feeling a bit unconventional and subsequent prodding has indicated that one side of the tooth enamel coating lump of long standing probably Dutch or German filling that masquerades as a tooth is now loose, held in place only by the gum at the base of the tooth, probably since that badly aimed weekend crunch. Well, there's no air or rot getting through to the nerve for now, so I'm just using other teeth for a few days till NEXT week when I'm due to go back to the dentist to have the temporary filling - beneath which the pain really does seem to have been removed - drilled out and replaced with a (so-called) permanent filling. Then I guess I can either ask him about the potentially flapping bit opposite the sorted tooth or, if I'm feeling particularly feeble, say nothing and wait a couple of months / years / decades till the thing has worked itself out and tooth ache has in due course ensued as, eventually, it generally does. Actually most of my teeth are still fine and dandy, but when I was young I had a few fillings put in, and of course when I went to live near Amsterdam the Dutch dentist was appalled at the quality of the English fillings and drilled them out and replaced them. A few years later the same experience repeated with a German dentist. Three German dentists later and I was back in England where the experience was repeated, and I was so shaken up that I didn't even ask for the return of the gold inlay from the German dentist to which that English dentist helped himself without comment. (There was lots of comment or at least chatter from that one, but somehow mention of the gold inlay never arose.) I have reasonable confidence in the current English dentist possibly because when he talks (which reassuringly he doesn't very much by the standards of most of the English dentists to which I have been subjected) the accent is strongly and in the context of dentistry reassuringly Irish.

Well, that was interesting, no? But thanks again for asking, even if "without complaint" is probably what the kids today would call much too much of a "big ask". Regards Charles01 (talk) 13:07, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Well now, I must say thanks for sharing though there was gorier detail than I'd expected. May those soft Irish accents steady the troubled nerves. I'd guessed you might have had an early life association with the British Army in Germany but you mention Germany and Holland above as if in adult life. Was there any special reason for being there? (You're allowed to be there because you like it if you see what I mean). Not designing and developing GP cars or anything like that? Regards etc, Eddaido (talk) 10:36, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Both my parents were in the British army during the war because they were of a generation where you joined the army, and they kept my father on for a couple of years after the war in northern Germany because he spoke German (embarrassingly well - he always had a gift for languages, and in he 20s the family had taken regular ski holidays in Garmisch which was a bit of a honeypot for musical types thanks to Strauss R, and where he later got a job as a tour guide organising charabanc trips for rich Americans, in the 30s). But I have no military connections on my own account. I worked in Nederland and Germany and elsewhere as an accountant in industry. Some of that time was in a US owned multi-national corporation which is wiki-relevant in that it made for a painless introduction to American-English, and some insights into some of the ways that Americans think - at least in the context of office politics. I do have two American grandparents one of whom came to Europe in order to pursue a career as a singer, but the mental processes of a WASP singer and those of an industrialist from the mid-west are somewhat different. Sadly counting beans for me never involved anything as exotic as developing GP cars, though a period as an internal auditor did provide the opportunity to compare and contrast the different ways folks in different countries organized and operated the production process in the metal bashing sector... Quite interesting. Too much information? Must get on with something slightly serious. Ach no, here's my neighbour to signal it's time for the coffee break. Well, that's serious too. Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

There seem to be distinct lines of congruence, I must get the email to function. Eddaido (talk) 02:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

I know there is a much simpler way to do this but I do not understand how its done. I have written a short note to you and put it on my talk page because there is a link there. Happy weekend, Eddaido (talk) 09:07, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for March 4

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

A2 motorway (Portugal) (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)

added a link pointing to Beja

A6 motorway (Portugal) (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)

added a link pointing to Elvas

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:15, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Sisu K-44

Hi Charles01. Last time I asked you to check my English you did excellent work with the Tor Nessling article. I made an article about one product of his company, strongly supported by an expert who collected sources for me. If you are interested in heavy vehicles I would be happy if you checked my English in the Sisu K-44 article. Would you help me please? Any improvement is welcome. --Gwafton (talk) 23:49, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, I'll happily take a look. At first blush it looks more difficult because there are technical words that I am not sure I would know in English even if I saw them. Maybe I'll ask you in more detail about a few. Till now just two: I do not know what "grading capacity" means. If you tell me the Finnish words, maybe I can check out a translation program and see something that seems to fit in English....? You refer later to "bogies". I never heard of a standard road truck with bogies. Maybe that's just my ignorance. But "bogies" generally applies to longer rail trucks / carriages in my experience. A traditional rail bogie is a four wheel structure incorporating two axles and linked to the train body at a single hinged central (central on the bogie) point at one end of the rail carriage. Is that what it means on a truck? I can see how it might work on an exceptionally heavy truck used on wide roads (or "off road" on a wide trackway in a forest with a firm dry surface so not too much rain), but for most circumstances I would think it dangerous because of the extent to which the tail would swing - ie travel out of alignment with the front of the vehicle. But again, I am no expert on this and maybe if I read the entry for more than 60 seconds it will already become clear also to me. Not sure.

Anyhow, either way I will take a longer look and maybe have some more thoughts.... But first the diurnal duties must be attended to.

Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 06:44, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

With grading capability I mean gradeability (how steep uphills it can go). In Finnish it is mäennousukyky. In an ideal case bogie means an axle system (including two or three axles) in which the load comes evenly on each axle. But in case of K-44, it is built so that some 2/3 of the load goes on the driven axle of the bogie and the remaining 1/3 on the non-driven axle. Moreover, you can adjust the load depending if you need better traction or a more even axle load. When driving with the rearmost axle lifted up you must mind the extended rear overhang.

Sisu K-44 was made for both on and off-road use. I am sure that you will understand more after reading throught the article. :) --Gwafton (talk) 15:35, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your edits so far. Don't put too much effort on explaining the bogie system here. It is nothing unusual, it is used in many Sisu's and other makes.

Regarding bogies, Veikko Muronen from VAT developed an outstanding bogie lift system in late 1950s. The bogie is equipped with a hydraulically operated mechanism that can lift the rearmost axle up even when the vehicle is fully loaded. This caused problems to SAT, as the bogie system helped VAT to gain a dominant position in the logging vehicle market in the 1960s. As soon as SAT and VAT were merged in end of 1960s, the bogie system was taken to use in Sisu's. And it is still in place: [1]. Note that the company tells about Sisu's legendary bogie lift soultion although it was originally developed by its competitor. :) --Gwafton (talk) 08:42, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I discussed the bogie issue with my neighbor who came round for a coffee this morning. He is more familiar with some of the technical aspects than I am, and we think that there may be a slight difference between American and British English in the use of the word. But you're right. It's not worth worrying about. The nature of the arrangement on the trucks is perfectly apparent already from what you have written and the accompanying diagrams. Time for lunch... Regards Charles01 (talk) 12:19, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I wonder what could a truck bogie be in British English then. Bogie shall not be confused with double axle which is a different thing. It means two axles with a wheelbase of max 1100 mm and separate suspensions. This term is used mainly in legislation - a double axle is regarded as one axle for example in axle load restrictions. --Gwafton (talk) 14:23, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

As you may have noticed, I've been trying to get my mind round the little section on gradeability. I hope I'm getting it ok. One specific question: You write " A corresponding 6×4-model has a 55% and a 6×2-model just a 29% gradeability." Presumably a 6x2 model has six wheels on three axles, but only one axle (ie 2 wheels) are driven. That (if I'm right) is the easy bit. But then presumably a 6x4 model has six wheels on three axles, but two axles (ie 4 wheels) are driven. If that's right, the thing I have not understood is the difference between the gradeability of a 6x4 model and of the the K-44 with its three axles of which two are driven. Maybe it is because of the uneven split between the proportion of torque delivered to the rear-most driven axle and the front axle, whereas the standard 6X4 simply goes with a 50:50 split? Maybe if I read the entry again I'll understand it better, but in case I can't, can you try and explain it to me, please? And thanks. Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:18, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I was wondering the same. But the secret is the bogie of which rearmost axle can be lifted. Then just one rear axle is in contact with the ground. The additional load on the axle improves the traction so that the gradeability is even better than with two driven rear axles. I was wondering was it a mistake made by the author but then I saw there also an original drawing by SAT demonstrating the gradeabilities of three-axle Sisu M-series logging vehicles with trailers. According to the drawing the gradeabilities on μ=0.4 with different drivetrain layouts for full laden vehicles are as follows:

• • 6×2 with a trailer bogie down: 8%
  • 4×4+2 with a trailer bogie down: 13%
  • 6×4 with a trailer bogie down: 15%
  • 6×2 with a trailer bogie up: 17%
  • 6×6 with a trailer bogie down: 20%

When comparing the bolded ones to each other you see that the lifted bogie makes a slightly better gradeability than having the rearmost axle down and driven! This also explains why 4×4+2 was famous - you can improve your gradeability with a driven front axle but not with a driven rearmost axle and therefore there is no point to pay extra for having a complete 6×6 instead. I was very surprised that the increased axle load has got a such big effect on the traction. --Gwafton (talk) 21:50, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I understood that (your explanation). Thank you. I was afraid I was posting another dumb question but it seems I wasn't.

My education to date has left me in no fit state seamlessly to incorporate μ values into my thought processes, but if you tell me about the effect of more weight over the driving wheels improving rear end traction, I think back to my father's Volkswagen in the 60s and how it behaved in snow (and in a country where snow tyres were unheard of) and I need no convincing about the superior traction of a vehicle with most of it's weight over the drive rear axle. Regards Charles01 (talk) 08:16, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

More questions:

I've been looking at the table for the engines of the K-44.

When I have created similar tables, I've usually simply been copying from something in German or French wiki, which in many ways much easier than creating a new table ab initio. But I do find it helpful if there is a line near the top showing the years when the engine was used. That way, in this example, you get a sense of when one engine REPLACED another and when it simply BROADENED the range. I didn't find anything with years from a brief google trawl, but do you know those years from your printed source? And if yes, what do you think about adding that line?

The final line shows fuel consumption. I am not an expert on how fuel consumption is normally expressed for heavy trucks. But for road vehicles the engish and americans use mpg (miles per gallon). (You have to know whether your speaking American or British with this one, because the Brits and the Americans never agreed on the size of a gallon.) In metric continental Europe they mostly go with l/100 km. At the moment the table uses "g/hph" in one column, which is not very much used elsewhere in english language wikipedia. And for the other column, your other source uses "g/kWh" which elsewhere seems to be a measure for carbon emissions: either I'm missing something or your source has got this one wrong. Or? Seriously, I appreciate that if a truck spends its life hauling logs across forests and stones out of quarries, mpg can be very variable. BUT I do not think many english language speakers looking at the g/hph will know what the figure means. At least ... I don't.

No further thoughts. This is an interesting one. I may not be an expert on heavy trucks, but I'm certainly learning and enjoying the experience. Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:58, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

K-44SV replaced K-44SU in Kontio class. In Jyry class K-44ST and K-44SP were available at the same time and K-44SP was later replaced by K-44BP. This is what the enthusiast, who has helped me greatly, knows for sure but as I don't have any written source for this I don't mention it here. It is difficult to say anything about the years as they have not been printed on the brochures and neither in the Sisu book I have. Besides, SV and BP versions were presented at the end of the life cycle of K-44 and it is possible that no brochures have been printed about them.

The fuel consumption figures are brake specific fuel consumption values and they only tell about the engine properties. I guess the data is provided by Leyland. It is not very informative to tell such values as l/100 km when the vehicle is used in forest, driven with various loads and maybe using a hydraulic pump for a crane to lift for example logs. The actual consumption varies a lot depending on driving conditions and in stationary use the vehicle doesn't get any kilometres.

Good that you find the article interesting - I might write later more articles about Sisu K-models and if this article is in order I can utilise it as a basis for the other K-model articles. There are anyway similar components, as the Leyland Engines, Kirkstall front axles, ZF transmissions etc. It is challenging to write about such vehicles as Sisu which are always more or less tailored according the customer needs. The customer just selected a suitable engine, drivetrain, wheelbase, cabin etc. for his needs and SAT built the vehicle accordingly. Sisu Auto works still with the same principle with its Polar models. --Gwafton (talk) 14:29, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

I have searched wikipedia, without success, for entries on those Leyland six cylinder engines written from the English perspective. I was wondering which Leyland trucks used them. But either I am looking in the wrong place or else there is no detailed information in Wikipedia on those old Leyland truck engines. We do have truck enthusiasts in England, but maybe these days Leyland is remembered with little love? Maybe those guys are too busy rebuilding their trucks to contribute to wikipedia. Or maybe I'm simply not putting the right word combinations in the search box.

I started putting the engine paragraphs into the PAST tense without thinking too much about what I was doing or why. I think I was trying to make it consistent with the earlier paragraphs. BUT you COULD justify writing the general and historical bit in the past tense and then switching to the present tense when simply describing how the trucks were. Or how the trucks are. Before I go any further with these descriptive bits do you have a strong preference for the present tense for these sections? I know what seems more natural to me, but I do not think there is a right or wrong answer on the question and I don't want to put it all in the past tense if you have thought about it and prefer the present tense. Are there still lots of the trucks around (possibly with the engines replaced....? Or would most Finnish people think of the K-44 in the past tense? I would feel strange writing about the Ford Model T in the present tense. I think would feel strange writing about the Ford Taunus in the present tense. But with a Ford Focus - maybe also with a Ford Escort - using the present tense does not seem so strange. Yet a Volga (car) still feels as though it belongs in the past tense, even though they continued building them for the Russians for years. All this is hard to explain, because I think in the absence of rules it is one of those things where we think a little differently in different countries without having thought about it and without being aware of the differences, and for 99% of the time without needing to be aware of the differences. There are a lot of things like that....

Regards Charles01 (talk) 17:35, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know which Leyland vehicles had these same engine types used in Sisu's. The old Leylands were sturdy and reliable engines and it is sad what happened after. If Power Plus was a clear failure, the V8-diesel O.801 was a catastrophe. Anyway, just one episode in the "engineering suicide" of the British industry.

I have been thinking of the tense question as well and I use the present tense in English Wikipedia because a majority of contributors seem to favour that. I am not aware if there is a fixed practice for this. I have used systematically the present tense for the vehicle description, but as this type is not available as new any more, I have told about the optional accessories in past tense ("was available in three colours or whatsoever). At least some K-44's are still up and running (like the one in the infobox) so you can tell about it in present tense for a good reason but it is a bit more complex regarding such models from which there are no existing specimens any more. For example Sisu KB-112 vehicles possibly still do exist somewhere but in bad condition and without number plates (one two-axle variant KB-117 is restored and running). --Gwafton (talk) 21:50, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Noted. And hmmmm. I checked three entries on Mercedes-Benz trucks and all those were in the past tense. (You might want to disqualify one of the three as most of it was written by me, so not strictly independent in this discussion.) I checked two entries on Volvo trucks which were mixtures. Some contributors on the Volvo entry had gone with present tense and others with past tense, leading to indigestion for the reader. I think I will go with my initial instinct for the Sisu K-44 and continue to go with the past tense for now. The only other thought I had was to ask about your printed source / sources? Do they have a consistent approach on whether to write about the K-44 in the past or the present?

New subject. When, in 1962, the middle-weight trucks switched from O.375 to O.400 engines there was a change of transmission from a five speed box to a six speed box. The six speed box was NOT the six speed box already fitted on the heavy-weight trucks, because there we have written in an earlier para that in the heavy truck's six speed box, the top ratio was an overdrive. From my understanding of cars, the ratio of the TOP speed is normally 1:1. "The sixth ratio was an overdrive" I take to mean "The fifth ratio was 1:1 and the sixth ratio was <1:1". (The discussion may be complicated because I am not sure we all always take the ratio in the same direction, but I think you understand what underlies my question.) So my question: You had written something like "the top ratio on the new six speed box was about the same as the top ratio on the old five speed box". My question concerns the word "about". IF I am right in assuming that the top ratio on a truck's gear box (as on a car's gear-box) is 1:1, then the top ratio should be identical. OR is my assumption wrong in respect of trucks? OR ... something else? It may seem a small point. But if you can tell me the answer, you help my understanding and (I hope) improve the usefulness & accuracy of the K-44 entry.

New subject 2. We write that the AVD torque splitter (I think it confuses the reader- this reader anyway - to call it a "second gearbox" in English) splits the power 23:77 when the front axle is engaged. BUT we are silent about the AVV torque splitter. In terms of what is actually written, it looks as if the low speed high load ratio of the two is almost identical which leaves the reader wondering why they bothered to offer a choice or torque splitters. Does that mean the AVV torque splitter simply split the torque 50:50 just like it was done an old fashioned Land Rover? That would have made it cheaper to produce and so maybe cheaper to sell. Fewer moving parts, easier to service, less to go wrong. Justification for offering a choice of torque splitters. OTHERWISE what was the torque split front:back with the AVV? If your sources don't give you the answer, there's not much we can do about it. But at the moment I have the sense we are telling only 50% of the story....

And thank you. Regards Charles01 (talk) 09:30, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

1: The ratio of the fifth gear of the old five-speed box was about the same as the ratio of the sixth gear of the new six-gear box. I'll have to check it out. The straight 1:1 is not standard in cars and heavy vehicles. It was more relevant in the past when many gearboxes included a main shaft and a side shaft. In a such structure the main shaft is connected from its front end to the clutch and from its rear end to the drive shaft. The shaft is not solid but can be connected together with a sleeve. When the sleeve is engaged the ratio is 1:1. The side shaft is used for changing of the ratio; the power is transferred from the main shaft to the side shaft with a gear set and then with another gear set to the other end of the main shaft. But when you drive with the 1:1 ratio you don't need the side shaft and it saves fuel (lower inertia). An alternative way to build a gear box is to use primary and secondary shaft when the power always goes through gear sets. Then there is no benefit at having a 1:1 ratio, or actually you must avoid it, because the ratio between gears should never be 1:1 or any integer but rather some fraction so that the same teeth don't always meet only each other. The Sisu gear box was probably some ZF product and I don't know how it was constructed.

2: Another name I have seen for torque splitter is transfer casing (which could mean basically anything that has got something to do with transmission). I don't know which expression is better. The unit includes the torque splitter and reduction gear. Regarding the differences between the boxes, we should be careful. It is said that one type splits the torques as described but I haven't got any info of the other one (besides the reduction gear ratio).

I'd not heard of a transfer case, but it has a wiki entry so I've used a link. I've also left the phrase torque splitter, because a non expert reader can more or less work out what it does from that name. But yes, you will have to check quite carefully that I have not inadvertently added something that is (or some things that are) incorrect in this text at some stage.

Maybe transfer case/casing is rather American than British word? But if you are not sure about the correct name it doesn't matter - someone who knows it might once read the article and bother to fix it. Torque splitter is descriptive enough that someone who knows basics about automotive terminology easily understands what its function is in the transmission. --Gwafton (talk) 23:21, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

I will have to check the text through at some stage. You should mind that K-44 should not be regarded especially as an independent model. It is actually just a selection of components. The front axles, rear axles, engines, cabins etc. were just parts which were put together and one combination is called Sisu K-44. For example K-34 is the same apart from the front axle (which is not driven) and the torque splitter unit is missing - instead, the reduction gear is integrated into the rear axle differential. I think the different model names only come from that, that the different drivetrain layouts need a separate homologation.

I would think it quite common that as far as an engineering department is concerned several truck ranges are as far as possible using the same components except for the specialist bits. From the perspective of the marketing department, of course, you want to maximise the differences - ie in terms of what the customer actually sees - because that way you can maximise the number of different potential customers whom your sales team can persuade to think of your product as the solution for their particular need. In terms of "objective truth" you see great debates in the wiki automobile section on whether two cars are simply one car with two different badges or whether they really are two quite different cars that just happen to be the same shape. And people are strongly protective of the version with which they grew up. But whether one of those perceptions really is closer to "objective truth" than the other, I would tend to think is an unimportant question, usually not worth the heat that it can generate. Anyhow, with the K-44, having given it its own entry, I guess implicitly we are voting for the idea that it has enough individuality to be written about as a separate model. My own preference with wikipedia entries is generally, when in doubt, to keep different vehicle types separate, simply because I like the entries to be simple. If you try, with 5 or 10 contributors, to have several different, but under the skin near identical vehicles in a single article, the article simply becomes complicated to follow and it becomes very hard for reader or writer to pin down which statements refer to which versions of the vehicle. Anyhow, that's all becoming a bit of a peripheral discussion.

I have been talking about the article naming with the enthusiast who has collected most of the source material (and whose beautiful K-44 specimen is in the infobox). We are planning to write articles about other K-models as well. There will be a lot of same data with this article (the engine data in particular). I thought of making one article "Sisu K-series" but it would be a huge article and full of lists of different wheelbase options, applications etc. It would be heavy to read and you couldn't get an overview about the model. We decided that one article per model is better. There are some types which we will combine - for example K-26 and K-40 are both 4×4 with the same wheelbases etc. and the only difference is that K-26 is the medium size Kontio ("Bear") and K-40 is the heavy Jyry ("Thunder/Roar"). Both models will be included in the same article. --Gwafton (talk) 23:21, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

By the way, do you think the right name for the "bogie" is tandem axle...? --Gwafton (talk) 14:47, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

I never heard of a tandem axle. But after checking in .... wikipedia, I think it may be the more accurate term. TWO problems. Make that THREE: 1. wiki entry itself says that the term is often loosely used. 2. there is no wiki definition spelled out with its own entry that one can link to (you have to go to axle and then search for "tandem"). and 3. I simply don't know how many readers will know what a "tandem axle" is. There's little point in using a correct term if it's not going to communicate any meaning to the reader. I think ... I think I want to think about it more.

I talked about it with one user in the German Wikipedia and he is sure that it is Tandemachse. The principle is the same - the load distribution remains the same in rough terrain. So I'm over 90% sure that tandem axle is the right name. --Gwafton (talk) 23:21, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Tandemachse appears quite a lot more in German wiki than tandem axle appears in english wiki. Though even in German wiki, Tandemachse doesn't have it's own entry (yet) from an expert that I could translate for English wiki.... In British vs American English I, too, am a bit mixed between the two. I am born in England but worked for the Americans for many years. Probably the more significant factor, where I don't recognise/recognize a word in this entry, is that my formal secondary education involved history and accountancy, which is some distance away from engineering. Every state in western Europe (almost every state...) seems to agonise/agonize equally about the lousy quality of its education system, but I really do have the impression that the average German has a much better in-depth understanding of engineering - just as the average Frenchman has a much more in-depth understanding of mathematics - than the average Brit or American. Sad for us anglophones. On with the daily routine. Regards Charles01 (talk) 06:56, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

While I'm here, there's a mention of something - I think the rear axle casings - being made from "formed steel". I do not know that term. But it appears, I think, to be some kind of sheet steel, delivered to the factory in large coils, then cut to length, and the necessary shapes then cut out of the resulting sheets. After that you take the shapes and put them in a heavy press where they are shaped - eg into vehicle body panels. Is that your understanding of what is meant by formed steel? The other way (apart from tube steel) that I know about that steel gets delivered to a factory is as moulded "castings" - delivered to the plant from the steel forger moulded into the correct shape, but then needing to be machined in order to get down to the necessary tolerances - eg for making engine blocks, crankshafts and the other main load bearing components of the engine. Maybe my lack of understanding is down to language differences between British and American English. Maybe it's just that it's a long time since I was in a big steel using factory. But I am interested to try and better understand "The axle housing is welded construction made from formed steel". The front axle casing is described as being made from forged steel which I THINK sounds as though it is machined from a moulded rough casting delivered from the steel forge, which would be quite a different process if my understanding is correct. Maybe the casing for the front axle needs to be more robust because those vicious Finnish trees are likely to jump up and hit it as the truck drive along, while the rear axles are better protected by their position so a slightly less hard casing is for them ok. And thanks.

Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:00, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

The most common way to produce an axle housing from steel is as you described. The top and bottom halves are either cold or hot formed steel and joined together by powder arc welding. An alternative way is to make it from straight steel and weld together from corners so that it looks like a box (or coffin). But most likely the description which I took from an original brochure is there to make difference to the other type Sisu axles which consist of a casted differential casing of which sides are bolted spindle pipes made from profile pipe. Such you can see for example under A-45.

I have to check the info about the "forged" front axle because it feels a bit strange when I think of it now. The non driven beams are forged but it is unlike that a housing of a driven axle would have been made with that method.

I don't know if my English looks more British or American or Continental European "un-English" as I have picked up the expressions here and there. Regarding technical vocabulary it is closer to the British I guess, as I used to read Haynes' repairs manuals a lot when I was a teenager and drove cars which were older than myself. I really value your proofreading work because it improves the articles and helps me to learn. --Gwafton (talk) 23:21, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Ok, another question: you had "An engine driven compressor feeds the air brakes and servo of the hydraulic brake circuit". To me that implies that the K-44 had a hydraulic brake circuit (or rather twin hydraulic brakes circuits) AND air brakes. I would have expected that the air brakes REPLACED the hydraulic brakes. Does that mean that the compressor drove (1) the servo-assistance device for the hydraulic brakes and (2) in more recent trucks, the sir brakes? If that's right, I would expect the compressor for (1) to be different (ie smaller and less powerful) from/than the compressor for (2). BUT I am not an expert on air brakes. I reserve the right to be wrong. But I would be grateful for any clarification... ALSO the implication of the sentence at the start of this para is that the same truck came with BOTH hydraulic brakes AND air brakes. I do not understand why the truck should need both, and elsewhere I had assumed that it had one or the other. BUT if it had both at the same time ... again, any available clarification would be much appreciated. And many thanks in anticipation.... Good weekend Charles01 (talk) 13:02, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there are no good sources for the brake system and I only wrote according the available, limited sources. What is known, the earlier models were equipped with hydraulic brakes and a pressure assisted servo. The later models are equipped with combined hydraulic and air brakes and the servo was replaced by vacuum type system at some stage. The combined hydraulic/pneumatic system is technically easier for the steering axle because the air actuators would take too much space limiting the turning angle. Therefore the front brakes are hydraulic.

I just couldn't include the detailled info about the brakes into the article because none of the sources tells it. --Gwafton (talk) 13:50, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Another question. But I hope you agree that it is in a good cause if it helps the reader... Anyway, you write "The total permitted laden weights were increased in 1967, after the production of K-44 had ceased. They were increased up to 18 100 kg in the beginning of 1967 ....". Question: WHICH truck? Already, as far as I can make out from the table and the source (produced by Sisu?), the laden weight was MORE than 18 100 kg for the heaviest trucks. If your source(s) do(es) not enable you to answer, I guess we can keep it ambiguous, but if we can pin it down, I think that would be better. And thank you. Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:50, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, now I am a bit confused. The table in Sisu-Uutiset (the producer's magazine for customers) tells about K-44ST, SP and BP, ie. Jyry-class. It says that the maximum permissible weight was 17 500 kg until end of 1966 and increased after up to 18 100 kg. The wheelbase or anything else is not specified. As the source doesn't tell more I think it is better to leave it as it is to avoid of overinterpretation. --Gwafton (talk) 22:06, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Another thing: The curb weights at the top of the entry in the info box for the empty trucks seem to be out of kilter with those given in the more detailed table later on. Should I change the info box values to match the top and bottom kerb weight values in the table? Or is there something subtle going on here that I'm missing? And thank you. Regards Charles01 (talk) 17:04, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

The infobox values are from the table (or should be) and you are right, it looks like I have made a mistake. --Gwafton (talk) 18:21, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi Charles01. Is the article from your side? If so, I will go it through in detail with the enthusiast who provided me the material. After that versions in other languages will follow.

Adding the imperial units increased the data but it is fine. As an engineer I prefer the metric units in (almost) every context but as the imperial units are still in place in many English speaking countries, or at least many people are more familiar with them even they wouldn't be officially used any more, it is good that you added them in. We non-native English speakers, who use the language just as a lingua franca, sometimes forget that it is a mother tongue for many people. :) --Gwafton (talk) 23:15, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Imperial units are a pain, but if you write in English they are what the reader will most likely understand in the big anglophone population centres UK and USA. (Not sure if India went metric yet, though I imagine fluent English speakers are more numerous there than in USA and UK together.) In Britain they announced a change to metric more than forty years ago and they have been working on it ever since. We now buy fuel in litres but we still quote fuel consumption in mpg. Mpg is a particular pain because the Brits and the Americans cannot agree on the size of a gallon. Oh, and of course we do our distances in miles but the distance markers on the roads are set 1 km apart. So in theory we all understand both systems but of course we don't. I understand that when Australia went metric they did it completely overnight. Well, I don't expect they switched peoples' brains that fast. But it does seem a better way to do that change: it shouldn't need a local rerun of the French revolution to metricate a little faster than, till now, we Brits have managed.

I had intended a final read through of the Sisu K-44 entry but am 99% done with it. Don't wait for me before verifying that I got it right - especially some of the more technical stuff involving steering gear, suspension etc etc. I'm an accountant, not an engineer. Lot's of (mostly good, family related) things have mostly kept me off wikipedia these last few weeks, but to quote Arnold Schawrzenegger (I think), I'll be back. At least, I intend so. Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 05:08, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the different gallons and miles and whatsoever are very confusing especially to us who were grown together with metric system and only heard about inches when talking about car tyres. But actually it took for a long time for Finland to adopt the metric system. The old system remained obsolete in 1880s but actually metric system was taken into use in timber as late as in 1970s. One big reason might have been the expensive sawmill equipment and another one that UK used to be one of the biggest, if not biggest, export market for the Finnish sawmills. And here we get back to the Leyland engines used in Sisu's: the sterlings earned with timber were used on British engines, cars and especially tractors (McCormicks, Nuffields, Fergusons, David Browns etc used to be common on Finnish fields).

I changed the article back to present tense because all the other Sisu articles are written like that. Would be good to have some official directive for the tenses for such cases.

I want to thank you for the great work you have done with the Sisu K-44 article. It has become very good now and gives a good basis for the other Sisu articles of the same series (K-26, K-34 etc. will follow some time). Your contributions also always help me at improving my English. I wish you a nice weekend! :) --Gwafton (talk) 19:40, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Recognition is always appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to enter this kind note. I wish you a good weekend too, though I think we may be discussing different weekends. I've been to Glasgow and Swansea and ... um ... Aardenburg since you wrote it, but/and so spending little time with wikipedia. Back to the gas/petrol station. Regards Charles01 (talk) 19:01, 19 April 2013 (UTC)