The Triumph Dolomite Club - Discussion Forum

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Cohn's Law. The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all of your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.

MacPherson’s Theory of Entropy. It requires less energy to take an object out of its proper place than to put it back.

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics. Things get worse under pressure.

Washlesky’s Law. Anything is easier to take apart than to put together.

Jose’s Axiom. Nothing is as temporary as that which is called permanent.
Corollary. Nothing is as permanent as that which is called temporary.
Imbesi’s Law of the Conservation of Filth. In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.

Freeman’s Extension. …but you can get everything dirty without getting anything clean.

The Titanic Effect. The severity with which a system fails is proportional to the strength of the designer’s belief that it cannot fail.

Rap’s Law of Inanimate Reproduction. If you take something apart and put it back together enough times, eventually you will have two of them.

An Engineer. An Engineer is one who passes as an exacting expert on the strength of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude strings of incomprehensible formulae calculated with micrometric assumptions which are based on debatable figures acquired from inconclusive tests and quite incomplete experiments carried out with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and rather dubious mentality, with the particular anticipation of disconcerting and annoying everyone outside of their own fraternity.

All of the above have a common denominator,

Triumph Dolomite !

So what went wrong today?

Jeroen

I would take issue with Mr McPherson and Mr Washlesky. Anyone who has tried to remove a transmission from a FWD car (one they've never done before) will tell you that it takes twice as long to remove and requires twice as much mental effort to work out how to remove it. Even Haynes admit this, you get up to 2 pages of instructions on removal and one sentence on replacement, ie "replacement is a direct reversal of the above procedure"

And I should remind you that I AM an engineer, albeit a rather empirical one, and proud of it too!

Steve

And if we are quoting laws, I have 3 of my own

1) Never trust someone else's diagnosis.

2) When you spend more time looking for a spanner than you do using it, it's time to tidy the workshop.

3) Never EVER trust someone else's diagnosis!

Steve's rule 1 and 3 are the most important. Obeying these saves a lot of time in the end. I want to add rule 4.

4. Never trust someone else's repairs.

Jeroen

Hmm. To rules 1,3 and 4. I often have to seem to believe other peoples' diagnosis. I have to prove to them in a non confrontational, 'oh, look what I discovered', 'well well well' manner that they were wrong all the time. After all I need their service contract next year!
Hmm.

I'm more harsh on that. When a customer really thinks i do not have to check what he or another did check or repair already it's no use for me to look at it any further and i ask him friendly to find himself another person to repair. Saves me a lot of time and hassle.

Jeroen

Can't agree more with that, and I'll add that as well as never trusting someone else's repair, never trust that the new part is not as faulty as the old one!

In my day job this is a favourite of mine:

Project Managers will not get the staff they need so long as they succeed through overtime, ulcers and super-human effort. Only when deadlines are missed will senior management approve the staff who, had they been available at the outset, would have prevented the missed deadlines - Woehlke's Law.

There must be some law attributable to the acquisition of parts from ebay?

I bought a rear hub bearing for an XC60 AWD, there are no options for this component. The bearing was 10mm shorter between the flanges than the one I removed. So I sent it back and purchased one that was the correct size from Euro car parts. Maybe the ebay item was 15% cheaper because it was 15% shorter?

Call it Ebay's law.

Motor Factors Law:- If they have it in stock when you phone up- when you get there, it's the wrong one!

Steve