Member postings for NIALL HORN

Plus 1 for the comments by OldMetaller and JS - and as someone with considerable experience of type-setting for printing I know just how difficult it is to spot absolutely all typos!

Niall

There's always "Senior officers have curly auburn hair 'til old age" for trig functions

- and better stay away from mnemonics for the resistor colour code - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-12584669

Niall

WD40 was designed as a water-displacing fluid not as a lubricant or long-term preservative (see the wikipedia entry) . For long-term protection I have found Finnigan's Waxoil very good; at UK temperatures it usually needs thinning slightly with white spirit for brushing or spraying. Of course, you need a solvent to get it off again!

Niall

When I was a schoolboy doing home chemistry in the 1950s, I used to order chemicals from a local chemist in Leigh-on-Sea. The pharmacist was either very laid-back or ignorant of chemistry - on various occasions I ordered conc. nitric. acid, conc. sulphuric acid and toluene without any comment. And yes, I did try nitrating the toluene, but never dared to see whether the resulting TNT would explode. On another occasion I bought some picric acid (for microscopy). It came as dry crystals in a glass bottle. I later found that it was suppposed to be kept wet to avoid explosion - fortunately it didn't!

Ideally, you need to find someone with a v-anvil micrometer. The angle of the V needs to be correct for the number of flutes - 60 degrees for 3 flutes, 108 degrees for 5 flutes and 128 degrees 34 minutes for 7 flutes. They are not cheap! An ordinary mike will not give a correct diameter.

V-angle mics are also used to detect lobing on centreles-ground spindles.

I have used MyHermes in the past without problems, and they are much cheaper than Royal Mail. However, I have now had second thoughts since I read about the way they cut costs by imposing very poor working conditions:

https://edition.independent.co.uk/editions/uk.co.independent.issue.130916/data/7238436/index.html

Companies such as Royal Mail have costs such as pension liabilities which many cut price services evade by using zero-hours contracts. I do not feel happy about colluding with exploitation. Also, you can hardly expect staff treated so badly to give great customer service!

Niall

GPO telephone and electricity board engineers seemed to be using petrol blowlamps for lead-sheathed cable joint wiping well into the 1970s

I have not received my paper subscription copy of 4542 (in Southampton) and have purchased a one-off e-copy to get the Brooklands information

Re the white powder in the BBC film of Owen Bush making a knife - if my memory is correct, the short book on blacksmithing published by the Rural Industries Bureau (aka COSIRA) suggested the use of silver sand as a flux in fire-welding steel. Unfortunately, my copy has gone into hiding!