Dave Hunt

When we lived in a small village in Lincolnshire, the house across the lane was two Elizabethan cottages knocked into one and was a listed building. The chap who had bought them was in the process of rebuilding them using the original wattle & daub method due rot in the corner timbers. He was replacing one wall at a time by supporting the roof and floors on pole jacks then taking the wall down and rebuilding it. The new corner posts were oak with some sort of preservative treatment although I don’t know what it was, and when I asked him how long he was expecting them to last he said that since the original ones had been in for over four hundred years he didn’t think that he would have much trouble in his lifetime. The only alteration he was making to the original structure was to include a French drain all

round the outside of the house to prevent the ground from retaining water.

Dave

I was taught as a lad by an uncle who was a carpenter that if splicing a piece into an upright outside timber, always make the join at an angle with the bottom of the join on the outside face. That way water will run freely down the join line and not collect there, thus avoiding rot.

Dave

Back to walking a (slow) mile today, although my back didn't half ache afterwards. I was thinking about spending some time in the workshop this afternoon but I had to have a lie down instead. It wasn't all wasted time, though, as I did a lot of thinking about how I'm going to make the sheerlegs for my layout. Ah, well, onwards and upwards as they say.

Dave

40 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

Meanwhile in the "heart of stone" class, some notably idiotic dog stories around at present...

........The Golgafrincham B Ark must be refusing bookings daily... 

Wasn't the population of Golgafrincham wiped out by a virus picked up from an unclean telephone after all the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers were shipped off in the B Ark?

Dave

I don't recall which one it was but a friend who models in OO told me that an Iain Rice plan that he liked the look of couldn't actually be built because the necessary pointwork wouldn't fit in the space available.

Dave

What was the question?

Dave

1 minute ago, SM42 said:

OK, I think I'm trying  too hard.  

 

I've just spent 20 seconds looking in the fridge and couldn't see what I was looking for

 

Hardly surprising as I was looking for the vacuum cleaner attachments.  

 

I may need a lie down.

 

Andy 

Don't worry Andy, it's just your brain practising for old age. You may ask how I know this..........?

Dave

1 hour ago, Tony_S said:

I like the 13 1/2 inch dimension…

Probably half an inch bigger than Iain's front to back waist measurement.

Dave

My visit to see the practice nurse for an assessment of my spine opsite wound this morning went well and I can now have a shower. After two weeks without one it will be bliss, not to mention that Jill will probably be willing to sleep in the same room as me again. 

Dave

4 minutes ago, J. S. Bach said:

Polecats (skunks) can make decent pets and will have the scent glands removed along with neutering.

One night many years ago a friend and I were driving over the Peak District when we saw an animal of some sort lying in the road. We stopped and discovered what appeared to be a ferret and upon finding it was still alive but injured, wrapped it in a dog blanket and took it with us, not knowing what we were going to do with it except some vague idea of trying to find how to contact the RSPCA. We found a policeman on foot patrol in Matlock (This was a long time ago) who was very helpful and contacted a colleague who kept ferrets and came to see our patient. He identified it as a polecat and took it away to be looked after. The downside to the story is that even though the animal had been wrapped in a blanket, the car and both of us stank to high heaven. After taking showers and changing clothes we weren't too bad but it took ages before the car stopped being niffy.

Dave  

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

But as I said, I'm a cat person. In fact, I am our cat's emotional support human.

 

Except that I'm out of favour just now because I've stripped all the beds. The look I got...

Isn't there a saying along the lines of, "Dogs have owners, cats have staff" ? A truism in my experience.

Dave

4 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

There might be a rose bush in the vicinity but I am reliably informed that the arch will support a Clematis plant.  It was one of a pair bought early last year.  Unfortunately one was damaged, so the supplier sent us another one as a replacement.

 

Of course with the typical low cunning emanating from all corners of the Hippodrome, the damaged Clematis was taken into the horticultural hospital, and after a period of intensive care, has emerged into the garden as a viable climber.

A few years ago Jill got some sort of shrub by mail order and when it arrived it looked like a dead stick that had been put through a mangle. She duly complained to the vendors, enclosing a photograph of said stick, and without demur they replaced it. The 'dead' one was then placed in a bucket of other garden waste, soil etc. where it remained over winter and the following spring started showing signs of life. It is now a large healthy shrub by the front door and is much loved by the birds, bees and spiders. Don't ask me what it is called, all I know is that it is green and bushy, or should that be shrubby?

Dave

5 minutes ago, pH said:

We once put a broken glass vase in the glass bin and had it returned with a note saying whole bottles and jars only - no broken glass. So how do they ‘process’ the items in the glass bin? - tip the bin into the back of a pickup truck, already containing the glass collected from previous houses on the route. 

Exactly what I wonder. Our glass, metal and plastic recycling bins are put onto a hoist at the back of the lorry that lifts them up then tips the contents into the hopper with much crashing and banging. Ergo a lot of the glass must get broken but we are warned not to put broken glass in the bin. Why?

Dave

9 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

This is why I walk all our broken glass to the bottle bank at the end of the road. 

Lucky you to have a bottle bank nearby. All the bottle banks near us disappeared after the multi-bin collections started years ago and the nearest ones now are twelve miles away at a recycling facility - and it has just been announced that will soon close due to council budget cutbacks, leaving the nearest one being twenty miles.

Dave

1 hour ago, SM42 said:

I've just spent 15 minutes ferreting through my stock cupboard of shame. 

 

For reasons lost in the mists of time I seem to have several Lima 117 centre cars but not enough driving ends to go with them. 

 

What was I thinking ?. 

I recently went through my cupboard of shame and although I did remember acquiring most of the stuff in there I had absolutely no recollection of where a complete etched brass locomotive kit, an etched brass parcels van kit and two plastic wagon kits in a polythene bag came from. It would seem that Polish Andy and I share some sort of defective gene.

Dave   

The large parasol in our front garden has been blown onto the hedge. We don't actually own a large parasol though.......

it's really quite windy.

Dave 

2 hours ago, SM42 said:

Wheelie bins are currently a hazard to navigation. 

The wheeliebins hereabouts are collected tomorrow and since the lorry is here about 0700 most folk will be putting them out tonight. if the wind keeps up it should be carnage by morning.

Dave

4 hours ago, polybear said:

 

I'm guessing the Neighbour didn't go for the shared drive option because they are a potential PITA and cause of arguments - this can put buyers off.

 

I bet he was wishing that it was a shared drive when the front of his shiny new Lexus was remodelled by a Transit van coming round the corner.

Dave

26 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

This is what happens when you allow planners and designers to work from home with no requirement to attend site meetings!

The chap across the road from Hunt Towers applied for planning permission to have a house built in his garden and to have an access driveway alongside. I had no problem with the house but the drive opened onto the road at the inside of the apex of a bend and I considered it dangerous, suggesting that a shared driveway would be safer. I went and stood where the proposed driveway would exit onto the road and timed how long it took from first seeing a car coming down the road to it being at the proposed exit point. The answer was two seconds compared with five seconds for the existing drive. I wrote to the planners with my findings and received a reply stating that the plan had been examined by the highways department and declared safe . Guess what happened within a few months of the house and drive being built?

Dave

Not far from here there used to be a cycle track through a town that has now been officially repurposed as a car park. There is also another one out in the country that suddenly stops without warning at an extremely busy roundabout then reappears on the other side. Since it is a two way track, negotiating the roundabout is somewhat tense. The other problem is that the hedge alongside has been allowed to encroach on the track to the extent that it is virtually impassable in places.

Dave

There’s a children’s medicine called Calpol. I don’t know what’s in it but No. 1 son and DiL seemed to dose their two ankle snappers with the stuff at the slightest suggestion of a cough or sniffle and I’m sure it sedated them. Maybe it’s a left over from good queen Vicky’s days.

Dave

2 hours ago, Winslow Boy said:

Well think of it this way. If those pendants weren't at the preserved railway open days asking about colour schemes where else would they be. 

Hanging round peoples’ necks?

Dave

Imagine - delivering McDonalds to innocent citizens. How downright evil can some people get?

Dave

3 hours ago, ian@stenochs said:

It's only paint!  Doesn't improve, or reduce, eficiency or make locomotives faster or more powerful. Unfortunately it is what we see and it diverts us from the the real engineering beauty underneath.

I quite agree Ian; when I was writing the Midland Engines and LMS Locomotive Profile books I used to find doing the livery sections a bit tedious but judging by the correspondence I got concerning them it would seem that there are a lot of people out there who find the minutiae of colour schemes and decoration very important indeed. Hence it paid to get it right if only to avoid the wrath of the minutiae spotters.

Dave