Broithe

Did he take an actual plaster-cast of the sea?

One gone now... I may actually be winning from all this lockdown stuff. Although I currently have zero income, I also spend virtually nothing. I haven't been in any shop (other than a weekly Lidl run) since early March. I've fixed loads of stuff 'for free' that I might have been tempted to replace, otherwise. I'm driving 28 miles per week and haven't put any fuel in since then, either. I still have half a tank. I would probably have only had two packs in 'normal' times, now I feel justified in going for a bundle.

Yeah, but it's got black horns.

It's dodgy fitting magnets on a HGV - some people might think you were trying to frig the tachograph...

We had an incident in a nearby town on the Big Island some years ago, before the practice was stopped. 'Waste matter', basically, guts, other bits and 'liquid', would be transported carefully in open wagons to a disposal facility. The smell was a constant cause of discomfort and there were regular complaints. There were also leakage issues and the odd 'splash' from the open tanks. One day, a driver was proceeding, with his usual care, through the main street of the town, when a woman in a hurry quite legitimately attempted to use a zebra crossing whilst pushing a pram. The driver had no option but to brake heavily, causing a tsunami to surge forwards, over the cab and about thirty yards down the road. People were literally covered in it, the driver was trapped in his cab and the state of their front steps seemed of little interest to people with the 'material' in their shops...

I had his old 2CV off him (after we'd used it to pull-start the CX). It developed a weird alternator fault - it would not charge for the first few minutes, after that, it would be OK all day. The number of the 'few' minutes was getting greater all the time and there came a point where I felt it necessary to intervene. Eventually, I came to the realisation that the brushes were only just touching the rings, but there was plenty of carbon left. They were being held off by a plastic post on the moulding - presumably a shipping thing, to stop the springs falling off in transit. After a bit of thought, I snapped it off - and everything was OK for a few more years. Once things had warmed up, the brushes had been just touching the rings again, but still wearing slightly, thus the 'warming up time' was constantly getting greater and there would have come a point at which the battery emptied before the alternator managed to charge it. I wonder how many extra spare brushes were sold because of that post? Something like this.

The bloke nextdoor had one of those in the 80s - lovely car to drive, but when the starter motor failed on his drive, we had to bodge up a pulley on a Black & Decker to drive the hydraulic pump to get the suspension pumped up high enough to get under it to change the motor. We couldn't even get a trolley jack under it on the drive, because it wouldn't start, and just lay on the ground.

Keep an eye on any of the various trackers - e.g., https://planefinder.net/flight/ADB3429 - she certainly won't fly under Athlone....

Currently over Nuremberg. Looking a bit cloudy here, though.

Other oils, of the type often used for sewing machines or bicycles, might be considered. But, this particular variety may require the use of some sort of protection measures. Although, it will prevent little-used equipment from going rusty.

Mmm, looking at those pictures of 007, I don't see the hatch in the roof for the ejection seat?

That's a lot of A Class, 121s and Guinness kegs wagons....

My first trip beyond 5km (to give them time to put the outside world back in place) involved passing the two bridges to the southwest of the station. The first seemed well able to resist being struck by my vehicle. The apparent 'limewash' finish on the stonework, whilst it might garner criticism if replicated on a layout, is real. Possibly Aspicilia calcarea. The track, looking back northeast towards the station, looked rather neat. The other bridge is in remarkable condition for its age, showing no real signs of ever being struck 'properly'.

If you only have five and a half minutes to spare, there is this. They were lucky the driver made it in on time, from his other job as a milkman.

Talk of things being late reminded me of the most effective and efficient job interview I've ever heard in progress... As I say, everything was late all the time, and painting was the final process, being done with brushes and then taking time to dry, of course. The painters were always under undue pressure - it wasn't their fault, they could have had it finished on time if it had been available when it should have been, but they were always the ones working on stuff when it was under extra lateness pressure. The head of the painters was a remarkable placid Sikh who was known as No, due to his name being Surinder... As I walked past one day, he was being berated by the Manufacturing Director about how long it was taking. A friend, Norman, was walking towards me from the other side. Norman liked to be 'involved' in everything and would offer an opinion about whatever was going on. As Norman walked past, he stated "My Dad can paint faster than that, and he's only got one arm!" "Well, bring him in with you on Monday!", was the instant decision. Norman's Dad worked there for the next four years. He actually had 1¾ arms, his left having been severed half-way up the forearm, but that was still OK for holding the paint tin. It remains the only time I ever saw anybody successful in a job interview when he wasn't there, or even aware that it was happening... The Manufacturing Director above was pretty much the only senior manager who was any use at all. He was involved in many of the extraordinary events that went on. My favourite was the time he nearly caused me to sustain cracked ribs. One of my "skills" was an ability to get into tight spaces. This was useful, as the stuff we made ended up as large assemblies and, should things fail on final test, it could mean days of dismantling, unless someone could get far enough in to do the work required to fix something. We had a few large assemblies of the same contract failing all around the factory floor at the same time. One of them looked like I could access it and save a day or two's work, but it was just a tiny bit too tight. My entry was via a pressure vessel with three aluminium busbars running in a triangular formation along it. I thought that I could make it up there, if we used the gantry crane to strain the two bars at the bottom upwards a bit. This proved to be possible and I inched up the tube on my back, having to breathe in a very shallow manner, due to the presence of the busbars pressing on my chest. I was aware that I needed to be sure that the strain on the busbars remained, or I would be in some trouble, having my chest movements insufficient for the necessary breathing - so I had appointed a rather laconic, but very trustworthy, chap to hang on to the pendant control of the crane for the quarter of an hour that this was going to take. I had just about reached to point where I could start to rectify the failure, the space getting tighter all the way there and was almost having to pant to breathe with the limited chest movement that I had available, when Cyril, the Manufacturing Director came running over to Whitey, holding the controls. "I want that crane and I want it now!", he demanded, expecting instant obedience. "You sound just like my ex-girlfriend" was the response that completely disarmed him, and nearly broke my ribs....

Great idea, thanks. To be honest, it's beginning to smell a bit now...

This chinchilla dust - how long do you have to dry them for before they crumble fine enough? I've had one hanging up in the airing cupboard/hot press for over a fortnight now and I'm not getting very good results yet.

Do the dials respond accurately to power and speed settings? Do they work on DC and DCC? Can they be recalibrated via DCC control or are they permanently set? Does the horn sound actually come out of the horn?

Many things convinced me in the last few years before I gave up trying. We had a half-million pound item, already late (as everything always was), waiting for three components before it could be tested. These items were about as simple as it could be, but we had "outsourced" all component manufacture by this stage. They were just a 100mm of 20mm diameter stainless bar, with a slight chamfer on each end and a 5mm hole just in from each end, for split-pins, not a 'difficult' item. "Give me a bit of bar and I can bring them in in the morning" I said. "You can really make them?" "Yes, I've had to get my own facilities, as you keep destroying the factory." "You can really do it?" "Yes." "OK - go and get him some bar!" Then, I said, half in jest, "But I'm not an Approved Supplier?" This resulted in a few suits arguing for ten minutes and finally deciding that they had to refuse my offer.... It was three weeks before the parts came. Ordering things properly... We were in desperate need of about a foot of 50mm brass bar. The supplier had a minimum order of a metre, but, because of our rather poor history on actually paying for stuff, they would only supply it if they had documentary evidence of the order, word of mouth no longer counted. We had just had a new computer system which required to use of only certain units for orders. This meant that we had to order 1,000mm of bar, rather than a metre. No great problem... ...until the typist missed one of the "m"s off. "I've got your brass bar outside, where do you want it?" "Just leave it under my desk, ta." Blank look... "I've got two lorry-loads..."

I picked up some waterproof speaker units a couple of years ago, and someone gave me a few feet of gas main pipe that they fitted perfectly. So, with a little bit of work, I have speakers on the front of the shed - finally wired up today and had a little test run today... ...but I'll fire them up with a bit of this sort of thing when it gets dark - that'll spook the neighbours.

Mmm, "gravity events" would be another complete sub-genre. My immediate boss was an odd bloke, everything was black and white, good or bad, with no graduation along the way. It was hard to predict which way he would go on anything. I was once banned from using an electric kettle to boil water for a cup of tea, because it hadn't been PAT-tested. I had just come back from doing a test which involved applying 750,000 volts in the open air, in an 'enclosure' whose gate interlocks hadn't worked for twenty years. Anyway, the point is that he, a few days later, walked under an eighty ton stator frame about thirty seconds before it fell thirty feet to the floor. In a quiet spell, we decided to train a new chap to 'take the swing out' of a load that was being moved with a pendant-controlled crane. It's a simple thing, once you have the knack of just poking the right button at the right moment. Unfortunately, he was a little hesitant and always delayed slightly too long, then hit the button at exactly the wrong moment. Things escalated quite quickly and the load, which was about a ton, was soon swinging almost up to the horizontal - nearly hitting the roof trusses. Even more unfortunately. there was a bit of a maze of obstacles on the floor and we were all on the opposite side of the path of the swing from him and it was only about a foot off the floor, at the lowest point. He was ordered to 'just leave it alone!', whilst I went out of the building, round the side and back in through a fire exit that you could rely on the smokers leaving open...

Until it came to the attention of the people in authority who had no understanding of it, we had our maintenance manuals compiled by a chap whose title was Technical Author. Geoff hadn't the slightest idea what we made or how they worked or what they did, but the manuals were as good as it was possible to be. We had to show him what was necessary and tell him what things were called, he would take some photographs and we might have to explain a few bits again, when he'd written what he thought we really meant, but that didn't happen very often. Also, he would not use the photographs directly - "They're just pictures of what you see, not what you should be looking at" - so, he did drawings, based on those photos and highlighting, very artistically, the parts that were pertinent to the task in hand. 'They' soon got rid of him, of course - then we had the usual sort of rubbish manuals where you really had to know what you were doing before you even bothered to read it... Geoff was a very 'artistic' person, not at all suited to industrial life. His watch only had an hour hand, not because it was trendy, as they seem to be now, but because the minute hand had fallen off. His attitude to time did not suit the sort of people who liked to think that they had to 'manage' everything, however badly they did it. For Christmas 1978, he was given a digital watch. At first, he wasn't keen, but he soon became obsessed with it's accuracy - he kept a transistor radio in the desk drawer, so he could hear the pips every hour and see how it was doing. He went from thinking in hours to caring about every second... He came from a family of eccentrics, though was certainly not the most far-out of them. His cousin, Derek, was famous for many stunts in his struggles with authority - trying to pay a fine for poaching with a cheque written on the side of a live pig, appearing in the dock on another charge covered in entrails, attending court dressed in a full frogman's outfit, climbing into Shrewsbury prison at Christmas and throwing cigarettes to the inmates from the roof and, most famously, nailing himself to a tree outside Stafford Crown Court, in protest against some other charge. Derek may have been more 'exciting', but my two years sitting next to Geoff were, perhaps, more educational..?

Factory vehicles is a whole sub-set of its own... We had a yellow Escort estate that was used by anybody, and nobody seemed to be responsible for it. One day, waiting for some stuff to put in the back, we decided to give it a look over. It didn't have a legal tyre on it, and the 'spare' had a huge puncture in it. I pulled the dip stick out and it was red rusty, worse than anything I ever saw in a scrap yard. So we got under and took the sump plug out, to see how much was in there. Nothing came out. Thinking the hole must be sludged up, we stuck a wire up, it came out dry, so we dropped the sump - it was lined with a thick, black, grease-like substance. The stuff arrived, so we put it back together and it was driven off - a search later found no records of it ever being serviced. Management cars were properly serviced and this was all organised by a chap in Purchasing. Over a period of time, we swapped over from Ford to Rover. By the purest chance, the chap whose car was the last to be changed had cause to go and see the accountant who was responsible for the car servicing contract and the current invoice was on his desk. The cars were recorded by Make, Model and Registration Number. It was noticed that there was a Ford on the list, but 'we' didn't have one any more... Investigations finally revealed that it belonged to the Purchasing Officer. If he had swapped it for a Rover before the end of the changeover, he could still be doing it, nobody checked the registration numbers... We had an old Bedford van that was only driven every few months between various substation sites. It was really a mobile workshop and only did a few hundred miles a year. Now and then, it would call into the factory as it went past. On one of these occasions, it was noted that the tax was over four years out of date and subsequent investigations then discovered that it had never had an MOT, despite the first one being due nearly twenty years earlier. We had a manager who was famously stupid. One wet lunchtime, he drove his company car to the canteen. When he came back out, the weather was lovely and sunny. When he came to go home, he couldn't find his car, so he reported it stolen. He only realised where it was when the copper who had asked him "When did you last drive it?" then asked him, after being told that he had driven it to the canteen "But, did you drive it back, Sir?".

I was working late one night, with one other person, in a large workshop, with an ancient gantry crane that had been converted to pendant control, but still retained the old cab. I had been controlling the crane, to deliver stuff to the other chap, who was about twenty feet up on some scaffolding, when an old sodium floodlight bulb, about the size of a two-litre pop bottle, fell out of the disused cab and hit the floor next to me, exploding quite spectacularly, having been left in there after a bulb was changed and subsequently dislodged by the vibrations of me inching the crane. We decided that, before we went home, we would investigate if any other "bombs" were still in the cab, so I drove the crane to the end and the other chap went up the access ladder to investigate. He had just shouted to me that there were none there when I heard the outside door to the workshop bang shut - I heard this a hundred times a day and didn't really register it, as I shouted back "Well, there's no point carrying on any more, we might as well just f--- off home now!" I then found myself with a bloke who was a sort of half-my-boss putting his arm round me to comfort me in what he presumed was me having some sort of breakdown, as I had appeared to him to be standing in the middle of an empty workshop, shouting at the sky about the pointlessness of it all... I had another similar event with the same chap. My office was at the top of a four-storey block and was served by an ancient lift that I rarely used, preferring the 'square-spiral' stairs that went around the lift-shaft. One day, I had been up the stairs that often, that I resolved to use the lift this time - as I pushed the button, the lift, which normally 'rested' on the ground floor, was called, a millisecond before me, by somebody on the top floor, and I heard it leave - you could hear the relays clicking as it went up and came down. I decided to wait the two minutes that I knew this would take - and to use this time to try to achieve a 'special effect' that was possible. If you hummed at a very low and steady frequency, you could get the 'organ tube' of the stairwell to resonate quite spectacularly. This involved getting the frequency absolutely exact and sustaining it for the several seconds that it took to build up the full resonant note. So, I stood there, humming loudly, with my eyes shut in concentration and my fingers in my ears, trying to concentrate, but not ever quite getting the full note going. Eventually, I could hear the relays clicking and the lift arrived back down, so I opened my eyes and prepared to enter it, only to find that the chap mentioned above was standing there, also waiting for the lift, with two customers - we all got in the lift and nobody ever said any more about it...