.Dave, apologies for the thread drift and for ranting in response to the introduction of legality into your thread.
I for one am impressed that you put in the time and effort to share your very interesting voyage of discovery relative to modifying your digital Morgan, and overcoming the odds against doing so....
Well I suppose we could turn the clock back to those better days, when the likes of Health and Safety didn't really exist (which is estimated to save on average 5000 lives a year in the UK alone). And enjoy the socierty of eg machinist,wood turners and so on, wearing the badge of honour of their trade, visible on their hands or face. In that how many fingers have they lost on each hand or how many functioning eyes they still have. Lets go back to the days before the Clean Air Act, where most urban environments were dreadful in winter with coal fires pumping out and choking our air and resultant smog that filled our Hospitals and Doctors waiting rooms with chronic chest complaints and often resultant deaths.Those good old days......which thankfully are behind us .maybe progress is often for the better.
I remember reading the environmental report undertaken on the residents living conditions around one of the major London Circular ring road traffic islands near Park Royal, where there were noted a very high incidence of premature deaths often in their early 50's. Not surprisingly, but unfortunately for those residents, noise polution and vehicle emissions etc. in that area was a key factor, leading to early deaths. So cleaning up that environment, restricitng HGV emissions and requiring hush kits fitted to HGV's and aircraft landing at Heathrow, improved their lot over time. Of course some may consider it a bloody inconvenient and expensive for the operators to meet those additional costs, just to make some Londoners have more acceptable living environment.
Maybe regulation has a useful role in society, whilst we may as a individual baulk against some of it's requirement and restrictions imposed and some freedoms lost compared to the past. But it it usually improves the lot of society as a whole. Of course, striking the right balance is very important and that is a difficult one, as vested interests compete for preference in treatment.
On my thinking of rules and yet more rules perhaps not providing the best outcomes, I suspect having ever been a hands-on type who valued some degree of self reliance, I ever admired those who pushed the boundaries, a tad more than those who pushed the pens creating regs, for sure there is a degree of balance best applied...BUT..?
My thinking was more based along the lines of folk modifying their Morgans and the boundaries which they pushed, I tried to provided some examples in my post which seem to be along similar lines to the more up to date methods recently applied to improve the performance of a Morgan in this thread.
It seems the sledge hammer and nut analogy might apply when using H&S data the clean air act, and the supposed lives saved, when applied to the reality around modifying a Morgans, given that if the future might indeed be electric to some degree, it seems rather unlikely that the ICE will dominate in transportation as it has done in the past, and if one considers that is also seems likely that folk modifying their Morgans or even having the capability to do so, seem few and far between compared with times past, having been discouraged by regulatory processes some of which have been incorperated in their design...Identify that as progress if you will..Shrug.
On a wider perspective I do admit to being concerned for the young, and their reliance of digitec, having been seduced by the convenience of it (as have I) away from the multitude of different skills their forebears required to learn in order to build a reasonable way of life..... I suspect I have no need of creating a list in terms skills that might be required if the lights go out for any reason, leaving a highly digitally dependant population potentially floundering somewhat....?
As ever, each to their own, while attempting to disagree agreeably... (-:
