Broithe

https://www.facebook.com/NorthYorkshireWeatherUpdates/posts/pfbid0GG7otBWtoicem31Qwatkpz8sTfRkfjfBs1XSTSqu4HQ3i2jbqzZfS8QnNZieuBjZl WCML at Beattock yesterday.

I've known a few over the years, it's a remarkable level of real physical skill. The chap who did this, by hand, on an old scrap of plywood, is a true artist, in every sense of the word. I once had to do a banner on a plastic tarpaulin. I did that by drawing it out on a sheet of paper and photographing it, then projecting the slide onto the banner, so I could draw the outlines, then fill in the spaces. Long-winded, but not as long as it would have taken me to do it the 'real way', even though a true sign-writer would have done it in a few minutes from scratch.

In a similar way, but not really railway-related, there are many sources of "free nice materials". I always retrieve the long leaf springs out of old wiper blade. It's a nice material and has many uses. I fixed this thing the other day. It's for holding a queen bee as you mark it, apparently - but the foam-faced plunger had gone very sloppy and it was hard to use reliably. I suspect that the foam block was the 'friction brake' originally, but had worn too much to hold the weight now. A few seconds grinding a bit to length and a little 'set' in it to give a friction load on the plunger and all was well again. A sweet job and it got me a free pint last night. It's very handy stuff for light leaf-springs.

That's up to them - they offer it for sale at a price and that price is acceptable to you or not. That its the Free Market. Conversely, I have had someone get really stroppy with me because he offered me, out of the blue, a reasonable price for something that I had no intention of selling - he seemed to think that his offer must be accepted... My favourite, though, remains the time I asked a bloke how much a Sandvik carbide scraper would be, having decided that I would go to £2 for it, if necessary. He required me to make an offer for it. He was a good bit older than me and I felt that he would easily understand my offer of 'thirty bob'. His response to that was "Oh, no! I need at least fifty pence!" So, I reluctantly gave him a third of what I had actually offered him... The other smaller scraper there was a great buy - nice-looking, but also hugely useful. And it is a product of a firm that proudly embossed on the blade "Cutlers to Her Majesty". No doubt it took her ages to repaper the whole of Buck House.

Perhaps a similar reason that I found this planimeter at a boot sale. "How much for the planimeter?" - "What?" - "That!" - "That's a compass." - "Is it? How much is it?" ... It is used for measuring the areas of flat shapes, a difficult task back in the days of real maps, etc. You just set the arm length to the right dimension for the scale of the map and the unit that you want to measure in, with some common examples in the chart on the bottom. A remarkable device that I had always wanted, after seeing one at school once - and I got it it a reasonable price, due to the ignorance of the vendor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter

Nowhere near as good for your purposes, but I do still have this 'wavy line measure', from the days of paper maps. Quite useful at the time, double sided and with dials in the popular scales, for direct reading. You did have to be aware that not all the scales ended at a 'round number' for a full revolution, but still far easier than trying to lie a thread along the route and measure that.

You won't regret it, I'm sure. As I said, I find the grey one suitable for pretty much everything. The rubber of the block is quite hard, almost like a brake block* on a bike, but there is a little 'give'. With all the use it's had, sometimes on fairly filthy stuff, I don't seem to have had any clogging issues. The work that is is subject to seems to cause it to be almost self-cleaning - and I suspect that the small 'softness' does help to avoid material getting stuck on the surface. It will be interesting to see how you get on. If I just had the old original one and did lose it properly, then I would have to do something about a replacement... * Typing that has reminded me that yet another use is to polish up aluminium bike rims to stop brake squeal in damp weather. The list of applications is endless, as I suspect you will find over time.

Using my old grey block today, made me remember this thread from pre-history, for some reason. (In both senses of the words...) I did take the precaution of getting a new spare set a decade or more ago, but I don't expect to live long enough to actually need it... The grey block at the front is what I use 99.9% of the time. You can see the result of a quick polish at the pointy end of the chisel blade and the oxidation coating that was there before. Just a few seconds work for a silky-smooth surface. That grey block was obtained in 1975, I think, so that is the result of fifty year's use on an almost daily basis. It produces a lovely smooth finish on all metals, even really soft stuff. I only really got the spares because it does have a tendency to get taken to the job and 'put down here for now' and then not found again for a while now and then. I was always frightened of losing it properly. But the new shed arrangement has greatly reduced instances of that and I haven't lost it (much) this year. On occasions, the existence of a sharp square corner is beneficial, so a new one gets used then, as the old one has lost the sharp corners now. Highly recommended.

Even living, mostly, on the Big Island, I was fifteen before I ever spoke on a telephone - there was just nobody with a phone to speak to - I had used radios and walkie-talkies long before there was anybody to phone. We all knew how to make a phone call by the age of 8 or 9, but there was just nobody to ring, if you didn't need the cops or an ambulance. There are some interesting hangovers today, from the old systems. In the old system in Ireland, it was common for the post office to be 1, the guards 2 and the bank(s) 3 (& 4), where the important places had the single-figure phone numbers, before the modern system arrived - particularly with the guards, if they are still in the old building, then the current phone number will often still end in 2, often 102. The AIB in Rathdowney was 3 and is now 46103. The guards were 46102, until they sold the old barracks and moved to more sedate accommodation. Also, the different keypad layouts of calculators and phones - because 0 on a phone was actually 10, inherited from the days of loop-disconnect dialling - you couldn't dial zero, or the system wouldn't know if you had, or how many times you had dialled it, because you hadn't. This all became superfluous when tone-dialling arrived, but it was too late by then and the keypad layouts were 'in place' forever. On the Big Island, I still have an old rotary phone, mostly for the bell sound, but the dial still functions and I use it occasionally - making a mistake at the end of an eleven figure dial-out is almost heart-breaking, after putting all that effort in. Also, the new codes in the republic are in a rather more useful arrangement than the UK phone code system. In Ireland, you can take a fair guess at where a phone number is from, 05 is the southeast, 05x will be a biggish place, 05xx will be smaller centres. In the UK, the system is (largely) alphabetical, 019xx will probably begin with W, but it could be Weymouth - or Wick - not much use to anybody. In the old days "reverse codes" were almost impossible to obtain - I had a booklet (obtained through Exchange & Mart) in my desk at work and would get a request for "Where is this code?" most days. It does seem to me that the widespread use of landlines and, even worse, mobile phones, has just made it far more "acceptable" to be disorganised and unreliable. We had to know what we were going to do - and then actually do it - at the appointed time and place!

I remember making a call from Ballybrophy in the mid-70s. It didn't even have buttons, just a handle to wind, to ring a bell for attention from the exchange in Rathdowney post office. There then followed a discussion about the potential cost of a call to England - this eventually boiled down to 'How much have you got on you?" and an instruction to leave the cash in the cardboard box under the phone.

Patience is a virtue, if you don't already have all seven.

NIR? Did they ever go up there?

The left-hand rear seat at Lough Boora appears to be for Number One...

https://www.facebook.com/LoughBooraPark/posts/pfbid02EqmYs2nkpyvF9xCg7CjCaCQB5DtPLvVqjFebSMCQjZyitETvgDTEVfAM3V81n3Rel Lough Boora Discovery Park - "We are delighted to unveil our first Velo rail bike prototype that we received for testing this week. We hope to be finished construction and up and running in the coming months." IRM will find it hard to motorise the model...

I had (still have somewhere) a Sinclair Scientific. Reverse Polish logic*, but still a huge advance on slide rules and tables - about £50 at the time, when a £ was a lot bigger than it is now,,, * Hence there being no = key.