The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

[larsssnowpharter]

Just completed booking flights to Davao mostly with QR.

Now have to plan Italy trip to take the DG somewhere and commit some serious aviation.

Problem is that the Sproglettes want to come with me. Might have to look at an aircraft swap deal.

[handsfree]

What ! You can swap Sproglettes for an aircraft. Why did nobody ever tell me about that.

Weather here gloomy at present.

[4mastacker]

Quite pleasant over this way HF, sunny and calm. Do you want me to send some over to you?

[Ibbie]

Morning

20c at present. Lovely walk with Ed in the campo earlier whilst it is cool at this hour.

Otherwise normal sunny day with rising temperature.

New beds with lift up storage arriving today.

[OFSO]

Sunny and warm; completely different from the forecast. Off for our rescheduled blast down river today. One destination is the royal palace at Greenwich to see the Painted Room....

[Magnus]

Mild but soggy morning here in Edinbugger. SWMBO heading out for a curry with her pals at lunchtime, so I'm raiding the freezer for something to keep the wolf from the door.

[Pontius Navigator]

Krystal clear today again, 5th day

[Wodrick]

Morning all,
25 for 28, bet it's nearer to 30. Not seen a cloud for two days now.

Builder brought a new pal this morning, they are rendering the track side of the new wall.

Mi old man (Architect) told me never to buy a rendered house, hides all sorts quoth he. Obviously not possible in Spain, but he was right.

Car annunciated "check left rear brake light" yesterday, what other sort of brake light is there than a rear one ?
Anyway what a performance to gain access to the cluster.

SM's card for the joint account was caught by a false web site yesterday, dammed Chinese. Card stopped.
Need to visit branch to sort today.

Nil F





66

[Ex-Ascot]

Morning folks another nice day. 3 nights to go. Tourist are building up. 4 here at the pub at the mo. They were quite busy at dinner last night.

Dinner with friends tonight. Spend tomorow night at home and close the house up Friday. Sail Saturday.

[Ex-Ascot]

See Sir Kim Darroch, has resigned as British Ambassador in the US. Just checked up on him. A degree in Zoology. Probably helps as a diplomat.

See one of our drinking mates has died. Great guy, excellent company: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ed-91.html

Never forget him addressing the haggis on Burn's Night at a friend's party. Talk about theatrical. Then we had to try to get him into a taxi dead drunk and he said he couldn't bend his legs. We got him in but his legs were stuck out over the pavement.

[handsfree]

Thanks for the nice weather 4mastacker. Wonderful stuff.

I have recently returned from the Royal Derby after having a fistula formed in my right arm.
A bit of an uncomfortable op but 'tis now done.
I shall be in need of a chauffeuse for the next couple of days.

[OFSO]

Sat at a Greenwich pub overlooking the Thames today eating fish and chips, scampi and chips, drinking three for the price of two G&TS. Suddenly noticed cormorant wrestling with a large eel down on the foreshore. Eventually got eel lined up with gullet and down it went. The Thames was reseeded with eels from Holland last month: this one looked Dutch and if so didn't last long !

[Undried Plum]

Me 'new' clock is running well. I'm chuffed.



Compare that with how it looked before I worked my magic. Scroll back a few pages of this thread to see what a mess it was.

I've got a few pictures, taken by she-who-heats-food, of my kitchen chemistry session to silver the dial. I'll upload them after I've had me tea.

[Pontius Navigator]

That looks superb. Did you redo all the face detail?

[Undried Plum]

On this one, I merely retouched the black wax. The engraving of the fine lines and lettering is terribly shallow on this face, so I decided not to completely rewax it.

Waxing is also very simple to do, but it it difficult to make clear edges if the face has been severely polished by over-zealous housemaids for a couple of hundred years as in this particular one.

I spent a fortune having the face of my favourite clock rewaxed and re-silvered . It is, in my opinion, priceless because it was commissioned in 1791 by the man who first defined the name 'chronometer' in a published academic paper. He was the Scotsman who sent James Cook to southern pairts to find a place to send our worst criminals and other dross. He was, at the time, The East India Company's Hydrographer and four years after he commissioned what is now 'my' clock he was appointed as the first ever Hydrographer of the Admiralty.

As a result of spending so much money on something which I subsequently found was something which can be done by anyone with a bit of sense, I decided to acquire the few skills which are needed to do a bit of simple kitchen chemistry.

[Undried Plum]

[Pontius Navigator]

And a steady hand

[CharlieOneSix]

See one of our drinking mates has died. Great guy, excellent company: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ed-91.html

Sorry to see that. I knew him briefly when he played the part of Juggernaut in the 1974 film of the same name for which I did all the helicopter filming. Had lunch with him, Omar Sharif, Shirley Knight and Roy Kinnear before we commenced the job. An amusing man.

[G-CPTN]

It is, in my opinion, priceless because it was commissioned in 1791 by the man who first defined the name 'chronometer' in a published academic paper. He was the Scotsman who sent James Cook to southern parts to find a place to send our worst criminals and other dross. He was, at the time, The East India Company's Hydrographer and four years after he commissioned what is now 'my' clock he was appointed as the first ever Hydrographer of the Admiralty.

Has to be Dalrymple, as Derham, Thacker and Harrison were all Englishmen.

Commissioned from whom?

Edited to add:- just seen the photograph!

[Undried Plum]

Here's a couple of pics of the post-restoration mechanism:

Hanging on impatiently

It actually looks very simple to disassemble, the trick being cleaning, polishing and reassembling. Do you make your own bits or can you buy bits in?

These things are extremely simple to pick apart and rebuild.

They are made of pure brass. No plating involved. To clean them, I strip them down to component level and then soak the bits in Horolene overnight; rinse them thoroughly in tap-water; and then soak them in pure rain-water to get rid of the damned Chloramine which Scottish Water so unnecessarily laces our otherwise pure water with. Then buff up the pieces by hand, occasionally resorting to Duraglit if necessary.

The only rework need on this one was to re-bush the bearing holes of the drive drum spindles. With one or two centuries of continual wear, they become elongated and that buggers up the geometry of the oilwell which lubricates the bearing.

She's good to go for at least another couple of centuries and will only need a re-oil once a decade as I've converted all the oilwells from a conical countersunk shape to a better hemispherical form which retains and conducts modern mineral oil much better than the whale oil of yore.

The only bits I needed to artifice on this one were several of the hands; and I had to make a hold-back spring to prevent the date hand from dropping forward by half a day on the downhill side of the month. That latter component was completely missing and had clearly been so for many many decades. Being a very rare centre-mounted date mechanism, I didn't have a proper guide as to how it should have been designed so I invented my own one. I subsequently found, to my delight, that my bodge was almost identical to the way it should have been.