Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Grand-Union-Ometer


Its amazing how you find things to waste your time when you're retired. Following yesterday's attempt at a canal calculator disc, I've come up with Mark II and a new name.

Here's a close up view in case the main view is too small.

Red underlining of the lock name shows there is a reasonable pub nearby. The main difference form yesterday's model is that the time scale has moved to the inner disc, and the places (all locks in this case) have moved to the outer. Following an idea from Halfie (thanks) I've used a standard 24 hour inner disc. Rotating this inner disc gives times between any two places.
I used an average cruising speed of 3mph and allowed 15 mins per lock. Everyone knows that won't always be right, but past experience shows it averages out tolerably well.

4 comments:

Vallypee said...

Aha, Mark II is even better. I'm looking forward to being retired myself, but it's too far off for my liking!

Anonymous said...

Improvement to Grand-Union-Ometer

I think that the meter is coming along fine, however it could be made even easier to use.

Instead of a 0 to 24 inner scale you could mark it 0 to 12 then 0 to 12 again, marking one set with AM and the other with PM.

You could then set the departure time to the departure position and the scale would read the ETA for any point on the journey!

You would of course need a reverse scale for the return journey, this could be on the back of the inner scale which would be flipped over as you wind.

The only flaw in this arrangement is that it does not allow for any lunch-time pub stop. I am working (mentally)on a split inner disc which can have a variable amount of time added at 1 pm

Neil Corbett said...

Blimey! Remember that I invented the thing because Kath found the spreadsheets too complicated!

Of course, you could include some way of entering preferred hours per day and lunch stops. I might include markers for sanitary stations and water points and perhaps shops.

saltysplash said...

I think its great Neil, I presume you would have interchangable discs for different chice of routes?

Sign me up for one of the prototypes....the last list you gave us is now getting a little dog eared :)