Materials Man

Just driven about 700 miles, 350 with a falling weight defectometer trailer in tow, it weighs 1.4 tonnes and my L 200 returned 25 MPG at a generally obedient 60 MPH. The return trip was foot down at 70 min apart from congestion on the M5 and M6 and returned 26.6 MPG. It is a long time since I drove so many miles in one day, isn’t red bull wonderful.
Anyway the point of the post is to say how fantastic a Tom Tom One is, I did this journey last year without a GPS device and stayed in various hotels to break the journey, however the small industrial park that is the monopoly of Dynatest is not that easy to find, unless you have a Tom Tom or similar sat nav. Even though I had been there last year the amount of driving around last year to find the place left the mind confused, an age thing. Tom Tom with Joanna Lumley’s voice took me there, once off the motorway through country lanes straight to my destination.
My Tom Tom One was bought from ebay for about £70 nearly unused and I should have had one years ago to find my way around Glasgow and Edinburgh, cities that you think you know, but drive in circles trying to park near where you’re going, which was not where you thought it was.
Sat Nav in cars I just discovered is brilliant, I am years behind others, what else I am missing? twitter?

Did I mention I had two of these machines? a light weight FWD (Prima 100) and a trailer mounted Dynatest FWD. Well not actually mine but of course my companies. What my beef today is Transport Scotland’s specification that requires FWD to HD 29, ie trailer mounted. Well first you need a departure to the more appropriate hand held FWD for subbase and formation, why, because HD 29 describes the trailer mounted beast. Not the least of this post’s beef, it’s the effect on the program, using the trailer FWD, waiting for base and binder to cool to less than 30 oC , ideally 20oC; tie ins are a problem, short trunk roads are a problem, trying to accelerate a program is a problem. The blooming use of the FWD is a problem, can a designer really analyse FWD data on freshly laid but cooled blacktop and confirm it complies with his design?  If it is anything like the precision of the ITSM (NAT) test, then I can answer that question, forget it!  It is just about possible to describe it as accurate.

Let me say I am not against testing, it’s my background, but testing that results in delays to a contract for a pile of data that means zero?  And lets face it you and me as tax payers do pay for this data collecting, and we do have the freedom of information act.