Broithe

. This reminded me of an event with one of the circuit breakers described above. Actually the one where the scalpel was dropped on my head. The bloke who dropped it was called Jack and worked for the CEGB, the ESB equivalent on the Big Island. He had no idea what he was doing, but also no understanding of how little he knew. He was also the dropper of the scalpel. They blew up one of the breakers in a dramatic and potentially fatal way. I know what they did, but they denied it and tried to blame us, saying it had 'just blown up', so we had to go through a pointless pretence of trying to find the "reason". The operation of these devices is fairly violent. In normal operation, though, the system stopped the mechanism from reversing until the operation had been completed, but, when hand operated, a person could defeat this delay, if they really tried, and cause the operating tube to buckle and break the pressured porcelain column that held the interrupter head up in the air. One of their chaps had blown the centre phase up, by doing this and only narrowly avoided killing himself in the process. He admitted hand-operating it and hearing a 'funny noise', then finding that it wouldn't operate again (because the loss of gas pressure had locked it out), so he got up and stepped back, falling over the ton of interrupter lying in the gravel just behind him, having caused the 'funny noise' as it fell down. So, we had to go through the process of seeing that the stresses were well within a reasonable range, when it really was operated properly. This involved sticking strain gauges all over the surviving breaker on the site and operating it in the manner in which they claimed to have done to the exploded one. Anyway, the aforesaid Jack, who had no idea of what he was supposed to be doing, spent a lot of time trying to see how we were setting up our strain gauges, so that he could copy us. The CEGB had said that they would supply a caravan to house the rather delicate electronics that we brought up with us. They had no shortage of money at all and I expected a caravan the size of a decent house, but, possibly in a further effort to stop us showing that it was not our fault, they supplied the smallest caravan that I've ever seen. My colleague, Barry, of whom more may be said at a later date, was the strain gauge king, so I left him to it in the caravan, as there was very little space. Jack, determined to see what was going on, went in there with him, but had to crouch and lean back against the door. The 'safety officer' felt the need to say something to Barry, for some reason, and grabbed the catch of the door - caravan doors open outwards - this was all that was holding Jack in place, like a coiled spring - and Jack, prestressed against the door, shot out horizontally, like a missile, taking the safety man off his feet and carrying him a yard back into a concrete pillar, winding him so violently that we considered calling an ambulance. I was nearly hyperventilating to the same degree...

You could make a reasonable cutter, particularly for aluminium, from a drill with the diameter of your router's collets. I did something similar, although in wood, when I wanted to rout a shallow groove to mount a tape just below a bench surface, to avoid it snagging and getting scraped. My routers were 200 miles away at the time, but I bodged up a reasonable device from a cordless drill and a right-angle stand.

That's a better idea, but potentially less 'entertaining'...

Now that you've done this as a prototype, will you be releasing it as a brass kit?

If you get no luck on doing it the proper way, it would be feasible to bodge up a sort of 'thicknesser', using an abrasive wheel, even an angle grinder. It would need great care and experimentation, particularly to get the dimension right on the first one, but it is achievable. After that, the second two should pass through and then be identical in thickness. Just don't stand where it will be going if it snags up...

Private clamping on the Big Island became largely illegal a decade ago. You do see the odd clamp by a state agency, but not many. It is all about who's done what and to whom. With the Post Office as an example, there appears to have been a clear and widespread conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on a large scale over many years, but, somehow, the cops seem able to ignore that. They'll drag anti-oil protestors off the road and fling them into the back of a van, but won't say 'boo' to a farmer blocking the same road in a separate dispute. Etc. It can be hard to know which laws you're allowed to break and which you aren't. I wouldn't venture into Birmingham much, but I had to go once and, approaching a set of traffic lights as they changed to red, I could have stopped, but I got the idea that the bloke behind me wasn't going to be interested in stopping, so I went through. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw that another six cars behind him had also followed us through. There's also the madness that you don't have to put signs up for a 30mph limit, although there will usually be a set - but, the mere presence of lampposts less than 200m apart is enough to specify the speed limit - as if you're supposed to get out and measure the gaps. There are a few sections of roads with no signs and a run of street lights that 'generate quite a bit of cash' via their speed cameras. The opposite is also true - there are sections of the A55 with streetlighting but no repeater signs showing the 70mph limit that the cops actually assume is there. It's all a gamble, at times. I always used to assume that the speed limits were in nautical miles per hour, rather than mph, but even that is dodgy now. The enforced limits are generally slower in 'quiet' areas, like Wales and the more rural parts of England, than they would be in the busy parts. And three lane roads still exist in a few places, where you can drive in the centre lane in either direction and it's up to you and the bloke who'll run into you to play chicken competently...

Everything is 'privatised' now. They work for the company, not the public.

I worked with a bloke in the 70s and 80s who was a Herald aficionado. Although a fan of them, Harry was not in denial about their (many) weaknesses. His three-week annual holiday would comprise the second and third weeks away in Wales or Scotland, preceded by the first week dismantling and reassembling the car in preparation. He always carried a lot of general spares, as a quick repair in order to get back home was often a requirement of any trip. He did, also, have a policy of never travelling over the county boundary without a half-shaft in the boot. Over the years, this proved to be a sound policy, as he changed at least three of them at the side of the road... At one point, when teaching his long-suffering wife, Thelma, to drive and acquiescing to her assertion that she could drive it into the garage now, he was nagging her so much about missing the rather tight gateposts that she failed to stop in front of the, as yet unopened, wooden double doors of the garage. The car, an estate, sailed on through the doors into the interior. He was a serious hoarder of 'good stuff' and the garage was packed, leaving only the shape of the car in the middle. The collapsed garage doors stopped the possibility of reversing back out and the stored items precluded the car doors being opened. His normal practice was to stop on the drive, open the garage doors and push the car in, then pulling it back out, when it was next to be used. Luckily, this car was an estate and he was able to exit via the tailgate, remove the obstructions and pull the car back out, with her still in it, so she could get out. Realising that he had at least some blame for this event, no words were ever exchanged about it and he merely repaired the garage doors to the standard of a museum conservator.

See the note above about inconveniencing posh people. That's how the place works - you need to know what is supposed to have been done, who is supposed to have done it and who it is supposed to have been done to - a competent assessment of those details will provide a clear prediction of the response of those paid to do the enforcement.

Nobody posh was inconvenienced, therefore no response would be forthcoming. It's been like that for the whole of this century. Parking on footpaths is, outside London, not actually a specific offence in itself in England and Wales, although there is talk of extending the regulation to the country bumpkins. This would be a bit of an issue as, for example, only about half a mile away, there are signs telling you to park half on the path*... As with many things on the Big Island, it's all a bit mad, Ted. Whilst you could, in very extreme circumstances, be done for obstructing the highway, you would need to be obstructing somebody that matters. However, driving on the footpath is an offence - so, how else did you manage to park there, etc..? You just have to know, or guess, what is actually allowed. * E.g. - Here - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.8120785,-2.1109126,3a,27.5y,110.64h,84.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sSbdpG3nsUNePHKaFiiIDDA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu

I took a short cut just now and nearly got caught out... ... luckily, though, I was turning left at the end.

No, a circuit breaker in this sort of style. I was sitting on the ground at the bottom and it was dropped by a chap standing on the scaffolding above the top.

On my list for this year is a visit to Mt Brandon, via the site of the Focke Wulf Condor crash, which brought the first Germans into internment during the Emergency. It was a fairly gentle affair, as plane crashes go, resulting in one broken ankle between the lot of them. One of them married in Ireland and lived here afterwards. His son became an Aer Lingus pilot. Anyway, I like to imagine the son taking off from Shannon, turning west for the USA and announcing "If you look out of the windows on the left side, half-way up the mountain, you will see the mark my father made when he first landed in Ireland, and some bits of the plane" - this would be followed by a very quiet cabin for the next six hours...

Last year, during the hot spell that everybody has forgotten now, I was discussing the shading of a greenhouse with an old boy up the road. I mentioned that I have a camouflage net that would be about right for the job, but I added the caveat that I haven't seen it for a few years now. About five seconds later, we both got the unintended joke at the same moment.

Lovely stuff! But, I won't be the only one who had a little gasp when seeing the thumbnail in the Latest Posts and thinking it said that there was some progress on @leslie10646's bodywork...

We used aluminium 'quick' scaffolding in the factory, as it was up and down all the time. The Safety Officer started insisting on toe boards, etc, and we went along with it, even though the platforms sagged so much that tools could get kicked off just as easily as without them, except at the ends, etc. One day, I found that there was another new problem. We had a truly giant bloke, who normally worked on site, but was in the factory during a quiet period. I was showing him an odd thing that he would be needing to deal with in the future. We were about fifteen feet up and when that was done, he left the scene, whilst I carried on with the last bit. I found that I was unable to leave the scene - my safety shoe was trapped by the rebound of the platform, when the toe board pinched it just behind the toecap. No matter what I did, I couldn't get loose. Rather than go for help with one shoe on, I shouted at a couple of chaps to come up and act as ballast to 'sag' the platform enough for me to get out. The cause of all this was, a few days later, banned from the aluminium scaffolding as, when torqueing up a bolt, standing in the middle, he bent the platform to an alarming degree! I also still have a CEGB helmet that I was wearing when I heard something small hit it. I looked around to see what it was and found a Swann Morton scalpel that had been dropped from twenty feet above...

We do have a general tendency to just believe in (completed) floors, but I lost that belief in the late 1990s, not in a factory event, but in doing some voluntary work for a wildlife trust. Their headquarters was in a 300-year-old three storey ex-farmhouse. There was no electricity on the top floor, but they want to turn an old storeroom up there into an office. I was roped into providing sockets and lighting up there. The whole building was very delicate, but the components was generally big and it all seemed OK, if you were careful. Someone had been under the floor before me and had created a loose board, which was very handy - this had been to get at the wiring for the light in the office below, where a solicitor's wife was performing her secretarial duties. I was particularly keen to avoid damage to the ceiling - a delicate lath and plaster structure, on separate beams from the floor (a good idea, as flexing of the floor does not flex the ceiling). I made a point of doing all the work under the floor first and getting the lifted board back in place, so that I wouldn't put my foot through the ceiling. "Phew, I'm safe now!" At this point, it became clear that the ceiling in the 'new office' was not up to holding anything more than itself, so it was agreed to put the lights on the walls, which were a bit better. This involved going up and down two steps on a step ladder repeatedly. Stepping down from one task, I didn't stop as usual and the eruption of debris, plus the odd position of my leg, told me I had gone through the floor, but, even from where I was lying, I could see the 'loose board' really was in place. By the time that people from below arrived, I had managed to extricate myself and could see down through the hole to observe the state the solicitor's wife was in below. I had stepped onto the centre of the span of one board and, not being tongue-and-grooved, that single board had given way. The wood looked beautiful, polished by three hundred years of use, but it was like a photograph of some wood, stuck onto an inch thick digestive biscuit. Having ascertained that I was uncut underneath all the debris, I went downstairs to see the result, a yard-wide hole in the ceiling and the solicitor's wife totally submerged in the debris of three centuries storage above - one of my great regrets is not having the presence of mind at the time to record the imprint of my boot in the pile on top of her head. We took two binfuls of debris out of her office and the hole was plated over. The rest of the floor above was found to be in a similar state - I even managed a Jackie Chan test on another part of the floor and punched through it with my bare hand - so, be warned! The beams were found to be OK and the floor was boarded over. I now have a permanently-running 'soft floor detection programme', whenever I am above ground level - or a cellar.

Time to get back on track? There were other Tippex liveries...

Perhaps you've lost a bit of padding over Lent..?

I was going to mention the white stripes, but I didn't want to end up being corrected...

Put the kettle on before you click this...

Wandering back from the pub in Rathdowney, I would often glance northwards and wonder why there was one red light in the middle of a few sodium lamps at Donaghmore. This bemused me for many years. Last winter, I suddenly realised that I was actually seeing the lamp two miles further on, on the top of the mast at Ballybrophy. Things just happened to line up from my viewpoint. One very small problem solved.

Cold air balloons would be the safest method, if only they would fly. When I had a proper job, we used sulphur hexafluoride gas, both as an insulator and as a blast to control and extinguish arcs as a circuit breaker opened. It is a truly weird substance, chemically inert (before it's had a good bit of arcing to degenerate it), but extremely dense, about six times that of air. A balloon filled with it was a strange thing, it would just fall straight down and stay there, not even bouncing. There are a few videos of demonstrations on You Tube, where a tinfoil boat is floated on a fish tank filled with SF6, appearing to just float on nothing. Being chemically inert did mean that you never knew it was there, although it would affect your voice, in a reverse way to the often seen 'helium effect' - but this had its hazards, as it was quite possible to drown in it, without any sensation of drowning, as your lungs barely noticed the physical difference from air. This made entering vessels that had been filled with it a practice that required your full attention, even if they had been pumped out. My practice was to drop a vacuum cleaner pipe in to the bottom and run it for half an hour.

10:50pm? Probably just caught him checking his phone whilst waiting for a pint to settle...

I would need a general anaesthetic.