Andrew Taylor

Once again I’ve been extremely lax in updating this blog. Unfortunately between work, St John, personal life (and driving my new car…!) I’ve not had a lot of time to get my thoughts and findings down on paper online as I was planning to with this site.

Anyway, hopefully I might kick myself back into blogging more frequently with this post. The title is the two things I bought this weekend – one somewhat more exciting than the other! My new car bought back in November last year came with the usual standard windscreen wiper, something like this.

Now these style of wipers have served the world well for many years, but there is a a much better alternative, which is now available at a reasonable price. As I needed to get a new wiper anyway, as the old one was clearly on its way out – smearing the screen and not really helping me to see at all, I wanted to go for this new style.  These flat blades look something like this:

These wipers have the advantage of having over 1000 points of pressure contact with the windscreen, rather than the older style which have only 6-8 using a whippletree mechanism and mould to the screen’s shape (which on the Elise is particularly curved. Nicely illustrated in the diagram on this page.

I picked up my new 24″ wiper blade from Tesco for only £4! Fitting it took just a few minutes and I’ve seen a vast improvement already – far less smearing on the screen and it clears rain consistently and quickly. Next job is to get a set of these for the girlfriend’s Mazda2, which – despite being 8 months old – came with standard wiper blades. My Mazda3 bought at exactly  the same time came with flat blades.

The second thing I bought this weekend was an addition to my digital SLR photography arsenal – the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4.0-5.6 IS lens. I was desperate to upgrade from the kit 18-55mm lens that came with my EOS 350D and ideally wanted IS to improve on blurry shots in low light.

I was toying with the idea of the IS version of that same lens, though in the end, I decided it made more sense to spend a bit more and opt for the 17-85, especially as it has the USM focusing system (very fast and quiet focusing), full time manual focusing for tweaking before releasing the shutter and a far better build quality including a metal mount, rather than the plastic mount on the 18-55mm lenses.

However now I have to splash out on new UV, ND and CircPol filters as the filter mount is 67mm rather than 58mm which all my existing filters are! Hopefully I’ll bring you an update on how the lens performs when I’ve had a chance to get out snapping.

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