Engineering
Unnecessary Engineering
Project 1: Scope Dials Welcome all and please gather round so I can waste a few minutes of your precious time on describing something that didn’t really need doing and no doubt would interest few. [more…]
Engineering
Engineering
Three Gyroscopes – Part 3
Introduction In part one we looked at how a gyroscope seems to defy gravity. This is accomplished by angular momentum. We’ll come back to that later 🙂 In part two we looked at how a [more…]
Collecting
My Watch Collection
I love wrist watches. My grandfather was a clockmaker, so it’s probably a genetic thing. The family story is that he narrowly avoided execution during WW2 by offering to mend the officers’ watches. (I had [more…]
20th Century
‘Twas the Night before Christmas………..53 years ago
Placing the spacecraft in lunar orbit had not been easy. Compounding the difficulty, the engine firing, which would put the spacecraft in the right spot, had to happen while the spacecraft was out of contact [more…]
Arts
In Praise of The Bongo
I have mentioned in previous articles that the exploits I was describing were usually carried out courtesy of my trusty Mazda Bongo. On reflection, it seems that this amazing vehicle deserves more than a “bit [more…]
Animals
Cnuteneering, Part Thirty Two
Welcome back to Cnuteneering, where the possible is made more difficult by bone headed ignorance, overenthusiasm and pointy metal things being brought together. You may want to refresh your memory on the project in: Part [more…]
Engineering
Busy Days at Cop Junction
Cop junction lies just north of Charlisle, an English cathedral city on Network Rail’s West Coast Main Line somewhere between Preston and Motherwell, possibly within a giant spike in the border penetrating well into Scotland [more…]
20th Century
The .303 Pattern 1914 – the Best Battle Rifle the British Army Never Had?
Introduction The humiliations suffered by the British Army at the hands of untrained Boer irregulars during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 caused a great deal of concern at the War Office where questions were soon [more…]
Economics
UK Electricity Bloodbath? Part Two
Last time in UK Electricity Supply Bloodbath? we concluded that, across the next decade, Britain’s positive electricity margin becomes a deficit as an older generation of nuclear and coal-fired power stations come to the end [more…]