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I have always been fascinated by models of allsorts, from as long as I can remember. May have been influenced by my farther and watching him on his lathe (which I still have) in his shed that he built, and learning to use basic tools by his instructions from probably around the age of 5 or 6. I am mostly interested in steam locomotives, maybe because we lived right on top of the railway and just round the corner from a very busy terminus at that time. Photography has also been an interest from a fairly early age, and I got my first camera by saving tokens from corn flake packets when I was about 9 or 10, it was just a simple cheap plastic one but it took some pretty good pictures at the time.

I used to make the proverbial Airfix models, I also once had a simple model railway set, and used to make buildings etc. out of cardboard and paint and other things like bridges out of wood and bits of metal. I have yet to make a model out of metal as such. My interest in actual model making waned somewhat during the early 70's as my interest tuned to Disco's and my late brother and myself started running a mobile Disco of our own. By this time I had also become interested in basic electronics and I built all our own Disco equipment down to component level. sadly my brother died about 18 months after we got it of the ground through illness. I carried on doing Disco's and my electronic interests until 1980 when I got married and when my daughter was born every thing else took a back seat. My marriage broke down and ever since then my interest in model engineering and models in general has recovered. Tools of almost every kind and the use of, have always been a big part of my life, metalwork and technical drawing were my two most favourite subjects at school.

When I first left school at 15 I started work in a blacksmiths workshop as an apprentice, however a sign up to an apprentice scheme was never honoured, and so with the advice given to me by my mentor blacksmith, I moved on to become a maintenance fitter/welder in a large industrial sand processing company, which had sites in various places in the UK and had partners in other parts of the world also, but is now owned by a Belgium firm. I was part of a team of around 45 fitters when I first started in 1970, but after the 80's the team started to decline due to natural wastage, farming less important work out and a slow but steady run of redundancies, until there were just two of us left in 2006. By then the company decided that our department was to be contracted out, so we were offered to ether join the contractors or take a handsome voluntary redundancy offer, we both took the latter and I became a fabricator/welder and general engineer in a couple of other small firms over my last working years, but I am now retired.

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