Coronavirus

There are masks and masks. The type sold by DIY stores to keep out dust are mostly useless, surgical masks slightly better. An N95 respirator mask is more like it, but a full Hazmat suit can be had for about £120...

Also very hot to wear unless you have a portable blower

Let's not get morbid.

Good news is that today town was almost deserted and I was able to get a shop done - I actually got through the Aldi checkout faster than usual and I've seen it far busier on ordinary days.

My stepson says that although Morrisons was out of loo roll most otehr stuff is ins tock - they have so much bread they were selling it off at 5p a loaf at lunchtime.

And, if you are older, you can stay at home and ways will be found to keep you topped up with essential supplies.

Yes it will be boring and frustrating but anyone on here should have the wits and wherewithal to find things to do!

Time to take up scrimshaw?

Neil

Wife suffers from severe asthma and I unfortunately had pneumonia at the end of January, so both us in the category of home isolation. Obtaining groceries a bit of a problem as daughter who lives local and has been shopping for us is required to quarantine for fourteen days, so supermarket delivery seems to be the way forward. Tried Sainsbury’s, Tesco , Morrison’s, Waitrose, Ocado and ASDA , all to no avail, all slots allocated. Last night at 1.00 am tried them again and surprise ASDA had a few slots available on the 13th of April so I grabbed one and submitted a list of what I could see we would need then, difficult to think 3 weeks in advance, another surprise was that I was able to reserve it as a regular weekly slot meaning we should be able to keep continuity of supplies always dependent of the items being in stock. I would advise anyone who needs a supermarket delivery to try them all and to keep trying, I secured my slot at 1.00 am, it might just be that they release further slots after midnight each day, who knows how it works. Meanwhile I hope you all manage to get supplies and stay safe.
Dave W

First catch your narwahl? With enough freezer space you wouldn't get hungry while you whittle by whale oil light..

pgk

Edited By Frances IoM on 23/03/2020 19:16:55

Edited By Frances IoM on 23/03/2020 19:17:38

I'm sure if Neil can catch his own Whale then the cost of the oil becomes moot - just a matter of rendering some of the catch down. I have a vaque recollection that the grades of Whale oil depend on breed of whale and part used. Certainly when I first qualified spermaceti whale oil was sold as an ear wax solvent. By the time that became politically unacceptable and withdrawn it ran at £5 per 5ml tube. It was a superb cerumenolytic and outperformed the current offerings - almond oil is as good as anything else on the market should the need arise.

pgk

As Pubmed is my go-to source of information these days:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17851335

Abstract

Probably explains why my habit of letting my ears fill with warm water whenever I have a bath means I never have waxy ears!

Neil

The last copy of the British National Formulary I owned (a 90's edition) unequivocally stated that no commercial cerumenolytic performed better then almond oil. Just be careful buying the stuff cos a lot sold as almond oil is only x% almond . Warning - may contain nuts!

I freely bow to any later pubmed study.

When I treated chronic ear problems we irrigated with simple sterile saline - usually under g/a if you wished to keep some fingers - and it was quite rewarding in some of the bad cases to get a snail shaped plug of stuff flushed from deep in the middle ear....

pgk

Blimey! If there was wax in the middle ear the poor beast was in real trouble! (But I know what you meant.)

Beware the ear syringe. If the external canal is occluded with wax, you can't see that the eardrum is intact. Syringing wax, debris and water through a perforated drum, into the middle ear, is not a good thing to do... Wax dispersants are so much better. Sodium bicarbonate (1%, IIRC) solution was favoured by the NHS ENT people.

NZ enters UK-style lock-down tomorrow. There's a distinct risk that boredom and frustration will make my future posts even more irritable, pedantic, argumentative and generally unhelpful. You have been warned. However, please accept my advance apologies.

I also did my share of bulla osteotomies for the necessary cases.

pgk

As said before on this forum I am still using whale oil for hardening steel components, gives a nice black finish and I don't find it necessary to temper cutting tools after hardening.

Emgee

Ha Ha! I used to work in the aromatherapy oils industry. Sweet almond oil was touted as the main aromatherapy diluent (in the little bottles bought from sundry outlets) for essential oils. The oils bottled in our factory were rarely, if ever, supplied with sweet almond oil - high-oleic sunflower oil was cheaper.🙂. Many of the essential oils were not ‘exactly’ as described either. There were ways to deceive the analysts.

Clearly it was beyond the buyer’s wit to tell the difference - or perhaps the whole industry was telling porkie pies and none supplied aromatherapy oils in sweet almond oil. Job did not last long - the factory burned down.

I put out bones etc in the garden to encourage the fox - in the hope it will also catch the darned rabbits.

We were world leaders at killing whales until there were almost none left, You could dodge national service by working on the whaling boats

When the profit from whale killing plummeted we became the world leaders at saving whales

At 10pm last night I got told to stay at home till further notice following the announcement that everyone has to stay at home.

I started thinking about all the little projects I could be getting on with in the garage, I could finish off my little IC engine, give my shaper a once over, rebuild that reground ML7 - heck, I might even be able to tidy up!!

I was back in work at 7.05am this morning.......

Being under house arrest means we've had the nicest most relaxing morning lie-in for months

My wife had me up at 6am this morning. All because I said last night that it was probably better to go veg and milk shopping sooner rather than later, as the chance of catching it increases every day.

Don't quite understand why we needed 2 1/2 hrs to get ready.

At least I now have the whole day for the workshop. I am going to start making my very first steam engine today. Just a wobbler, but t is a start.