Obviously missed the point. You may not post to troll, but your beliefs, however sincerely held, are certainly far from mainstream. I'd go with extremist, racist, reactionary, childish, intellectually unsophisticated and dishonest, and rude. If that's mainstream, well I don't wanna be part of it.
In reply to this comment by quantumushroom: A troll types to hear his keyboard clatter and relishes the attention nonsense brings. My contributions are often unpopular and thus a minority opinion at VS, but troll-poop they are not.
If your ideas have merit, they'll bear the weight of inquiry. 99 out of 100 new ideas will fail, that is the way of things. Unfortunately, the safeguarding processes by which society challenged new ideas have broken down.
The word "extremist" no longer has meaning. 50 years ago a man gets in his huge, heavy car with his family and drives to a restaurant. He might buckle up, he might not. His kids in the back do not sit in car seats. At dinner he eats a huge steak and then smokes a cigar. His kids eat pie with ice cream. Once upon a time, that was a free man. By today's warped eco-nanny-health state standards he'd be considered a mass murderer.
One of the charges against the religious is they stay in their own bubble and reinforce one another's beliefs. Do you really think liberals or any other "enlightened" group don't so the same?
>> ^quantumushroom: A troll types to hear his keyboard clatter and relishes the attention nonsense brings. My contributions are often unpopular and thus a minority opinion at VS, but troll-poop they are not.
If your ideas have merit, they'll bear the weight of inquiry. 99 out of 100 new ideas will fail, that is the way of things. Unfortunately, the safeguarding processes by which society challenged new ideas have broken down.
The word "extremist" no longer has meaning. 50 years ago a man gets in his huge, heavy car with his family and drives to a restaurant. He might buckle up, he might not. His kids in the back do not sit in car seats. At dinner he eats a huge steak and then smokes a cigar. His kids eat pie with ice cream. Once upon a time, that was a free man. By today's warped eco-nanny-health state standards he'd be considered a mass murderer.
One of the charges against the religious is they stay in their own bubble and reinforce one another's beliefs. Do you really think liberals or any other "enlightened" group don't so the same?
Obviously missed the point. You may not post to troll, but your beliefs, however sincerely held, are certainly far from mainstream. I'd go with extremist, racist, reactionary, childish, intellectually unsophisticated and dishonest, and rude. If that's mainstream, well I don't wanna be part of it.
>> ^brycewi19: There were four words I couldn't take my eyes off of. Two seemed applicable, two didn't:
1. web 2. tv 3. pant 4. anal
Thanks a lot for pointing that out, once you've seen it you can't un-see it. Kind of like the arrow hidden in FedEx, or the fact that the badge on the Dodge Viper looks like Daffy Duck if you look at it upside-down.
Our own Choggie Kendall, leading the charge with a little social commentary.
You can tell he's not totally batshit insane, if he was the following would be single-spaced...
"T.V., it satellite links our United States of Unconsciousness Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive The methadone metronome pumping out 150 channels 24 hours a day you can flip through all of them and still there's nothing worth watching"
-Television: The Drug of The Nation
To all the local and national twits who call themselves purveyors of information, journalists, and any other such felicitous and inappropriate moniker used to describe their bile. Get a REAL job, assholes!!!"
>> ^jimnms: >> ^Kevlar: ^ Might be your browser. It's working fine here on Firefox 3.5.2.
I guess it doesn't work in Firefox 3.5.4 then.
Nope, 3.5.4 works fine here.
I have to say the wide proliferation of proprietary flash-based video players kind of sucks. I have a really difficult time with LiveLeak videos especially, they tend to play fine for about 10% of their length, then get caught in a buffer lock- never to recover.
Fantastic stuff. I wonder if they cook the fish whole, with the smaller fish still in the gullet of the larger... kind of like a fish version of Turducken?
Just got around to finally playing the PC version of this game. An amazing achievement worthy of any historical Hollywood A-list film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Ridley Scott, but like so many said historical Hollywood films they left out 2 fundamental things:
A) Any sense of narrative coherence B) It was no fun at all.
>> ^cybrbeast: Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?
One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.
In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:
1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties. -fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished. - The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.
2) The engine itself was a stressed-member. -While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.
3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system -Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details. -The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.
4) The motor - 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft. I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.
5) Carbon Fibre - While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.
Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!
Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.
I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.
>> ^cybrbeast: Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?
One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.
In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:
1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties. -fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished. - The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.
2) The engine itself was a stressed-member. -While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.
3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system -Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details. -The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.
4) The motor - 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft. I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.
5) Carbon Fibre - While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.
Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!
Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.
I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.
I'm totally blown away by this bike. I know I'll never get the chance to ride one, but hopefully will be able to lay eyes on one someday.
I really recommend watching the documentary linked above. Really quite cool- gives a great insight into the Britten the man, and into just how much work he put into Britten the machine. It's crazy and inspiring that one man, working almost single-handedly could take on the most well-financed and skilled engineering teams in the world and beat them! Shame he died so young. Wonder what the world of motorcycling, and motor-engineering in general, would have been like if he'd lived.
Terminator 3 - Deleted Scene
quantumushroom
In reply to this comment by quantumushroom:
A troll types to hear his keyboard clatter and relishes the attention nonsense brings. My contributions are often unpopular and thus a minority opinion at VS, but troll-poop they are not.
If your ideas have merit, they'll bear the weight of inquiry. 99 out of 100 new ideas will fail, that is the way of things. Unfortunately, the safeguarding processes by which society challenged new ideas have broken down.
The word "extremist" no longer has meaning. 50 years ago a man gets in his huge, heavy car with his family and drives to a restaurant. He might buckle up, he might not. His kids in the back do not sit in car seats. At dinner he eats a huge steak and then smokes a cigar. His kids eat pie with ice cream. Once upon a time, that was a free man. By today's warped eco-nanny-health state standards he'd be considered a mass murderer.
One of the charges against the religious is they stay in their own bubble and reinforce one another's beliefs. Do you really think liberals or any other "enlightened" group don't so the same?
The Internet Troll is explained in new psyclological study. (Politics Talk Post)
A troll types to hear his keyboard clatter and relishes the attention nonsense brings. My contributions are often unpopular and thus a minority opinion at VS, but troll-poop they are not.
If your ideas have merit, they'll bear the weight of inquiry. 99 out of 100 new ideas will fail, that is the way of things. Unfortunately, the safeguarding processes by which society challenged new ideas have broken down.
The word "extremist" no longer has meaning. 50 years ago a man gets in his huge, heavy car with his family and drives to a restaurant. He might buckle up, he might not. His kids in the back do not sit in car seats. At dinner he eats a huge steak and then smokes a cigar. His kids eat pie with ice cream. Once upon a time, that was a free man. By today's warped eco-nanny-health state standards he'd be considered a mass murderer.
One of the charges against the religious is they stay in their own bubble and reinforce one another's beliefs. Do you really think liberals or any other "enlightened" group don't so the same?
Obviously missed the point. You may not post to troll, but your beliefs, however sincerely held, are certainly far from mainstream. I'd go with extremist, racist, reactionary, childish, intellectually unsophisticated and dishonest, and rude. If that's mainstream, well I don't wanna be part of it.
Choggie's Latest Manifesto - Via Pre Screamager
Thanks.
"Ice Fishing" in Brazil
There were four words I couldn't take my eyes off of. Two seemed applicable, two didn't:
1. web
2. tv
3. pant
4. anal
Thanks a lot for pointing that out, once you've seen it you can't un-see it. Kind of like the arrow hidden in FedEx, or the fact that the badge on the Dodge Viper looks like Daffy Duck if you look at it upside-down.
Choggie's Latest Manifesto - Via Pre Screamager
You can tell he's not totally batshit insane, if he was the following would be single-spaced...
"T.V., it
satellite links
our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
you can flip through all of them
and still there's nothing worth watching"
-Television: The Drug of The Nation
To all the local and national twits who call themselves purveyors of information, journalists, and any other such felicitous and inappropriate moniker used to describe their bile. Get a REAL job, assholes!!!"
Inside the Ikea Table Factory.
>> ^Kevlar:
^ Might be your browser. It's working fine here on Firefox 3.5.2.
I guess it doesn't work in Firefox 3.5.4 then.
Nope, 3.5.4 works fine here.
I have to say the wide proliferation of proprietary flash-based video players kind of sucks. I have a really difficult time with LiveLeak videos especially, they tend to play fine for about 10% of their length, then get caught in a buffer lock- never to recover.
"Ice Fishing" in Brazil
Glenn Gould & Menuhin - Bach
Glenn Gould & Menuhin - Bach
Glenn Gould & Menuhin - Bach
Zero Punctuation Review: Assassin's Creed
A) Any sense of narrative coherence
B) It was no fun at all.
The BD-10 Homebuilt Supersonic Jet Aircraft, marketing video
UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture
R O T T E N S E E D (soory ladies) (Bravo Talk Post)
Congrotulations.
Greatest Racing Motorcycle ever: Britten V1000
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?
One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.
In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:
1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties.
-fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished.
- The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.
2) The engine itself was a stressed-member.
-While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.
3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system
-Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details.
-The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.
4) The motor
- 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft.
I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.
5) Carbon Fibre
- While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.
Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!
Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.
I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.
cybrbeast
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?
>> ^cybrbeast:
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?
One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.
In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:
1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties.
-fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished.
- The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.
2) The engine itself was a stressed-member.
-While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.
3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system
-Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details.
-The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.
4) The motor
- 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft.
I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.
5) Carbon Fibre
- While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.
Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!
Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.
I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.
The Cat With Hands
Best Pumpkin Dance Ever
You keep on using this word, I do not think you know what it means.
Greatest Racing Motorcycle ever: Britten V1000
I really recommend watching the documentary linked above. Really quite cool- gives a great insight into the Britten the man, and into just how much work he put into Britten the machine. It's crazy and inspiring that one man, working almost single-handedly could take on the most well-financed and skilled engineering teams in the world and beat them! Shame he died so young. Wonder what the world of motorcycling, and motor-engineering in general, would have been like if he'd lived.