Observations from a Hill

As anyone who has worked for a company or organisation of any size in the modern era will know, Health & Safety looms large and holds sway. This is no bad thing in and of itself - working practices in foundries were pretty much a guarantee of personal injury well into the twentieth century: some of the stories the old man told me were exceedingly hairy to say the least, often the youngest members of the workforce being employed to perform some of the most hazardous tasks on the grounds of speed and agility. One tale of Dad's springs to mind: the unfortunate school-leaver (between twelve and fourteen years of age) working in a strip-rolling mill whose job it was to catch the end of the strip of hot steel as it emerged from the last of the rollers and engage it with a revolving capstan to coil the thing up. Bear in mind that by the time the initially slowly progressing billet emerged from the final reduction rollers, it would have been moving at thirty miles per hour and more tha...

I don't wish to appear to be making light of the pandemic we're living through but the irony of the above is inescapable and self-explanatory. But it also begs the question: how many links in this supply chain are there, and how many profit-taps along the way? I'm not in any position to judge or investigate, but on the previous record of our inglorious and indeed vainglorious government, it's not a great stretch of the imagination to suppose that a few layers of chummy consultancy and 'outsourcing' were involved at the UK end. Talk about a circular economy...

To continue - Tagliatelle Bolognese, as we all should know by now;  not Spaghetti Bolognese : that combination is not a thing in Italy. The consistency of the sauce and the shape and texture of Spaghetti just don't go together: Tagliatelle is your only man, to paraphrase Flann O'Brian. The thing is, the sauce simply slides off of Spaghetti and anyway has the wrong mouth-feel against the sauce. There are myriad versions of what a Ragu Bolognese should contain, and Here Be Dragons - I would imagine many fights have broken out about this most (apparently) basic of Italian sauces. Truth be told, I favour the very simplest of all, as favoured and promoted by the late, great Antonio Carluccio. I've never had a failure with this one: good ingredients and patience are all that's required. As with everything, I tend towards Occam's Razor, or KISS in the modern idiom. Never add when you can subtract. Here, I will definitely upset an apple-cart or two here and say that vegetab...

Well I was going to write something about tonight's Tagliatelle with Ragu Bolognese as the sauce was even better than it was yesterday - a double portion has left me in pasta torpor. But the news has caught me out: I'm proud to say that our adopted home of over four decades has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status - the slate quarrying valleys of the area finally being recognised as globally significant, culturally and historically. Many of us, professional and lay people alike have been saying as much for decades: finally the history of this area has been granted an equal footing with perhaps more immediately 'glamourous' sites throughout the world. As a consequence, we can promote ourselves to, and be taken more seriously by, the rest of the UK in particular. It's to be hoped that the political and class struggles that are inextricably entwined in our history are writ large in that promotion, placing the industry of slate extraction firmly within the context ...

Pictured is my nice shiny new dead-centre (size MT1) for my Dad's old lathe. Having got the tailstock aligned, I was keen to see if the thing was true in the Z-axis, as the only option of righting any problem here is shimming the headstock, not a job for the faint-hearted in my book: as it turned out, the thing is as close as it could be or that I could ever make it, so that's a relief. I was telling Joe of the purchase in the pub this afternoon: the stupidly low price of this was noted: back in the days when such stuff came out of our own factories, a dead centre would not have been a cheap purchase, and to be honest, if you go for something with a bit more pedigree, you can still drop quite a lot of cash for one. Mine was pretty budget, but bought from an outfit in Hockley, Birmingham: a bit of ex-pat loyalty to the place of my birth, off the net. China was my first thought in terms of it's probable origin, and as it turned out I was bang on. Given the eighty-plus year ag...

Shown is the repurposed tripod screw and it's new partner, the Manfrotto head I got on eBay for a bargain price. No longer for spares, this will partner the Rolleiflex SLX as I mentioned the other day. All that remains is to knock up a friction pad for it then job done and quite a few quid saved! Getting the workpiece square in the chuck of the lathe to do the little bit of turning necessary was initially a bit of a puzzle due to the narrowness of the knurled disc of the screw: no matter how you eyed it up it wouldn't sit true, until I came up with idea of referencing it against the front face of the chuck by using a nice square-ground piece of machine steel and a couple of feeler gauges to sit against the chuck face and out of the way of the jaws whilst I held the flat of the piece against the shim and tightened the chuck - pretty much spot on! The finish leaves a lot to be desired as I really need to invest in some new lathe tools and maybe a quick-change tool post. All grist...

Now  the future really does look perplexing, and to be honest a trifle worrying. Apple's Photos app has a neat little trick or two up its sleeve when it comes to organising the plethora of pix on one's iDevice or Mac. For all I know, Androids play similar games: I'm simply not familiar with the platform at all, and as for Windows, that's a bridge far too far for me. That slightly snotty remark would seem to imply an innate superiority on behalf of Apple and its operating systems, however I can report quite honestly and without bias that it ain't necessarily so. The above image is a close-up of the one that was picked by my iPhone's system as a key image for one of its 'collections': that thing where the phone sorts pictures it 'thinks' are similar into 'curated' categories. For the most part, it works pretty well and might be useful for some people, although not particularly to me. But sometimes the results, like the above, are just plain...

I bought the Manfrotto tripod head shown for spares - I'd forgotten all about the purchase as it took so long to arrive - and when it did arrive, I realised it was a larger model than the one I wanted it for spares for. However, apart from the missing camera screw, the head is in good order and will suit the recently-gifted-to-me Rolleiflex SLX, which is after all, a tad on the chunky side! I'd already got a spare 1/4" camera screw from the old Linhoff tripod I bought last year, so I figured that with a minor bit of fettling I could get a decent medium-weight head out of the combo. I'll need to replace the missing bedding pad, too, which I'll have to make specially to accommodate the Rollei's very particular baseplate arrangement. The screw also needs work: the 'waist' needs to come down by a few thou as the the slot in the head is too tight for it and the shoulder needs to be turned down to expose a bit more of the thread to the camera when the new bed...

Still going through my Dad's collection of Model Engineer magazines - tonight came across the above advert on the back cover of an issue from February 1960. Ilford film has been a mainstay of traditional photography since the company was founded in 1879 by Alfred Hugh Harman. In particular, in my and so many other people's cases, their medium-speed 125 ASA (ISO) film, FP4 or it's predecessors; it depends on your age, but I'm sixty-six and it was FP4 from the earliest days of taking photographs for me - my Dad used FP3. Now, I never got on with their 400 ASA (ISO) high-speed HP4 (for me, and HP3 for my old man) and latterly HP5; much preferring that old staple of the press photographer: Kodak Tri-X; a film you could argue was technically inferior to its Ilford counterpart, being coarser-grained among other attributes: but Tri-X always had a special quality that just 'was'. I've no idea what the post-revival Kodak films are like, so I can't comment - and p...

Well, there you have it encapsulated in one picture: location, Rachub and the Welsh Pride flag used along with the Greek flag as temporary shade from a relentless solar force. Hotter here than Athens or Corfu this afternoon with the thermometer reading a shade temperature of 32°C (89.6°F in old money) and bloody humid with it - if we don't get a thunderstorm tonight it will be a miracle. We sat and ate under the above makeshift awning for around three hours late this afternoon: very pleasant company and good Greek cheese pies and assorted mezze, washed down with ice-cold Mythos and white wine. I'll take the positives for once and leave the doom-mongering I'm normally prone to for the while. Ya mas!

Writing this, I'm currently afflicted by insect bites of a severity I would normally expect on holiday in Greece and which frankly I have learned to manage and live with for the short duration of a break in that beautiful country; but which, to be honest - horse-fly bites aside: and these ain't! - I'm unused to at home here in Rachub. Nevertheless, whatever unseen creature is taking lumps out of me at the moment doesn't seem exactly your usual midgey-thing that swarms in the bottom garden in the evening: they're more pest that threat. Whatever we're now hosting seems to be affirmation of the climate-change we really can't now ignore. It's just shy of 30°C here at 19:39 BST, 721 feet above sea level, in North Wales. Really. Things is changing rapidly, folks...

Whilst I welcome the return of cricket to the BBC, it's with mixed feelings, as it strikes me that the true home of televised cricket is just going to be hosting yet another short-form format of the game: 'The Hundred'. I've no problem with the variations-on-a-theme approach to a sport which to most people, frankly is impenetrable and long-winded. This may be the case, but I for one relish the fact that the First Class game and in particular Test cricket, can run for a full five days and result in stalemate. There is something philosophically pure in its very nature, almost Buddhist in its serenity and acceptance of the Karma of the long game. What I find particularly strange is that us, non-Sky-viewers are to be left with what is in reality a form of the game even better suited to commercial media outlets than say Twenty-Twenty. I should have thought that the traditional five-day game is far better suited to the national broadcaster than any of the 'Pyjama Games...

Much work in the garden today, despite the heat - the UV levels appear to have defeated even my iPhone SE's normally excellent camera's exposure capabilities, as you can see above - my ladder is tethered to our out-of-control willow tree which is in the process of having a severe haircut: the pile of offcuts in the foreground gives you an idea of how much overgrowth there was. Having bailed from our labours in the shoulder of the afternoon for the cooler climes of the house, and in my case a very welcome shower, followed by cold beer (Jane with her favoured G&T), our phones pinged the news that the Met Office has issued it's first extreme heat weather warning, saying that in Wales and the west we can expect 33°C temperatures over the next hours/days. Well, in our sheltered gardens as of five this afternoon we already have 28°C, the same as yesterday evening. And still the climate-deniers continue to deny that our weather, as I said before, has just gone totally bonkers ...

If the 1970's cultural reference in the title of this little post escapes you, Google it! Suffice it to say that I'm not talking puppets here, but real, live Muppets. Henry Mance in this weekend's FT, rightly highlights the crass ego tripping being indulged in by three of the worlds richest men: namely, the race for the rich to get into space [or close to it] for a few short minutes, for the kind of money most of us take ten years or more to earn. Bezos, Musk and Branson, stand up and take a bow! Leaving the planet is pretty much a pointless exercise in exotic tourism - there is little left to be learned out there that we actually need down here: curiosity is a fine thing, but not at any cost. Our problems are fundamentally ecological and currently, virally, epidemiological and frankly, spending billions on chucking more pollutants into the high atmosphere so that a handful of the stupidly rich can tick off another pointless box in their bucket list, is an affront to humani...

Apropos of absolutely nothing other than it's been such a fine day here, I give you Lotus Eating in Rachub... at 7:45  this evening the thermometer stood at around 26°-27°C. It's now cooled to around 23° with no breeze and skies as blue as blue can be. We've just finished the chicken souvlaki pictured (with crispy potatoes, Greek salad and flatbread (my plate including the rather garish barbecue sauce I sometimes favour): mine consumed al fresco outside of the cottage to the soundtrack of Johnny Kyte's favourite bassist, Brian Bromberg. There's not a lot else I want to venture at this point - it's been a good day and I'll leave it at that.

OK - got a tool pretty much centred on the lathe and I've no stock to try the thing out on - I'm certainly not buying bar from B&Q at their prices and I'm not sure whether our local stockholders are still in business: research needed on that one. So I rummaged around in the plumbing materials and found  this brass tee, which looked like it might be a candidate. I got the tool centred as best I could and gave the thing a few passes in both directions, facing it off and taking the rough casting down for about 8mm or so along its length. Not perfect by any means, but an indicator that the old lathe still has it. Just needs the operator to relearn all that stuff he was taught at school. Fortunately I've got a wealth of knowledge and teaching in the hundreds of Model Engineer magazines I mentioned yesterday: madeleines!

Whilst recovering in a darkened room from an impending migraine attack this morning, I smelt a familiar but long-lost smell. At first I thought it was a neurological artefact accompanying the 'halo', but soon realised that it issued from the piles of recently disturbed copies of 'Model Engineer' magazines that I've mentioned before - an enormous collection that I inherited, well adopted, after my Dad died - they would have been pulped by now had they not been taken on board, their fate still yet to be decided. This 'olfactory anomaly' was in fact the particular odour of the house I grew up in, tobacco residue and all, and just as the installation of my Dad's lathe in the studio has imbued that space with a redolence of our shed and latterly cellar at Winson Street: machine oil, cutting suds etc., it took me straight back to my early youth. Proust was not wrong - the merest taste or smell or sound can evoke more than ten-thousand words ever can: truly the...

Where now operates the Zip World in Snowdonia - a tourist attraction that brings in people in search of a managed and safe adrenaline rush from all over the world -    also happens to be what was [and is still generally referred to as] Penrhyn Quarry, Y Chwarel Penrhyn in Welsh. The quarry was historically, at least since the village of Bethesda started to form around the Independent chapel of Bethesda, from which it drew its name, the largest employer in the area. Between 1900 and 1903, quarry workers at Penrhyn were locked out over their protest at the pay and conditions - conditions which held them in thrall to their master's will: he literally owned their lives - abuse and summary dismissal being commonplace there. One of the main issues of contention was the system of 'The Bargain', a practice which involved a gang of workers striking 'a bargain' with the management over working a particular part of the quarry: on the face of it as semi-autonomous 'contract...

I've got so much to say regarding the awful bloody people that have reared their ugly heads over the last few days - idiot politicians (on the right, natch) included - and also having come across a little known book about an even littler-known book/pamphlet about Y Streic Fawr [The Great Strike] that occurred at Bethesda, North Wales in the opening years of the twentieth century: about which a movie has to be made; that I feel I need to sit down and think a little deeper on this. So, instead, for tonight I'll just say that I've spent a wonderful ten minutes in the close company of a pair of Blackbirds in the bottom garden, neither particularly bothered by my presence: a lovely still time on a beautiful afternoon. The picture is of a bee I rescued from heat torpor in our veranda yesterday: a couple of minutes on the Alchemilla Mollis [Lady's Mantle] outside the front door and it was off again, back down the garden.

Anyone who knows us also know we love Greece, and in particular, the Ionian island of Corfu. Sadly Covid has knocked foreign travel on the head for us for the time being as for so many people: even given the affordance of restrictions being lifted and our Double-Jab status - the shine has been taken off it for the time being: mask-wearing in Messonghi just doesn't sound like fun to me. Perhaps a private apartment complex would solve this conundrum? Then the only hassle would be the getting to there from here - three-and-a-half hours in a plane in a mask is surely tolerable. Well I did spot one such place in an ad in the FT Weekend. It's part of a (small) group of mini-resorts run by a company called Ultima Collection, sleeps twelve in six double ensuites in a complex built into the hillside overlooking the coastline of mainland Greece and Albania. It features the usual infinity pool, indoor and outdoor dining areas and many more of the standard gew-gaws of modern 'luxury...

Just a minor update on the lathe-gear-safety-guard mini-thing. The photo shows the first pieces folded and pop-riveted in place: there will obviously be side pieces - the left-hand side being the largest and also the main support for the thing. You can just see where the top is bolted onto the front of the headstock via the existing cast-iron back-gear cover’s hex-bolt. The wide slot in the front is to give easy access to the clutch-change of the lead-screw drive. The whole thing’s made of aluminium sheet and 10mm aluminium angle and will be spray-painted, possibly in the shade of Birmingham Municipal green of the remaining paint on the lathe castings. When I was a kid, everything seemed to get a coat of that shade - I don’t know if it was Birmingham City Council policy or that there was a glut of war-surplus paint floating about in the fifties, but that particular hue is highly redolent of childhood to me, just like the smell of the blossom on the privet hedges that used to abound in ...

I was going to post a brief update on the progress of the wheel guard for the lathe mini-project, but thumbing through the [very] extensive collection of old Model Engineer magazines that used to belong to my Dad, a couple of things stood out from their pages. Firstly, as a product of the 'hippy' [we preferred 'freak'] generation, I have always assumed the phrase 'Nuff said!' to be of our coining, or at least the invention of some cartoonist of the Alternative Press we so avidly consumed at the time. Not so, I discover. In the issue of Model Engineer of May 12th 1955 (I being a mere six months old at the time), the following is written as the sign-off to a piece on the construction of a portable workshop [I know]: '...and now I feel it calls for one of L.B.S.C.'s well known comments: "Nuff sed."' 'Nuff said - there ain't nothing new under the Sun. The second thing alludes to my Safety First, at Last (a paraphrase itself of the HSE m...

The first knockings of my wheel-guard for the lathe - the frame for the top of it shown on top of the aluminium sheet that will form the body of the guard, the length of 10mm Ali angle ready to be cut for the frame. The lug on the top frame will be located by the hex-bolt that normally secures the cast iron guard that shields the bull and back-gears - the rest of it will be supported from the motor bearers or the bench itself, depending how this particular improvisation goes! Keep you posted... 

There is a general, possibly heroic/stoic but ultimately pathetic unwillingness on the part of the human race to accept that it really is just one tiny part of the Earth’s ecology and that by our will alone we can prevail in the face of the threats before us. Climate catastrophe aside(!) the pressing issue of pandemic has at its heart an organism totally outwith the scope of our workaday perceptions - a small clutch of nucleic acids 'acting' ruthlessly intelligently, adaptably and resiliently through what is after all blind, ineffable stupidity, its simplicity being the key to its effectiveness. Whilst it has an arena, it will continue on with its show. Global vaccination is the only option, and that at the moment appears to be a distant aspiration. We're doing particularly well in the First World (no surprise here - we do have all the money and influence), but what I want to know, and what we all need to know, is just why the vaccine rollout here in the UK appears to have...

Well, as Joe pointed out in his comment on last night's post, the blue plume didn't appear from the controller, but almost from the motor itself. To get the controller to lower the revs down to anything like resulted in partial stalling and uneven drive, with the concomitant odour of stressed motor as a result. A hasty shutdown and some research followed. It appears that the simple Triac controller descends into instability at its lower limits: all it's actually doing after all is chopping the sine wave of the AC current in order to effect the frequency-change necessary to alter the induction motor's speed: resulting, ironically enough, given Joe's remembrance of my squaring up some dodgy timecode back in the day, in guess what? Transients of a very square nature: I thenk yow! This might be OK if they were regularly spaced, time wise, but in this case, they're most definitely not, a recipe for a fried Crompton Half Horsepower. Given that the cost of a proper, in...

The component parts of the (as yet putative) motor speed control for the lathe. On Joe's advice I've opted to try that avenue before going down the mechanical route and swapping motor pulleys out. I Amazon'd a cheap motor control/dimmer unit last night and it arrived this morning. The project box will be the old computer mains conditioner/spike suppressor seen here: I'll just strip out the filter and effectively replace it with the controller board you can see perched on the corner of the box. Now to my old [fashioned] eyes the thing looks mighty puny, even though my motor's current draw (including startup surge) is well within it's quoted spec, and I suspect a plume of blue smoke and the acrid stench of burnt circuit board to be the most likely outcome, but we'll see. I suspect being a cheapskate is going to prove to be folly though, somehow. Keep you posted. 

A couple of days ago it was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jim Morrison in Paris, at the age of twenty-seven: that magnetic age that seems to be the terminus for so many in rock & roll. The roster of like early exits is well-known and much written about - usually on anniversaries such as his. Randomly, this morning I picked out an old volume from a bookshelf: ‘Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series)’ by D.T. Suzuki, first published in 1949. Suzuki attained his enlightenment at the age of twenty-seven. He went on to write and teach for the next sixty-five years. "Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse" - from ‘Knock on Any Door’ by Willard Motley. “Those who can do, those who can't teach.” - George Bernard Shaw’s infamous aphorism from ‘Man & Superman’. Neither quite hits the spot, methinks…

I figured that the chuck-speed of the old thing was a tad faster than I remember from the old setup in the  shed at Winson Street, so I did some fag-packet calculations on the pulley train versus the quoted motor speed and came up with a figure which seemed to back up that intuition: around 70 RPM greater than the 'average' 420 RPM that forms the 'centre' of the speed range for a lathe such as this. I decided to invest a small sum in a no-contact tachometer, which duly arrived today and indeed confirmed the chuck speed to be ahead of the game by the amount I'd calculated, adrift by a few RPM. I reckon that either the motor spindle speed may be awry from that quoted on the motor plate, or my measurements of the pulley diameters was out by some - it matters not: a 2" or 2-1/2" pulley at the motor shaft should rein the thing in to around the required speed. I'm only likely to need slower speeds than the 420 RPM which will do for most of the stuff I'm ...

Pictured is the updated metalworking bench arrangement: squeezing a quart's-worth of heavy metal into a pint pot of a space. But it seems to be workable and the good news is the lathe's now working - it lives! All I've got to do now is re-educate myself on its setup and use, it having been over forty years since I last used this old beauty: but hey! you're never too old to (re)learn anything. I've got plenty of fine-tuning to do on the drive-train, and I've also got to get the back-gears working and slow down the feed to the lead screw, too: it's a bit F1 at the moment. It's a project! But all in all, a decent day's work: I'll keep you posted.

I wonder how is it that when the Right or Right-affiliated causes win an election by a small margin - even vanishingly so - it is greeted as a victory of heroic proportions, and when the Left win in similar circumstances, it is greeted as a defeat of like scope. Tigger to one side and Eeyore to the other. The psychology of this is telling, and could be seen as indicative of the reasons behind the current state of British politics: whatever cock-ups the Government makes, or disasters befall them, their attitude and that of their followers and supporters is always one of either insouciance or naked triumphalism. Narrow Labour or Left-affiliated victories however, are treated to a pall of such gloom and pessimism as to give the impression that a Plague Of Locusts was about to descend from God. Compare and contrast the outcomes of the EU referendum and this weeks Batley & Spen bye-election, held by Labour by a very tight margin and seen by some as a 'defeat' for the party. The ...

Crossing No Bridge, Fairview... I've been digging through boxes of stuff - mainly books - in the quest for my old tournament-sized Chess-set and clock, both of which are here in the house somewhere, but as yet have proved mighty elusive in the finding. Along the way of course, books appear that I've not seen for some time and so I've been dipping into one or two of them. One particular little tome I rediscovered was one of those little square, mini coffee-table books that crop up in garden centres and the like: 'Zen Garden' by David Holzer. Whilst my small centering friend pictured sits under the buddleia in the rockery just in front of our house, I've been meaning to resurrect a small patch of the garden in front of the studio that has fallen into disuse through not really ever having had any use or focus; so recently I'd thought that a small Zen garden in the shade of the studio might be a good use for it. When I came across the book, I thought why not jus...