Being British

[northwind]

Originally Posted by hob

An example I would give would be on a 1986 Honda accord, all but one of the inlet manifold bolts can be accessed without the head being removed, the final one requires the head to removed lol.

Kawasaki are god-awful for this... The 636 B has the 2 best examples I can imagine, the suspension linkage has grease nipples but no grease in the linkage from the factory, and the bottom shock bolt is fitted from the right meaning it can't be removed without removing the entire exhaust system (not even just the end can, the whole ****ing thing), where if it was fitted from the left it'd come straight out without disturbing a single other part. We just cut the bolt head off instead and replace it, better to fit a £10 bolt than spend an hour doing battle with crappy kwak fasteners.

Originally Posted by hob

We are down on manufacturing due to WWII, after that all of our machinery was screwed, unlike Germany that got leveled I don't believe we got any money to rebuild our infrastructure...

Heh, Britain got the most marshall plan money of all, more than twice as much as germany, nearly a quarter of the whole fund.

Originally Posted by northwind

Heh, Britain got the most marshall plan money of all, more than twice as much as germany, nearly a quarter of the whole fund.

Aye but didn't we have a massive IOU to America?

[northwind]

Yup, but so did everyone else who took marshall plan money. Germany was smarter with how they handled the cash than us to be fair, but not enough to get twice as much milage out of it.

I was taught that the real reason british manufacturing fell behind was just that we were such an early innovator, the countries that came after could learn from us but also didn't have the history and infrastructure and old hardware etc- and while germany had no real choice to start over, we chose to rebuild what we had. I don't know how true that is but it does seem reasonable enough. I think at the end of the day we just didn't do enough to stay on top, the british auto industry is a brilliant example of where we went wrong in, oh, almost every way we could have.

Originally Posted by northwind

Yup, but so did everyone else who took marshall plan money. Germany was smarter with how they handled the cash than us to be fair, but not enough to get twice as much milage out of it.

I was taught that the real reason british manufacturing fell behind was just that we were such an early innovator, the countries that came after could learn from us but also didn't have the history and infrastructure and old hardware etc- and while germany had no real choice to start over, we chose to rebuild what we had. I don't know how true that is but it does seem reasonable enough. I think at the end of the day we just didn't do enough to stay on top, the british auto industry is a brilliant example of where we went wrong in, oh, almost every way we could have.

LOL indeed, we do not reinvest and so get owned by everyone...

I think the Olympics showed this too, the first actual "investment" in athletes and we rank 4th (close 3rd) compared to our usual single digit gold medals.

Originally Posted by northwind

No offence mate but that's complete rubbish. There's any number of places you can go to for top drawer engineering and manufacturing. Britain still does some very good low volume engineering but we're far from the only ones.

Ask the forumla one teams.