Member postings for Nick Clarke 3

In a previous life I sold lining tape, both the type where a centre section was torn out leaving a strip either side and also the type that left a line of colour when you pulled a carrier tape away - Perhaps if the first type is still available it might help? - mind you I also remember a TV documentary about Van den Plas where they showed a strip being applied the full length of a BMC 1300 in one go with a long brush loaded with paint, like Michael saw on the tank. No guide or anything - just a steady hand and years of experience. I am deeply envious of course!

All this recognises is that a greater proportion of PC users needed help than the Mac users. For example if the PC users are low level clerical users just given a computer and similar their computer knowledge might be low.

If a user was sufficiently high level to be able to choose a far more expensive option or a graphic artist, media creator or mac developer they might be more independent as a computer user.

or perhaps any of many other different situations.

The statement is not justified by any valid evidence.

I saw one of these once, and they were so common a sight that either Dinky or Corgi produced a 1/43 model of a bus chassis under test with weights on to simulate a body.

Nowadays it is harder to drive round with no body on a vehicle than with a body in the boot!!!

I agree it looks like a thermocouple to measure temperature - your ohms readings are unusual though.

But if it is something you have just come across remember it is not necessarily a working thermocouple.... !

A word of caution -

Although I work with the blind and visually impaired every day I'm afraid I made a daft mistake.

My optician gave me an Amsler grid to monitor my sight and it was very distorted - when I looked at it through my varifocal glasses!

After a moments panic I looked at some print and realised the issue was with the glasses not me! - subsequently confirmed by my optician.

I have read in an old ME (can't remember which - will have to hunt) a warning about a welder who had a gas lighter in his pocket that was set off by a spark, exploded and killed him.

This caused some discussion in the letters pages until the editor was forced to write a retraction as the whole thing was a hoax and had never happened!

As my workshop is in the garage that also stores the freezer and other domestic items it has it's own built in cooling system.

Unfortunately it is off at the moment as I can't find the bottle opener.

While unfamiliar with the article mentioned above there were others from the 1970s onwards that suggested the use of three brush car dynamos converted into traction motors. Two brush dynamos are far less easy to use as motors.

Three brush dynamos were replaced on cars by the more efficient two brush types from the late 1930's and were almost totally extinct by the 1950s. However due to the fact that cars tended to be kept longer then, the older kind of dynamos were still available from scrapyards in the 1970s and eighties.

I suspect that today you may find it harder to source any type of car dynamo, let alone the three brush type except as a very expensive spare part for a classic car. The scrap car trade has shrunk, as has the car electrical spare part business.

Check carefully what the article asks for, but my gut feeling is that advances in motor technology, particularly in permanent magnet motors, my mean that old car parts are not the best way to go.

In the early nineties I was part of a team doing a roll out for a large organisation and as we went round the huge office we would ask the user to log in and we would do the upgrade. However people were less concerned with security in those days so after the first day what happened was that we would turn up and a bunch of people would allow us access by telling us their passwords or letting us know where they were saved while they went off for a coffee.

Post-it notes on the edge of the screen with the password in plain text or perhaps disguised as phone numbers were the most common, followed by a note in the top desk drawer. The passwords we were told included sports teams (MUFC, AVFC, LCFC, Blues, Reds, Notts, Barbarians, Essex etc) names, presumably of family or pets, or every swear word as foul as you like.

I still reckon that if I typed **** or ******** into a computer in any large office I could get into at least one computer. (replace the asterisks to (bad) taste!)

The ability to lie convincingly when the boss asks is that work you are doing?

Robin quite agree - it takes effort to be a truly irritable old git!

Or for C programmers 2b || !(2b) = To be or not to be

and if you are worried about biometrics what about removing the entire eye as in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons?

Ar you getting an irritable old git?

I hope so but I have been waiting for mine for weeks. I have tried phoning and only got that awful music - and if it is not some awful stuff why to they insist on ruining the Brandenburg concertos by using them for such an inane purpose - and if you do get through to a real person they only take you through a script on their computer - if I wanted that all they need to do is to put it on the internet as I have several computers of my own that would do the job jut as well and while my day has already been spoiled at least it would not involve another person - and talking of other people have you noticed that if you have an issue with someone on a phone support desk that they can never let you speak to a manager - in my day if there was a problem in a shop you just asked for the manager and someone would come down to sort out your problem for you - although as the issue seems to be 'the system' there may not be a solution and when did we start 'the system' it seems to be an inflexible barrier to customer service - service!! I ask you when our first colour TV arrived two guys carried it in and they set it up an checked you knew how to operate it - nowadays you give yourselves a hernia lifting a huge box into the back of your own car and then lifting it out again before having to set it all up yourself and if it does not work you have to take it back to the shop and repeat after spending precious hours out of your life on a customer support line that offers no support. And breathe!

I hope you get your irritable old git soon - I am certain I am not one yet!

Keep smiling!!

Drummond recommended 250 rpm as the speed of a countershaft so perhaps 400 rpm might be at the top end?

As an IT professional and trainer for more than 35 years please do not hide your password, no matter how well disguised, in a phone number. It is the first example of 'what not to do' in many security training sessions, followed by a word or number that can be related to you - wife/child/pet's name favourite sports team etc.

The good news is that most thieves cannot be bothered to try to find out a PIN - but in the odd exception do not leave your PIN in the same wallet as your card.

If you carry a phone with you put the number in that, with a screenlock on the phone.

Separation of card/PIN is the key point here.

And while on the subject of memorable winters -

1963 when with my brothers and sisters we created a superb slide around a corner of the path that surrounded our house - full speed and then almost on one elbow as we went round the corner - unfortunately this was the corner where patients came in through the gate leading to my father's GP surgery.....!

After the first casualty we all got belted and the slide was salted!

Andmuch later on in 1982 when my flatmate at uni came back from Christmas to find that while his car (1963 mini) ould start it was frozen to the ground and stalled every time you tried to move it!

Regarding the winter of '47 ( way before I was born I hasten to add!) go to Youtube and search for the British Transport film 'Snowdrift at Bleath Gill'.YI first showed this to the school railway society as a 16mm film borrowed from the British Transport Film Library more than 50 years ago.It is still great!

Nick

I enjoy reading old ME magazines and LBSC frequently mentions 5 1/2 pint blowlamps as if they are the ultimate before moving up to oxy acetylene.

Purely out of curiosity what would be the equivalent in propane burner - 50mm????

Incidentally Amazon still lists a 2 lt paraffin blowlamp, and another where the capacity is not mentioned, but it looks strikingly like the paraffin blowlamp I used as a teenager 50 years ago with the burner on the end of a flexible hose (and with which I nearly incinerated a group of friends - long story!).

Nick

You may find you need a different charger for NiMH.

Some information here:

http://www.greenbatteries.com/nimh-battery-charger-faq/

A long time ago I used to work in a motor factors selling to the body trade. Bodylead came in sticks about 1" by 1/4" by a foot long ( or thereabouts) The idea was to use a blowlamp to put knobs of solder in the area where it was needed and then use a wooden stick dipped in tallow to smooth out the lead using a soft oxy acetylene flame (usually the only source of heat in a workshop) - ideally from behind so the metal was warmed up gently. Bakers fluid was the flux of choice. Any roughness was sorted with a bodyfile. As well as the Rolls, FX3 and to a lesser extent FX4 taxis used a lot of lead to hide seams.

Down at the 'fag end' of the motor trade the process was modified and the wooden stick was sometimes the top six inches sawn off the top of the yard broom - it had a nice rounded end, and resin flux in a tin like shoe polish. I have even seen multicore solder or the thin plumbers solder in sticks about 3/16 wide used to tin the area first.

Visiting a customer/friend once I tried to use body lead. Just the once. What didn't end up on the floor ended up in and on my (non safety) trainers - painful!!.

Nick