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To be honest I don't really see that one. The playgrounds I remember had something like a slide, a roundabout, one of those long horse things and some swings. All located on skull smashing concrete. The playgrounds I take my daughter to these days are much better. They have things like zip wires, climbing frames sited in sand pits with pulleys and buckets for moving sand about, big spinning dishes to sit in, trampolines, the list goes on. No concrete in sight. Safer and way more fun.

They're still made out of UPVC which is energy intensive to manufacture and full of unpleasant chemicals. It's good that they're recycling though. Previously the old frames would be burned or go to landfill. UPVC windows only last about twenty years which is less than wooden frames if you look after them.

Same thing they're doing now, except they're 3Difying films shot in 2D with added migraine.

It means the product is guaranteed to last for its expected lifetime. Which is the length of time from when you bought it to when it breaks. It's never your lifetime unless the guarantee is underwritten by the Mafia.

This is part of the RAF press release given on http://www.woottonbassett.gov.uk which differs a little from your route. Best thing to do is just hang around staring at the sky

It doesn't really matter. For a given difference in temperature you can calculate how much heat leaks through your roof. You can put a definite £ value on that heat and decide if it's worth saving. Well, insulation will help with your AC bills too.

What I'm saying is that every kilowatt hour you save is going to go up in value all the time. Like I said, all this stuff is quantifiable. Look up mu values, they're what the builders used when deciding what size boiler to put in your house when it was built. You can just keep on saying it's all a big con if you want, but if you won't bother to look at the actual facts to make an informed decision it's up to you.

The thing with insulation is it's easily quantifiable. You can calculate the extra energy required to heat your house to say 10 degrees above the outside temperature compared to if it was insulated. You can then put a figure on what that does to your gas bill and see how it goes. Remember, energy prices are going nowhere but up! If you look around I'm sure you could find an online calculator

Loft insulation is an absolute no brainer. If you put the stuff down yourself the payback period is about two years. If you want to board your loft you can get boards with a thick slab of insulation on the underside. Double glazing is the one where you never get your money back.

They aren't replacing the planes, they're closing the base. Repatriations will be going to Brize Norton.

Anyone remember the BBC adaptation of John Christopher's 'Tripods'? It was prematurely cancelled and the final episode ended with our heroes returning to base only to discover the alien invaders had blown everything up and humanity was doomed!. The End.

There's an interesting article here about the quite insane amount of money the US Army spends on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically everything runs on diesel and it has to be tankered in off-road through hostile territory. There's mention of insulating tents and the energy saving cutting some 11,000 truck journeys and associated risks to personnel.

I just bought one at Telford. They are on the web site, but it's not obvious if you're looking for 'bending' tools. It is actually a drilling table with 'radius forming attachments' (direct link)

At Guildex with some other Flying Scotsmen

Replacement part 116 duly arrived and here are the bits fitted. Now, off to box it up ready for the Flying Scotsman stand at Guildex tomorrow.

Haven't done a huge amount lately. Here it is with some more bits added to the boiler. Also at issue 116 I've had my first missing parts. Mag arrived in its sealed plastic bag, but no parts at all

Brass would certainly be less chunky. Mine is slightly a casualty of not having all the parts up front. The bulkhead should have been not quite flush with the curve around the tender sides so that the brass beading added later would be.

Postie's been and left some more bits for the tender. One of the castings was duff so I made it up with some milliput which hopefully won't look to bad once it's painted.

Trying out the valve gear for fit. On the whole it fits well and moves freely. Note that the combination lever needs bending to fit but no mention of this is made in the instructions. Also the threads on the cast return crank pin are under sized and pull straight through...

Tender again. Now with the bits stuck on

The tender is much improved by the addition of axle boxes. The rest of the stuff is just plonked there to see how well it fits together. Some fettling is required as cramming it all in there twists things and makes the tender wobble on its wheels.

Hi. Yes, it is the part work model. It's basically the DJH O gauge A1 model tweaked for mass-production.

I wasn't sure how the solder would take to the blocks that form the inner part of the cylinders. The bits you can see are white metal but the stuff inside is something else. So the outer parts of the cylinders are glued on. The front buffer beam. Complete with old-school rivets I attached it to the footplate with copious gobs of epoxy

Here's the tender body. It's plastic with a white metal support. No solder here! The frames can be soldered though Don't look at the horrible soldering. I was too lazy to get the big iron out and now I'll have to clean that up.... Beading around the tender is etched brass glued on. The results of all that laminating. I got sooo fed up of laminating.... This is something I put off doing for a long time. The frames needed grinding back so that the wheels can go round. See, there's room for splashers and everything! Making a start on screwing the valve gear together Soldering the tender frames on. I was bold here and soldered them on with a 40 watt iron. Happily no plastic melted! Confident of soldering round plastic I soldered the rest of the tender chassis as well Back to gluing again...

Right then. Time to restart my Flying Scotsman thread. I originally started this on old RMWeb but that thread seems to have vanished.. I tried putting it in a blog on here, but I don't get on with the blog format so I'll repost it all here. Progress will seem really fast until I catch up with my current progress where my usual glacial pace will become apparent. So. Starting off with the contents of my old thread. ======================================== Here we go. A startlingly inappropriate kit for a beginner to loco building..... There's a lot of catching up to do so starting with last December. This is the first solder of the kit. I'm soldering rather than superglueing like the instructions say to. Even I can tell superglue isn't going to work. Actually,, I did mend an Austin Allegro engine mount with superglue and it held for the year I had it for.... And here it is. The cab with completely wrong windows The instructions in issue one were wrong.... Made another cab (I got 4 issue ones) and also tried making some rivet detail from cut down pins. Still not right though. The frames look dreadful no matter which way round you stick them. Here we go with the third cab. This time I bought some rivets from Scale Hardware and filed down the frames as suggested by another RMwebber. Now it looks half decent. Now let's have a look at the chassis. The idea here is that it fixes together rigidly enough so that it's difficult to get it out of alignment. Here it is. It seems to sit flat on a glass table so it's probably OK. Here's the cartazzi truck. And with some castings attached. With Araldite since I still haven't tried low melt solder yet... Here's the zamak(?) footplate plonked on the chassis. This is the tender chassis neatly demonstrating one of the disadvantages of getting bits sent through the post... It went together well enough though. Skipping forward to when I got some wheels it runs quite smoothly. The big difference between this kit and the DJH original is the use of plastic. Here's the first of the plastic. The cab roof. The only other plastic kits I've built have been from Airfix. This stuff is a lot better. Here's the cab, now with handrails posed on the chassis. Comedy interlude. Some decals. Won't be needing them for a while.... Now for the bigie. The plastic boiler. Looks good to me. Those bits of wire are what Hachette expect me to make rivets out of. Nuts to that! I still had loads left over from the cab. Looking loco shaped. This is the plastic A3 backhead that was initially supplied. This is it's whitemetal replacement. And some stuff to stick to it. Like this. And there we are. Eleven months later. Hachette had some trouble initially accepting my payment so my issues are a little behind. I'm only up to #33. Finally got round to doing a bit more.... Stuck the bits to the backhead. Rather than using the supplied brass wire and painting it I stripped down some copper cable and used that instead. Guard irons and some brackets fitted to the chassis along with another pair of drivers. Here we go with the coupling rods. First off made a horlicks of this one. I picked up the mag with instructions for the other side and ended up soldering it back to front. Some unsoldering later.... My expensive jig. All soldered up. And cleaned. Here we go with the tender brakes. The instructions tell you fit the brakes and line them up to the wheels. I figured using the rod on the etch as jig might save some trouble later. Superglued these. I still haven't tried low temperature soldering yet. The rods were soldered to the brakes using regular solder. Quickly. The water scoop is also on now. It's a solid casting. Some people have carefully hollowed theirs out. I didn't. By the time the frames are on it's not going to be that visible anyway. OK. Time I did some more of this. Out of the box, the footplate fouls the rear drivers. To fix this 2mm needs to be trimmed from the front of the frames. The guard irons need to come off. Also the splashers since they apparently are going to foul the wheels as well. Quite a bit of the footplate still needed to be filed away before the wheels would turn and ther'd be no danger of them shorting Now the footplate sits nicely on the chassis and all the wheels go round too! Now the footplate's been moved back and the wheels go round I can attach the splashers. This picture's a little off-centre but the splashers do sit directly above the wheel centres. A little bit more of the valve gear laminated... Right then. Here are the parts of the front bogie laid out. One etch folds up to make the basic structure. The other has some side detail with etched rivets. The instructions would have you laminating the sides before the issue containing the bushes has arrived. I just used the bushes to align the parts while laminating which seemed a little more sane. And the trailing bogie. The wheel weights are on this etch too. There we are. A full complement of wheels. All I need to do now is get some Slaters axles so the don't al wobble drunkenly and then I can fit the brakes. A little bit more. Fitting the brakes and rodding. As I did with the tender I used the rodding to position the brakes instead of doing it partwork fashion and sticking the brakes on first and tring to get the rodding to fit afterwards. Still wimped out of soldering white metal and used epoxy to fix the brakes to the frames and solder on the rodding. I think I have the rods a bit close to the centre here...