Member postings for Bill Dawes

I have resisted commenting until now but it is driving me mad, does anyone else find the seemingly increasing practice of repeating the question in an answer really irritating?

Bill D

Nice to see my post prompted so many other complimentary views, how do you get time to actually get on with your business Ketan responding to all these accolades!

Wishing you all there up in Leicester a very happy Christmas and an excellent and well deserved new year.

Bill D.

I have used ARC Eurotrade many times, likewise my wife for presents.

She asked me to post here praising once again their excellent service.

If you can impress the good ladies of us ME types Ketan then you are doing everything right, thank you.

Present was a precision vice by the way.

Bill D.

XD351.

The shower lamp I referred to is still original halogen, hence my reluctance to tempt fate by changing it to LED.

My theory about its longevity is that the water vapour helps to keep it cooler than it would normally be.

Still , when I have finished all my replacements I will swop it for an LED, as I said I have a box full of Halogen GU10's if the LED is no good.

Bill D.

Hi Dave, I would agree with Clive that you may not have as much time as you think. I am to be fair, only part retired, I work two days a week. I have been in engineering all my life but apart from an engineering apprenticeship most of my working life has been on the technical side so did not have the benefit of say a toolmaker when it came to craft skills other than DIY. I always promised to buy myself a lathe one day which I did a few years ago, now added to by a milling machine and various other bits and pieces. I started of making the Jan Ridders simple two stroke engine that ran in ME a few years ago, then a vertical boiler. I then decided to have a go at a steam loco and liked the look of Henry Woods 'Emma Victoria' a 5" gauge saddle tank that also ran in in ME, 2013 I think it started. Naively thought it might take me about 12-18 months, Dec. 2017 and still not finished.

Having said that my workshop time seems to vary a lot, might have a good run for a few weeks and not much for a while, depends what other things are going on in your life of course. Anyway good luck, plenty of good advice always to be found on this site.

Bill D

I too have progressively replaced most of our Filament/Halogen/Flourescent lamps (got a box full of halogen GU10 now)

We have one halogen GU10 in the bathroom that is built into an extractor fan above the shower. Must be at least 10 years old with original GU10 so reluctant to tempt fate by touching it.

Had a strange thing happen last weekend, high winds caused a power cut for 5 hours, when the power first came back on a lot of the LED's weren't working so assumed they had 'blown' possibly due to a power surge. Then noticed that the trusty GU10 in the bathroom was on but very dim. Power went off again and next time it came back everything was back to normal, much relief as I thought there goes a load of pound notes.

Bill D

Just caught up on last weeks country file on the beeb. There was a young (20's ?) woman featured that was a blacksmith, not your farrier type as far as I could see, an ornamental blacksmith I suppose. What caught my eye was her using a pneumatic hammer together with all the other blacksmith aids to produce some wonderful iron art creations. Worth a look on catch up.

Bill D.

Glad you found it Jimmie, I was resisting the temptation to reply 'British cycle threads', probably wasn't.

Bill D.

I wonder if modern day car salesmen (sorry people) have this sort of training.

Unfortunately Talking Pictures channel on freeview is not available in all areas.

Talking pictures channel is good if you like old movies, lots of British ones as well, the sort that has every actor you have ever known in them and of course the good old Ealing comedies.

I love these old docs. though, there we quite a few done that I remember, by organisations such as British Rail, Shell etc., be nice to see these again.

Reminiscing, must be getting old.

Bill D.

And today at 3.45 'Motor salesmanshio in the 1930s' visiting Hillman, Humber, Dunlop, Vauxhall and Austin factories.

Must keep more of an eye for these on this channel, some good stuff.

Bill D.

I used an old BBQ and put some aerated building blocks on it, works well for me. they are easy to cut to make any special shapes/sizes.

Broken bits also useful for filling up empty spaces.

Having said that I will get round one day to buying some 'proper' blocks.

Bill D.

For those of you with Talking Pictures channel, on 'Glimpses' tonight at 11.40 is a steam fair in the 60s at Darlington.

Bit late for me, might record it.

Bill D

Oh, and for all the reasons above I am not offended when our hobby is criticised.

When I was talking to my sister a few years ago about my new retirement hobby she said 'Why'

I said for similar reasons that you pay a fortune for a season ticket to stand in the cold watching a crap football team.

Bill D.

My hobby is holding my head in despair at the stupidity of many of todays 'intellectuals'.

Like todays report that Amanda Holden asked Tim Peake if he bought any moon rock back with him from his space station. And the way when they are talking about pollution the TV news always show a cooling tower and the endless armchair experts pontificating and making decisions about technical subjects that have implications for us all and the way the media drone on and on about cutting edge technology not working perfectly first time and......

Bill D.

That's brilliant, thanks Richard. I may have even made some of the bits on those hammers if they were circa late fifties.

The castings were machined on horizontal borers, the machinist Joe looked like a chimney sweep after raking out the swarf which of course was cast iron.

The anvil blocks on the largest hammers weighed about 10 tons and I had the job one day of 'slinging' it on the crane. The crane driver a welsh man Glyn, was a tease and poised the hook just high enough for a strong man to lift the chain but not me, a 7 stone dripping wet 'man'.

This was the first time i pinched a finger in a large chain link and I can tell you it hurts!

H&S would have a blue fit these days of course.

Bill D.

PS working in my field of industrial fans we buy a lot of motors, fractional power to several hundred kw.

Most of the well known brands these days, Siemens, ABB, Brook etc have a 'budget' range of motors made in China.

To be fair, not been to China but talking to motor reps that have, describe very modern state of the art factories that they deal with.

Bill D.

I have always puzzled over the prices of some of these inverters advertised at several hundred pounds.

I say this because not too long ago I bought (through work I admit) a WEG inververter for my lathe and it did everything I needed and more. WEG are a high quality brand and well known in the electric motor world. Can't remember the exact price but it was less than £100, but as I say that was trade price.

Bill D.

Hand driven blower, that brings back another memory. Alldays made a range of these for 'Field Forges', the army used loads of these. They had a gearbox on it and one of my first jobs was drilling various holes including tapping some blind holes. I was put to work doing this on a pillar drill fitted with a reversing attachment. Unfortunately the drill speed was that fast that the tap bottomed out before I could blink, talk about sweating blood. The machine shop foreman came up and told me 'Don't be afraid of your machine son' ushered me to one side to show me how it was done and promptly did the same. 'Carry on' he said walking away and puffing on his pipe.

Some of you will be aware of Alldays cars and motor bikes. An old fella there had a load of envelopes on top of his cupboard ( in my innocence I was not aware of the phrase 'plain brown envelopes' plucking up courage i asked what they were and he showed me loads of photographs of cars, bikes, vans hot pie trikes. I regret not having the cheek to ask him if i could have some.

Another old fella (youngsters were in their 60's, old fellas in their 80's) in the fabrication shop came to work on an Alldays push bike, about 50 years old, it had an enclosed oil bath chain which had never been removed, the rusty spokes finally gave up the ghost one day. I think he retired after that

Bill D.

Seeing this article in latest ME took me back to my first days at work.

At the tender age of 15 in Jan 1957 I joined Alldays & Onions in Birmingham as an apprentice.

At the time Alldays made industrial fans, rootes blowers, smithy equipment and pneumatic and steam hammers.

We had a separate shop, called appropriately, the hammer shop. This shop had a floor surfaced with massive wood sections to absorb the shock. Every hammer was tested and I vividly remember seeing a man running through the main works trailing sparks behind him from a large bar of red hot steel from the smithy we had there.

Despite the wooden floor the whole place trembled when the large hammers were being tested. At the back of the same shop the Rootes blowers were built and tested, they ran for several hours and I walked back home with a throbbing droning noise in my ears.

I have a couple of old catalogues from the late 1800's, a feature of catalogues of this era seemed to describe everything as a 'Patent xxx or 'New improved xxx.

Happy days.

Bill D.

I think this is the difference in attitude towards engineering between UK and Germany.

I grew up in Birmingham in the 50s. Not everybody was an 'Engineer' of course but an awful lot of people, my relatives included, worked in industry and had some sort of empathy with it.

Thanks to successive governments, financial services became the god.

My observation of the antics of a lot of todays generation (not all of course) can be put down to a complete lack of understanding of anything remotely technical or practical, other than the latest Apps on their facebox..

A bit late in the day, but better late than never, (never quite understood the logic of 'too little too late' the last few years has seen the realisation that we don't have engineers any more.

Bill D.