Observations from a Hill

Having spent the meat of the day at Jane's aunt's in Saltney, Chester - installing a towel rail rail or two in the bathroom, and not installing the bathroom cabinet we'd bought for her as there was one panel missing from the flatpack; I'm just going to make a diary post tonight and defer my overdue Deck of the Week posts (last week was a no-show, too) until tomorrow. When I was looking through stuff and generally messing about beim Wintergarten after we'd gotten back from up the coast, I heard a familiar bird call: the peee-uu of a common buzzard, but much louder than normal - at which point the bird flew low right in front of my window and only just above our garden from the direction of the Ffridd; then wheeled up and into the thermal he/she was looking for to join their partner: both soon high above us in the familiar paired circle, calling all the while. Common might be it's appellation, but they're uncommonly beautiful to me. I love 'em...

Still trial & erroring the main drive train for the lathe. I've got what I think might be the final geometry of the thing sorted and have moved the main vee-belt inboard of the bearing on the driveshaft - I didn't like the amount of out of line leverage the original outboard mounting was exerting on the rest of the affair. I did manage to find a slightly longer belt, which gave me some slack to play with without resorting to re-drilling the old frame, so I think I'll fabricate an idler wheel to tension the belt and keep it out of the way of the frame where it passes over it. The other thing I've definitely decided on is to remove the rubber mounts and bolt the motor rigidly to the bracket, having already decided that I'm going to mount the whole thing vertically behind the lathe (there's not a lot of bench real-estate to play with). With everything aligned and properly (lightly) tensioned, the amount of vibration should be minimal: I'll probably use the ...

Well, the Hatt Mancock debacle has certainly thrown two things into focus: one, Boris Johnson's complete denial of the fact that he actually is the place/person where the buck stops - it's in the job-brief, you idiot! But the concept of actually taking responsibility for one's actions seems to have been drummed out of him at Eton and replaced with the Übermensch mentality that most alumni of that institution appear to espouse.  Secondly, the question of the covert surveillance that brought about the [probably temporary] fall of the [now departed, but not sadly missed] Health Secretary. The question remains - who put it in place, and to what end? Given that the kind of tech involved is available on EBay for a tenner, it could be anyone with a grudge against the said departed. Could be a very long queue - but given the extreme levels of security surrounding Government buildings, one can only assume someone on the inside thought it a good idea to pop a hidden camera into a smo...

Gillian Tett in this weekend's FT writes of her Great Aunt's fastidious habits in recycling as a matter of course, rather than ideology - an attitude ingrained in her generation's collective psyche through the privations of two World Wars and the Great Depression. I was talking to friends the other day of my memory of one of my maternal grandmother's regularly-used aphorisms: "Never cut string!" She used to keep a special, cylindrical tin on a shelf at the cellar-head, which had a hinged lid with a tiny aperture at its centre, finished with a minute, hollow spigot, and through which the loose end of the recycled skein of string held inside the tin would emerge. My Nan would religiously unpick all the knots from the string holding any parcel together to reclaim the fullest possible length of cord, which would then be knotted neatly to the end of the skein in the tin and its end pushed through the spigot for re-use as necessary. I'm pretty sure the tin was a...

Having bolted the old lathe to my [now metalworking] bench and checked the ways for true (as far as I can with the tools available to me), I've turned my attention to getting the thing powered up and rotating, so I can see how accurately it can turn actual metal stock! The motor and belt drive mounting arrangements Dad used are now forgotten to me, as the photographs I took of it's last resting place in his workshop disappeared with whatever phone I was using when I picked the lathe up - well pre-iPhone days. I've been playing around with some of the bits I have left and have decided to cobble together a combined motor-mount/belt feed affair from them. I found a couple of seriously butch springs (shown) in the back of the workshop, so I think I'll pivot the motor at the intermediate shaft side and suspend the other side on the springs, allowing the weight of the motor (not inconsiderable as it's a half-horsepower job) to tension the vee-belt feeding the intermediate...

We never really left the Art Room. And I cry for your Loss As the fifteen-year-old I once was:   I am old and you will not age more. And I cry for your Loss As the old man I now am. Kel, for John 25/06/21

Shown is a Tamron SP 500mm f8 mirror lens that I inherited when an uncle of mine died some years ago. It had a Praktica bayonet Adaptall 2 Tamron adapter, which is now of no use and can be seen in the background by the edge of my screen. I found an adapter on Ebay for a few quid so I can try it out on my old Canon F1 - the lens is pretty filthy, and I've cleaned the outer surfaces of the optics as best I can, but there appears to be evidence of grot and maybe fungus on the internals, although the main mirror appears to have only a couple of marks to the silvering. Working on the principle that optics can't focus on themselves, it might turn out to be usable, if a tad niche in its application: we'll see... I realise that I have not just a couple of projects to go at, but a whole raft of stuff which should keep me going into the foreseeable, which is good. I intend to have a crack at making the simplest 4"x5" field camera I can design, using the tools and materials ...