Canal Digger

Puppet on a String - Sandie Shaw

All Over The World - ELO

Having been the subject of numerous Management deciding to reorganise their departments having been advised to do so by consultants of course who had spent some time watching from afar (I've seen the same consultant give the opinion that 'Change X' should happen, then later that same consultant recommended to a new Manager that 'Change Y', yes you've guessed it, reverse of X). That and several layers of Managers [one on a national basis, another on a building wide and yet another making changes all at the same time. Ah life in the Civil Service was fun! I did ask if I could have the contract for the pens etc to give away to celebrate the new Team, they were the only ones to gain.

Bear can do quite a lot of roofing felt nails......and some door hinges & padlock. I'm about to demolish a shed, that or catch the bits that come off in the next storm!

Ah, but how many of them can shift anything (not necessarily snow)?

It is my sad duty to inform TNMers of the untimely demise of one Happy Hippo on Saturday February 4th 2023. The cause of death was a pannier tank wedged in a delicate orifice shortly after the deceased sent a text message. Dave There's gratitude for you! You offer to help and ...

Thank you NOT! I now have the image of HH in a Frank n furter costume!

brain cleaner please ASAP!

Several years ago, one dark night parked outside a friends house in my old Humber Septre, hand brake on, ignition off etc. Then the houses in front started moving sideways ....., 1st house, 2nd ... In the snow, I had left the road and stopped on what was normally a grassy bank and we were sliding sideways downhill, getting faster and faster until we hit a bank of snow

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=572220088082064 HH you appear to be in San Antonia?

Ah, more happy memories courtesy of HH. Life for a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF was not dissimilar to that which he describes for an Army Captain except that the course was entitled Junior Command and Staff School (or JCSS for short) and the exam was just called the C exam. There was a third hoop before being eligible for promotion to Squadron Leader, though, which was an 18 month correspondence course called ISS (Individual Studies something or other) with an exam at the end. Naturally, being the RAF (where the art of cramming a week's course into a month was highly refined) some of the subject matter in JCSS, ISS and the C exam was repeated (and promptly forgotten). The delights of dear old JSP (Joint Services Publication) 101 cropped up in all the aforementioned trials and one was expected to be able to reproduce the different types of correspondence and other paperwork without reference to it during exams but no-one with any sense would actually try to do so in everyday life and like HH there was a copy in my office that was well thumbed. Could it just be coincidence that Room 101 has connotations of severe dislike? Funnily enough, the location of the JCSS was in those days RAF Tern Hill, now an Army barracks, which is only about a mile from where I now live. I don't actually shudder when I pass it but it's a close run thing. I imagine that many people in other walks of life had similar mind numbing sequences of qualification for progression. I'd hate to think that the likes of HH and I were the only ones to suffer. This reminds me of 'Happy Days' of me trying to learn a strange language, known as RN Signalese, so that me a Civi Project Manager could write Signals asking ..... or explaining something. When I could I wrote in plain text and asked a more experienced person, but on Friday afternoons Service Personnel were rarely around.

Sorry Dave, but that's no good at all. First of all what you have to do is convert this meter thing into feet. According to my Casio Super-FX calculator (formerly the property of one or other of the kids when they were is school and who are now all over forty) that's PD close to 3.3 feet. Now if 20mm represents 3.3 feet the actual scale is 6.06 mm/ft which, for easy math, we could round off to 6mm/foot. So you see it isn't really 1:50 scale, it's actually 6mm scale. Pretty obvious really. Surely the scale of this layout should be defined by the ratio of the size of the wagon (& other future rolling stock) compared to the real thing? This debate about ratio of the track gauge is like debating H0 v 00 v EM v P4. Jamie, kindly provide the necessary info I'll get my coat ...

Did a good trip several years ago: Left home 1am ish, through Chunnel (napped), Bruges for breakfast, Berlin for 10pm dinner. Then back other way 4 days later. Re prats on Motorways: Coming back late one night from Swansea, very little traffic, along M4, there was an area of 'nothing' that I was catching up. 'Nothing' in the sense that the lights ahead (oncoming traffic, surrounding lights from alongside M4 etc) would disappear then reappear, very strange. As I approached the lack of light was getting bigger & bigger, getting spooky ,,,, ,,,. ,,,, What I was seeing (or not seeing to be exact) was the silhouette of a Cattle Truck so plastered in mud, that not a speck of light was shinning/ reflected even from 6ft as I overtook giving it a wide berth. A call to the Police followed

It's probably a bit too coarse, I did try my Minidrill with a flat sanding disc, but the finger tip is too sensitive and I couldn't keep the one hand still enough, and my right hand holding the drill was shaky anyway, so it was quite uncomfortable and I gave up I suppose I could try and keep the hand still by clamping it into my big machine vice and milling the nail(s) down with a fly cutter...... I can't find the article now but I'm sure that I remember reading about local (to me) explorer David Hempleman Addams being told that he might be able to go go on an upcoming expedition because of his frostbitten finger tips, so he went down to his workshop and cut the offending tips off with a bandsaw. No frostbite now!

Lunch today for £15: Bacon & egg baguette, chips and salad plus coffee

My first introduction to a lathe was for the whole class to line up and drill a hole in a piece of steel held in the chuck using a drill mounted in the tailstock, Very simple, what could go wrong, well as my surname begins with a 'W' the teacher was getting bored before my turn. The comedian before me new a bit about lathes so left it in reverse , me not knowing the controls, obeyed the simple instructions and started drilling, curiously the drill bit turned blue, not knowing any better I continued .... . My cards were marked from then on

Ver nice. Why is this older stuff so much more interesting? Injecta AG Teufenhal, makers of the SBB Red Arrow model, claimed to be the first people to do Diecasting in Switzerland in 1930s, having sent someone to the US to learn the process. Does anyone know otherwise? Is this the only model they made, so perhaps a 'Salesman's Giveaway'?

Is that the same thread that has a tutorial on working water troughs and pickup gear in 2mm scale? No, HH is thinking about the thread describing how to get carriage doors to open automatically as the train comes to a stop in T Scale

the helicopter! You mean that you don't have a fleet? Managed to get one car into the garage (alongside the pool table) for the winter, it's a Smart electric convertible, so less fun in the winter. Daughter in Liverpool tells us that it is snowing there

In N scale wasn't it Bear. That's what you said to me the other day. There was a very nice, unfinished, 2mm scale model of York (?) Station at Larkrail in Bath a few months ago.

I'm also glad not to worry about such things. Back in the Dark Ages, when I did my C&G/ BTEC Electrical Technician's Course A kilobyte was 1024 (2 to the power of 10) bytes. 1000 bytes is meaningless. Methinks that the people who name things are talking complete and utter kibil00ks. Oh happy days working with base 8 or base 16 computing systems and a calculator using Polish Logic.

In a short skirt by any chance? I used to know the electrician (yes!) on HMS Victory, he had a terrible place for a desk by a window under the Gangplank, especially bad on a breezy day

Only for the Captain/ Executive Officer through the periscope

Also marked to show correction factor due to temperature variation and certificates (past 10 years at least) to show that the angle of the jaws has been checked against a standard.

I used to test/ repair radios, radar, sonar etc for the MoD, I felt old when I saw the same equipment in a museum and that was 20+ years ago!