Broithe

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...

I've failed to drag @Andy Cundick 's post about the Swindon roof glazing into here, but we had a sort of reverse issue along those lines. For years, we had been getting hardened and tempered components from a long-established factory in Birmingham, without the slightest problem, but, all of a sudden, they started failing regularly. Investigations of the material suggested that the heat-treatment had been done incorrectly. Phone calls resulted in them claiming that everything was exactly the same as it had ever been, even down to the same chap doing them, as he always had. So, a visit to the factory was arranged, in the hope of resolving the issue. In the 1980s, "long-established' in terms of factories in Birmingham usually meant something more like 'semi-derelict'. Eventually, it was discovered what had changed. The business had been bought by a much larger company, the sort that had people in suits, and one of them had visited their new acquisition, to inspect the premises. He had been so horrified by the state of the place that he had ordered an immediate tidy-up, as these people usually do. One of the things they did was to make an attempt at cleaning the windows. This had affected the lighting in the factory to such an extent that the chap doing the heat-treatment had to get things a good bit hotter to see the same colour that he had been judging the temperature by for the previous thirty years..

To avoid running off topic elsewhere, I thought we could move this to here... I worked in 'British industry' from the mid-70s until 1993, when I realised that, after years of 'outsourcing', I actually had better facilities for my 'home office' jobs at home. Any refurbishment activity, particularly in production areas, was always viewed, and mostly correctly, with deep suspicion. Shortly afterwards 'they' would often take a 'difficult decision'*. I'm sure we must have actually knocked down places with the paint still wet... * More difficult for those that were actually affected, of course. I only did twenty years, but it was getting to the point where it was a matter of what colour uniform took me away. I couldn't/wouldn't do it again, but it was (almost) worth it for some of the daily madness that I witnessed. I remember being in a meeting and having to stand up to talk to someone on the other side of the table, because two blokes were fighting in between us - at the time, it just seemed a bit of an inconvenience. I had an old pressure vessel that I used occasionally for tests - it was, like everything, a bit rough-looking. "We need to get rid of that!", I was told - I bet the Manufacturing Director ten quid that we would buy another one within one year - it was just over three weeks before they had to order a replacement, which took four months to arrive and cost around twenty grand - he's never paid up - yet. I went into the stores, with a 'req' that had required six signatures - "Give me one of these, please" - "I can't, we have no stock" - "I can see two from here!" - "Yeah, but the system won't let me enter a negative stock value" - This developed into a meeting/argument with about eight people, trying to 'sort it out' - after an hour, I left, declaring that I was going to steal one, not that it officially existed, of course. I've no idea what they eventually did about it. I had a morning and afternoon ritual of visiting the skips, for the gems that would be flung in - one day, I passed a friend trying to build a hydraulic pump from a box of rusty bits (always a feature of our stores) - when I got to the skip, there were eight fully assembled pumps in there, so I dragged one out and gave it to him, leaving him to explain how he had managed to paint it as well, and the paint was dry...

I worked in 'British industry' from the mid-70s until 1993, when I realised that, after years of 'outsourcing', I actually had better facilities for my 'home office' jobs at home. Any refurbishment activity, particularly in production areas, was always viewed, and mostly correctly, with deep suspicion. Shortly afterwards 'they' would often take a 'difficult decision'*. I'm sure we must have actually knocked down places with the paint still wet... * More difficult for those that were actually affected, of course.

A quick check revealed that the station was just inside my 5km radius, so a brief inspection was carried out, revealing little of note. The parking situation has eased considerably, of course. Just four passenger vehicles parked (one is just out of sight in the car park corner), rather than a full car park and both sides of the access road. This substantial wall where the old cattle dock was is slowly disappearing. If you have any old rail left, you could improvise a crash barrier with it. The bees are carrying on as though nothing has happened. This has appeared on the ticket machine, for anybody modelling this very specific period in the future...

I'm reminded of another thing that used to go on with the Japanese chap. He had a friend at a university who sometimes got involved in what we were doing and came to see him. He had a name straight out of a 1930s crime novel - Doctor Fang. He was Chinese and also had good English, but with a (different) strong accent. We could cope with both of them, but they sometimes struggled to understand each other's spoken English and neither of them spoke the other's language. However, there is an odd situation with the Japanese and Chinese languages, although they are mutually incomprehensible when spoken, there is a great amount of similarity when they are written. This meant that their conversations often ended up with them scribbling on bits of paper and flinging them at each other. It sounds odd, initially, but we all have a similar thing with numbers - if a French chap says quatre-vingt-seize, we're stuck for a minute, as we translate it to four twenties and sixteen, but if he writes 96, there's no work to do at all...

For a few months, there was a sign here https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.8589776,-2.1861069,3a,75y,10.24h,87.93t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sGMb9hc4fJTwRJpQdP9whFQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DGMb9hc4fJTwRJpQdP9whFQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D324.53735%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 , informing people that the road was closed and they should find an alternative route - reverting to the map will inform you that the road is a dead end...

No, not that bad.

I worked with a Japanese chap. He had arrived in the UK in his early twenties, so his accent was established. His English was very good, but, over the next twenty years, because he was largely interacting with people who knew him and were 'trained' to understand him, he got a bit less determined to speak clearly. One day, I was involved with a failure of the factory floor and he happened to be passing by. It was the sort of thing that he would have had a knowledge of, so I indicated that we wanted his opinion. He gave a long and detailed account of what he thought was wrong and what we should do - then he went on his way. The chap who was directly involved with the job didn't really know him and asked me to explain what we were going to do. I did. Then he asked me, in all seriousness, how long it had taken me to learn Japanese. Through the whole three or four minutes of the conversation, he had no idea that we were being spoken to in English.

And - Click ^ for the full-size pictures.

An interesting detail.

I presume that you still can't actually buy a ticket to Manulla Junction? You're not meant to leave the station, merely to use it as a 'transfer point' for Westport or Ballina.

The same chap was a good bit older than us and very 'straight', he wasn't going to be listening to 'pop' music at all, for example. His son was in the Cubs and he often spent some time at the weekends taking them on hikes with another parent. We often got reports of his weekend activities. Over a period of time, it became slowly clear that this other parent, who he referred to as 'my friend, Mr Osbourne', was actually Ozzy Osbourne, who lived not far from him at that time. We carefully enquired about 'Mr Osbourne' and the description was good enough - and the assessment "I'm not sure what he does, I believe he's involved in the music industry and he does have a wine bar in Newport" - it was clearly Ozzy. We all resolved not to let Gerry in on the full details, as it must have been quite a relief for Ozzy to have some 'time off' from being 'his public self'. It went on for a few years, without Gerry ever having any real idea of what was going on. After one hike in the summer holidays, on a lovely summer's day around Dovedale, when there were crowds of walkers around, Gerry did remark that "He does seem to know a lot of people!" As an aside, the school in the local village is All Saints Primary School, which seems an odd group to name it after - every now and then, somebody alters the sign to Black Sabbath Primary School.

A chap I worked with fell off a ladder at home and broke both legs. He became quite obsessed about 'safety when working at height' and the conversation would often be diverted by him onto this subject. He bought some aluminium scaffolding, as he was never going up a ladder again - a decision that he would often inform people about. He had a holiday cottage in Wales and, unfortunately, he discovered that his beloved scaffolding would not fit in his car. Undaunted by this, he bought one of those tiny Honda pickups that was about in the early 1980s, just so he could take his scaffolding with him on holiday. He had been in the Navy for many years and I suspected that, at home, he would also park 'facing out', as he did in the car park at work - circumstances were to prove the correctness of my assumption. I nipped out to the car park and measured the tailgate, then we made a prefabricated sign that could be attached in a few seconds by means of some wire-ties. Nothing happened after we attached the sign... Until a fortnight later, when he came in one morning, demanding to know "Who did it!?" He had only finally seen the sign when his son, who had been sent out to wash the pickup, reported finding it. I still have a picture of it somewhere - R. G. Lewis (Scaffolding) Ltd. Enormous erections a speciality. He said that lots of people had been beeping and waving at him for the fortnight, but he just assumed that he must know them, so he just smiled and waved back

When I was running GoW bulbs, I used to run two 12 volt bulbs in series from the 16 volt ac supply. This gave a 'nicer' light and they ran a lot cooler - they also lasted for ever at the 8 volts they were getting. Running them at the rated voltage would give a much shorter life, I found. There would have been the issue that, when one bulb failed, it would have turned off the current to the other bulb in series with it, even though it was still capable of working. Therefore, I tended to try to make it easy to tell which were the 'associated' bulbs in that case, although simply being 'off' when all the others were 'on' was a good clue, and they tended to be near each other, of course. You would still have to discover which of the two was the failed bulb. But, in the end, none of the bulbs running at 8 volts ever failed. LEDs are definitely the way now, though, much more reliable and efficient.

They're 'OK' for what they are, but even when it's folded and stored, it's capable of producing injuries from the sharp edges, if you were to pass by without adequate care. The odd cuts from the many sharp edges would be survivable, but potentially awkward - however, the shearing action when folding it is well capable of provoking a hospital visit. Even the task of assembling it should be undertaken with sturdy gloves on. Other than that, it's alright...

Those modelling the Modern Image may need to consider upgrading the scenic details...

I'm not sure if they still do it, but McCulloch chainsaws used to have the following advice in the handbook - Chainsaw accidents are rarely trivial. The folding metal sawhorse has some advantages for me, in terms of storage volume and ease of transport. It doesn't get a lot of use, but it's never been used at 'my place'. If I had a great deal of use for one at the home location, then a permanent wooden one would be preferable. It's (saw)horses for courses, I suppose... I do keep one of these with me - if I need anything bigger then there's little point.

I'm always wary when using a chainsaw.

I think he's been hacked - or abducted by aliens.

I got myself one of those cheapo steel ones, with an attempt at 'teeth' on the upper sections. It's quite adequate for occasional use. Every single edge on it is sharp, though - you need to approach it with the care of someone picking up a dropped boxful of scalpel blades. It's more likely to injure you than the saw is! I'm reluctant to take the edges off, though, as that will go through the galvanising.