Silver Soldering

[Tim Mackey]

Erfolg. TY for a nice thorough explanation, I have now wound my coils cold, with my original 20+ yr old wire bender. I have also made my own oleos to fit the existing wells on my Spit, and have incorporated these coils into short stubs which fit into the retract block.
I have started a new thread on the subject called unsurprisingly....
"Combining oleos with single coil springs". Pictures etc over there if interested :-)

[Alistair Taylor]

Peter

your grovelling apology is accepted, but I've had some difficulty removing your name from the "illicit importers of RC gear" black list that the European Commission has been compiling (they've got your number).

My sincere apologies if your entire modelling goods and chattels are seized and you're carted off to Belgium in a pink lame jumpsuit for questioning and lengthy artf assembly sessions (I'm assured it's worse than basket weaving).

AlistairT ;o)

[Tim Mackey]

LOL nice one Alistair :-)

[Peter Miller]

Help! I would rather convert to electric flight...er well, er perhaps not quite that.
Timbo: You seem to visit some very strange websites...or is that a self portrait?

[Tim Mackey]

Come on now Peter you will have to do better than that to persuade people that it is not YOU in your now infamous jump suit !!

[Alistair Taylor]

I have created a monster....

Peter - you're going to need a bigger boat

Alistair :)

[Tim Mackey]

Classic line from a classic film..... :-)

[Peter Miller]

Ah yes, Jaws. Must watch that again. In Jaws 2 all I wanted was fro the shark to eat the screaming teenagers.

[Peter Miller]

On Health and Safety. Did you hear on the radio yesterday about the child entertainer who was banned from using modelling balloons because some child in the audience might suffer from a latex allergy?
Now there is someone with their common sense surgically removed!!!
This also brings on the thought that in later life that child could have problems but we won't go there!

[Alistair Taylor]

I say I say I say

Q: When does a person decide to become a Safety Manager?
A: When he realizes he doesn't have the charisma to be an undertaker.

Q: What do safety Managers use for birth control?
A: Their personalities

Q: How can you tell an extroverted safety Manager?
A: When he talks to you, he looks at your safety shoes instead of his own

What do you get if you put 100 Safety Managers in your basement?

A whine cellar


Speaking personally, I place no faith in anything I read in the papers about anything. Whenever they've reported on my work they get it wrong, whenever they've reported on anything remotely connected with R/C they've got that wrong too. Hell, even the weather reports are 50/50 at best.

Todays newspaper is tomorrow's chip wrapper, and it's best to take both with a pinch of salt.


AlistairT

[Tim Mackey]

Shooting completely off topic here... and credit to the originator of this little ditty, but I thought it was just superb and relevant to the conversation regarding beurocracy ( spelling ?) and the health and safety elfs.

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 50's,60's and 70's !!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cots covered in bright coloured lead based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to
mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose, NOT from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle
and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank lemonade made with sugar, but we were not overweight because:

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day

And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our Go-Carts out of old prams and scrap and then ride down the biggest hills, only to find out
we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes and trees a few times we learned to solve the problem!

We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels Cable, Video movies or DVD, No surround sound , CD's or I PODS, no cell phones, no personal computers, no internet or chat rooms............

WE HAD FRIENDS and went outside to find them !


We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays!

We made up games with sharp arrows and bows made from trees, we played with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not actually “put out any-ones eyes” !!

We rode our bikes or walked to a friends house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them !

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law !

THESE GENERATIONS HAVE PRODUCED SOME OF THE BEST RISK TAKERS, PROBLEM SOLVERS AND INVENTORS EVER !
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL !

If YOU are one of them. CONGATULATIONS !


You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government
regulated so much of our lives “for our own good”.
And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were !!

[Malcolm Fisher]

Timbo,

Congratulations on that.

I was one of those kids and did an awful lot of that, and during school holidays we were sent off for the day with a packet of jam or treacle sandwiches and a bottle of tea and told not to come back until tea-time.

As for lead, we had "pencils" which were sticks of lead, painted and sharpened to look like pencils - they worked...

We also had soldiers etc, made from lead which were chewed and sucked pretty much like the lead "pencils".
All water pipes were made from lead and in Leeds the water was artificially "hardened" to stop the ;lead from being dissolved and creating leaks.

I'm now 68 and AFAIK have suffered no ill effects.

Having paused to look back at the previous 2 or 3 posts, I have to admit that I don't buy any newspapers as I don't believe more than a small fraction of what is printed and HSE no longer allow them to be used for chip wrappers - something to do with the ink getting onto the chips...

[Peter Miller]

AMEN to all that. I haven't bought a newspaper in years. I also refuse to talk the the press these days.

I like looking at the old books from the turn of the century. I had one which told you how to make cellulose varnish by dissolving rags in acid. At one stage of the procedure it said "This is very similar to guncotton so be careful" Guncotton is a high explosive!

In a book from the 30s on modelling there was a detailed description of how to make hydrogen using a couple of large containers, some zinc filings and hydrocloric acid. The "HSE" instructions were comprehensive "Wear gloves and do not have naked flames within fifty feet"

When I was a technician in a local school one pupil calmly cut through a live soldering iron lead with a pair of diagonal cutters in the middle of a lesson. Unfortunately he survived.

[Tim Mackey]

I remember ( just - eeek ) as a child discovering that sticking an all metal screwdriver into one of the holes in the round interesting looking thing on the huge wooden skirting boards of our house, propelled me across the room MUCH faster than I could ever run !
Now that's one bit of H+S development that I actually agree with - shutters on mains electrical outlets!!
My mum always says thats when I developed a particular interest in electricity...think I was about 5 yr old.

[Steve Hargreaves - Moderator]

Treacle sandwiches.....mmmmmmmmmmm!!! That takes me back. Have you tried Nestles Milk on a sandwich?? The thick condensed stuff.......

Malcolm...did you not know that one of the symptoms of intense lead poisoning is that it makes you sit up until the wee small hours chatting on aeromodelling forums???!!!

Or is that castor oil poisoning????? ;0)

[Alistair Taylor]

Thanks guys

My first child was born 1 month and three days ago, but you've all made me feel young again, very, very, very young.

One of my earliest memories is of milk at primary school being taken away by the milk snatcher....

The first war I remember involved harrier jump jets; in school I was taught how to make nylon; I was around for the microchip revolution that brought digital watches, video games, microcomputers, and mobile phones within reach of the masses; the Tornado jet first flew the year I was born, and we joined the EU before I was born.

So come on, who among you remembers rationing?


AlistairT :)

[Myron Beaumont]

Er indoors says that where she works, they had smoking huts. To comply with the new regulations although they can still smoke in the huts, the seats were removed, heaters taken out and the back and front walls emoved and replaced with horizontal bars so that it looked like a cross between a cattle pen and a bike shed
The latter was to ensure that people could only go in and out through the doorway (the doors had been removed).
In the interests of safety until the horizontal bars were put in place the empty space here the walls had been was replacd with black and yellow hazard tape to make sure no-one tripped over the metal strip tha once held the wall.
Now all the smoke goes into the buildings instead of staying in the shed.
Behind the shed is a high hawthorn hedge, beyond that a school playing field. When the council came to cut the hedge with a tractor and hedgecutter, lengths of hawthorn were flying into the shed with a fair velocity, and thorns, through the wall that was no longer there. Cleary a triumph of H&S!

[Alistair Taylor]

Ah yes, but the shed is the responsibility of estates, arrangements for smokers are organised by HR, the hedge clipping is the responsibility of the groundsman, who contracts it out to a local farmer, the school playing field is managed by the local council, and health and safety are in charge of yellow tape.

Estates are only in from 9 - 10 Mon-Wednesday, the Groundsman only works weekends, HR are all on holiday, H&S are attending a course on the hazards of cotton wool, the local council aren't in session at the moment, the schools are all on holiday, and the farmer's making hay while the sun shines.

If you'd checked the council notice board nailed 40 feet up on the outside of city hall you'd know this....

;)

[Myron Beaumont]

Nice one Alistair!

[Peter Miller]

Love it! Alistair.

I had an email, now lost about a modern Noah being told to build a new Ark. Sounds just like that.

[Peter Miller]

Going back to MY childhood. I remember being given a sheath knife at the age of about 7. But then things like that were minor risks.

I was six when I came back from South Africa (My father had been posted there from Egypt) on the first convoy through the Suez canal after it had been reopened. My strongest memory is watching the destroyers in the escort going "Whooop, whooop, whooop" and dropping depth charges. We were chased right out into the Atlantic by wolfpacks of submarines. The really extraordinay thing was that we never lost one ship.

After that what is the risk of a sheath knife.

Oh yes. I do remember rationing too.

I know, I know, Swing the lamps.

[Malcolm Fisher]

I too was "rationed" and remember when one of the last items, sweets, became unrationed - circa 1950/51. I also remember that I ate MORE sweets when they were rationed than afterwards - after all one had to have one's ration whether you liked it or not...

Like Peter, I had a sheath knife from a similar age - an imitation Bowie knife with a blade about 8" long and no one batted an eyelid in school when I used it to sharpen a pencil.

[Erfolg]

I almost remember rationing, do remember playing with an old buff coloured ration book (simple times). The Germans had been of rationing for years, no Socialist, market controls for them.

I remember a class mate bringing in an old British and German handgranade to school. The pride of the teacher showing the class the superior British model, against the inferior Kraut stuff. I do not remember how he knew it wasn’t live.

My dad kept a tin full of bullets under the stairs, had his obligatory trophy handgun (handed in years later). Yet gun crime very low, in that era.

We as kids used to plunge down the side of the local slag heaps on our bikes.

Yet the only deaths I remember were two friends separately killed by buses. Not by falling of the open platform at the rear.

That was in the days before Health & Safety

Happy Memories, well almost

Erfolg

[Malcolm Fisher]

No guns or bullets around in my childhood, but there were grenades aplenty - minus explosive charge but otherwise functional with spring loaded pin. We kids played with them a lot pretending they were real, pulling the pin and hurling them towards the "enemy".

we rode bikes round quite deep hollows - bomb craters? -doing the "wall of death" and going from one side to the other down and up the sides. The ultimate was doing a figure of 8 and this gave great credibilty among peers.

There was also the large pipe we used to ride along across a stream - bit tricky when wet as there were lugs on the top so one had to ride slightly down the curved surface. There was also the six inch wide girder alongside a railway track from the local colliery which crossed the same stream and some of us rode across that as well.

No-one suffered any real harm even if falling off and I still have some of the scars on my knees...

No hint of HSE bods.

[Peter Miller]

In the fifties we used to fly models on old USAF air bases, Saling, Now St Andrews Filed and eason Lodge. You could find .5o cal. ammunition all over the place. We used to pull the heads off and burn the cordite. I had a belt of cartridges with the cordite removed and the heads replaced.
Never did what some people did with ammo (Not.50s). Put it in a vice and hit theprimer with a nail. Even I wasn.t quite that stupid!