All life is here...

We now shop at Tesco's. Mainly because Morrisons had started going low on stock which is just laziness.
So, much as I despise Tesco as an organisation, it is the only place that has all we want, although we still check out the very well priced Lidl's every so often.

One thing that Tesco have here, which nobody else does (thank Christ) is a 24 hour gym up one end. This means that having ridden up either the travelator thingy or, as increasingly, the lift, because OTIS can't make a reliable travelator, you end up only feet away from the gym's entrance, where (usually) brutally ugly women stand around as if mesmerised by the light or noise or something, invariably staring at a mobile 'phone, having shoehorned their lumpy limbs into the most unsuitable, but equally ugly hosiery and wearing the kind of tops that leave their cellulite ridden flabby stomachs exposed to the vomit that I always wish I could project onto them.
I suppose there is some achievement in carting around the exercise machines the extra weight of eyelashes that would propel a small boat across the Atlantic if the rower lost his oars.  Make up so heavily and insensibly caked on that they appear to be mutated dolls from a singularly incompetent workshop.  Eyebrows that Graucho Marx would have been proud of and lipstick that looks like they've just eaten a Ferrari.
With all the exercise, they still have backsides like picnic tables and knock knees, bottomed off with pigeon toed feet that must catch on each other as they walk.  Why do these stupid females spend their precious time and money trying to look better when they are ALL hideous!?

Their shopping list will, of course, be on their mobile 'phone, so that they can stumble round the rest of the store staring at it, in the unlikely event that anyone will have sent them a message of any import whatsoever.  But they live in hope and so stare at the stupid contraption in case some misguided fool thinks them at all important or worthy of attention., thereby bumping into displays and people who are sufficiently well organised to have a small piece of paper between two fingers of the hand that pushes the trolley, containing all their needs for the expedition.

Fitness women...UGH!!!

The younger men all wanna-be hipsters. struggle round in jeans so tight, their balls have all but withered away, but their knees will be free to open air being stylishly cut at the factory by Chinese children who are paid specially for that particular and peculiar skill.
They will have visited the barber's shop which is squeezed incongruously along the vestibule of anger where we jostle twixt non working Otis travelator and lifts. In there, grown men have the kinds of hairdos that as small boys I and my friends were already grown up enough to fight against. The short back and sides which was all the carve up merchant at Austin's barbers could ever do. Now...it's considered a special skill. It's what my Grandfather called a "tuppeny all-off"  "All ponsed up like a pox doctor's clerk" he would smirk at the merest whiff of hair oil or male grooming.  It's what I laugh at and call a Tesco's hairdo.  They're like droids in a row, as are the snip joint wallers doing it to them. Clones, sheep...Baaaaahhh!

With very few exceptions I hate people!!

Happy New Year

What am I up to?...

Well, I have now finished the Vanwall Transporter master. Just have the glazing bar masters to do in brass for a white metal casting. Trouble is, Eileen's Emporium have been super tardy in their deliveries so I was forced to soften and hammer 1/16th" rod into flat strip.

For some reason the guy wanted it to be motorisable for slot tracks rather than just scenery, so I had to make a chassis pattern to take the inevitable Slotit pod. All this does is weakens the chassis which I could so easily have designed to be strong without having to use the silly, over-rated, overpriced pod.

Then we have the 1915 Triumph Model H in 1/43rd scale as model railway scenery. All in brass and fiddly as Hell to do.  I'm now doing the riders for it. One, standing in uniform and one seated on it as a civvy chap with his cap back to front.

And the Vincent, subject of other posts?  Well, I sent the deeper parts that our normal caster couldn't mould to a company in Birmingham called Griffin Moulds who assured me it was all just normal work. After longer than they promised they sent me, without any communication of any kind, a bag of dust that had been the engine casings!  They had utterly destroyed the masters and made a shit job of casting the other bits. The wheel rims they claimed were a "perfectly normal casting job" weren't even round and half the spoke bumps were missing.

So, after Christmas now, I will have to remake the engine casings in brass this time to get a caster with the right moulds to do the work.

That's it for now, folks. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Vincent is into production at last...

The long running Vincent Black Shadow master for a 1/6th scale kit has reached the end and the parts are now with casters, moulders, decal producers, etc.
It won't be cheap, but regular updates with pictures I have sent Richard over the last year of master making are all going on his new Facebook page. You need to "do" FB to see the page. Just click on
www.facebook.com/groups/260314371337243/ and you should  get there.

The very first parts from the very first mould.  Many, many more yet to come.  This is the first master I have made where it took two people to carry the boxes of parts safely to the caster!"

Nuts'n'bolts...

                                                                               

After a year I am nearing the end of the Vincent Black Shadow master. Obviously it doesn't actually TAKE a year. Other stuff has been done, other things have to be waited for, reference material gathered, visits arranged and made to sketch and measure real ones, etc.  Having made the components there is then, with such a big and complete model, a period of checking.  Checking that things fit in place, checking clearances and fits generally, checking that I haven't forgotten anything, and most of all....checking all the nuts and bolts.  Yes, nuts and bolts.  Whilst they are not actually threaded, they are obvious in their presence and most actually do keep things in place. They HAVE to be there and they are so easy to miss while you make bigger, more obvious , perhaps more challenging parts. It's perfectly natural top miss a tiny bolt when you've just sculpted a magneto cover or one of those ludicrously abstract cylinder heads.

These are relevant to the wheels and front suspension.

The essence of the front suspension,  the legs, bristling with dummy nuts and bolts, but if the legs are shiny black the polished faces of the chrome look nuts and bolts will contrast beautifully.

I'm hoping one more day should see it done, then all off to the white metal caster, resin moulder and tyre maker.  And I can take a break.  I have some boats to restore.

Oh and a 1/43rd scale 'bike and N gauge locos and a Gypsy Moth aeroplane and, and, and...

Make do and mend...

At the weekend I've decided to leave the big stuff behind and just do jobs for me.  Of course that usually morphs into Kanyerjustas. You know...Kanyerjust sort that door out, Kanyerjust top up the pond, etc.  Today the light seems to have run out after all that lovely summer and Indian summer and it's pissing down with rain.
I did get a bit done yesterday. I finished the carrying case for the Crash Tender and painted some bits on the wee Star SY 3 yacht restoration.  I'm really getting a taste for this restoration lark. It has more challenges than making new.  And making do and mending has always been my main interest. I know I can make new. I've nothing to prove there, but restoring is always something new to think about.

The Star yacht with the first coat of enamel on the lower hull.

Tinplate fittings scraped free of rust and mast repaired from 2 broken halves.

The front slides down hammered aluminium angles.  The case will eventually have stands to keep the boat's prop and rudder off the floor.  Now I have to make similar for the Vanity yacht,Chris Craft, the Darby One Design and the Greavette.  Then where do they all go?!

Give me strength!!...

Tonight I watched less than half of a new TV series called the Great Model Railway Challenge.  It had been advertised for weeks and I'd had time to ponder how awful it would almost certainly be.  But, Ye Gods I hadn't bargained for the disaster that met me at 8 o'clock on Friday evening.  To think my dear wife had foregone Gardeners' World for this drivel.

Three teams of baggy arsed, pot bellied old farts, recently ( or otherwise) pensioned off from, no doubt, well pensioned jobs got together to be given completely predictably stupid and irrelevant tasks to acheive with an 8x4 roundy roundy train set. I do NOT consider any part of their magnifying headsets, overpriced Noch electro static grass applicators or round ring desk lamps to be anything whatever to do with model railways.No amount of airbrushery where a paint brush would do will make a bodger into a modelmaker.  The one encouraging scene was where one old boy on being shown the scratchbuilding challenge, declared with some disgust that he was a modelmaker, not a clown.
That challenge had to be explained by the producer/presenter so that people knew what was scratchbuilding. It too had nothing to do with modelmaking being the insistence on the use of a high heeled shoe and a lipstick!  An ugly ginger denim wearing token female, more at home on Big Brother, I would have thought, warned she would be looking for creativity.  God forbid!

I have to confess, at that point, I too was missing Monty Don and told my wife to switch back to something realistic and interesting.

This debacle follows another model series that was bloody rubbish, where a team of British (always has to be a team doesn't it?) model flyers challenged a team of German model flyers to relive the Battle of Britain with models. For the most part the models, all built to one standard...low, were appallingly badly flown to the point that one could not discern what was happening, except for one pilot and SHE (HE...IT) was a transgender!  How thoroughly Media of them.  Apparently, on that occasion "we" beat the Jerries.  How would we know.  I have not watched that again, either.

There seems to be a kind of terminal unwritten statement in the Media that modelmaking must be pilloried and ridiculed out of existence and since the screen is everybody's modern bible they will do it by TV.

Sudden loss...

I learned suddenly the other day of the death of an old friend.  I had known this gentleman since the first week of my internet presence, on my old Mac, back in the late '90s.  We met over his superb set of web pages called Model Boat Wizards.  Rich loved many things, but woodies and models of them (mahogany classic speedboats), motorbikes and the Islands were his passions.
7 years ago he had to have a lung removed. He never really found out why and that, I imagine, as much as its removal and subsequent disabilities annoyed him. He was not a smoker.  Maybe it's true what they say about wood dust, for his models were all wood.  He could make a Liberty aero engine in a boat that you would swear was made of metal.

Attitudes to hand made models changed recently and he lost his interest, especially when aol summarily removed all the websites they hosted and we lost Model Boat Wizards.  Rich never really knew what to do after that.  He passed on to me two lovely jobs I'm sure he would have done himself previously, a Miss America X and a Baby Horace III, which are now in a restaurant in Fairfax, Virginia, called Artie's.  He sent me books on woodies which I treasure, but when he found little or no interest in all the hundreds of drawings he'd amassed over the years he made a huge bonfire in his garden and they were gone.  That, is the fault of the model world. No club or museum could be arsed to answer him. It was out of disgust and despair for the hobby that he burned them. For all I know he might have done the same with the kits and books he had remaining, because they would have been too expensive for him to send or me to receive, thanks to sudden huge increases in postal charges.

I'm lucky to have some CDs he recorded, telling the story of an old Allard J2X that his chum once owned, which seemed to be jinxed. His rumbling voice is both restful and amusing.  He went under the handle of  Chatham on my followers list. He could rarely leave a comment due to blogger being difficult, but he'd always mail me instead.

                                           Sock it to 'em up there, old chum. Give 'em Hell.

Touchy, touchy...

Recently I have come off various enthusiast sites/pages/forums because I make a reasonable comment or give an opinion to which I am perfectly entitled and some picky, touchy bastard gets totally snotted out with the comment.  There's no point in wasting time with these turds, so I fire back a snotty comment and leave the site/page/forum.  I therefore find that I am now on so few pages on Fartbook and no forums at all, that I wonder of the point in remaining on Fartbook at all.  If it weren't for my son's page about Triumph Renown restoration and a couple of pages my chum runs on 1/43rd scale slot cars, I could easily leave the time wasting crap altogether.
I can't believe how touchy people are.  I got a load of Belgian abuse from some goofy turd this morning who put up a load of heavy crap about car enthusiasm and then showed a picture of a modern Ford Focus or some such arse liquid.  I just said "But...it's just a Ford"  And whoa, off he goes, calling me all the things under the sun!  So, I don't know how he became a friend in the first place, clearly an oversight, but he sure ain't any more, especially after what I called him just now!
And as for Yanks who can't take any form of criticism whatever, the less said the better. I reckon if somebody shows a video on FB of a row of filthy, rusty, hideous so-called rat rods, I have a public right, nay duty to comment upon them, but the response was pure personal vitriol.  Sad gits.  Don't offend me in a public place and expect me to make no comment and rat rods offend anyone with aesthetic tendencies. Same thing on a woody boat page. Silly dog's paw exhausts on an otherwise beautiful boat, yuch. I said so and I was pounced on by some Yank who couldn't take criticism.

                                               Suck it up Bubba and blow it out yer arse.

Almost there...

Well, after a year, the Vincent Black Shadow 1/6th scale master is almost finished. I finally got the etchings from France, via Portugal and glued them on. They were too fragile for solder.  I finally got enough pictures to make an operable front stand. Almost as abstract as the cylinder heads which I've done, but which need some cleaning up.  I made the exhaust today until the delivery of brass rod turned out to be 4mm diameter steel in 5" lengths.  I'm expecting the right stuff tomorrow.  Even just 2 apparently simple curved pipes are actually far more complex in shape and relationship than you'd first think.

We have had the wheel rims done by a process called SLA.  Some call it 3D printing, but it isn't.  A laser hardens a microscopic layer of resin in a bath of the stuff and then it pops up one layer.  There is also a complex support system which is very brittle, but he results were superb. Right down to the bumps from which the spokes issue. 

He is currently making tyre masters INCLUDING the writing on the tyre wall, Avon for the front and Dunlop on the slightly different rear.  Because all this stuff now has to be done from computer files, he is also doing the transfers artwork, equally beautifully.  Where, once, I did it all, my job these days tends to be one of not merely pattermaker, but "facilitator", harvesting work from the best in their fields.  It annoys me that they can all charge much more than I, even though I consider what I do to be beyond most of them and what they do something I could quickly learn if I didn't have to pay through the nose to do so (£500 a day plus accommodation!)  But these days it's the only way to get these things done.

I made the pattern for the hub recently. I was dreading it, but as ever with a feared job, it went swimmingly.  The caster is currently making 4 of them for me to modify into a set of parts. The front hubs have 5 bolts holding the spoke flange to the main hub flange and the rear has 10. I will get the 4 castings back and make one set with another 5 bolts.  The one side, front and rear has to be just the flange and the other, front and rear is the flange and hub cylinder, to be joined at one side.  Here's the brass pattern for the 5 bolt original. The ten slots round the etch take 2 spokes each and were done by drilling the hole centrally and then sawing out either side with a piercing saw. It went very easily. I was surprised and relieved!

Also made the chain guard. That was going to be two sides with a central piece sandwiched betwixt, but it turned out to be far more domed than that would allow, so the only way to make it was to beat two sides over at the top to get the curvature, then be filed straight and soldered together and filed to one curve. Then tiny fixings had to be made and soldered to it.

Why do photos taken with a mobile 'phone end up in a different orientation to that at which they were taken?

Well, with just a few final parts to be made and a final check that everything fits, we should be done.  Then, I have to make all the little changes that make it a Black Lightning and then a Series D.

And if that ain't enough, the next whole bike will be a BSA Gold Star with a Rocket Gold Star Twin to follow that!

Arf a sixpence...

Well, half a litre, anyway.  I went to my local paint supplier today, Kett's Autopaints (much recommended, no complaints) to get, I'd hoped, a 1/4 Litre of enamel paint in a nice off white for a model boat.
Unfortunately as they had to mix it, they could only do half a litre. Fair enough, but whereas a litre is 21 quid, HALF as much is over 16!  How is that right?  Not their fault, that's what the makers charge. It is good stuff mind you, so OK I paid it because I had no choice, but I'd have been happier with something around 12 quid as half of 21?

I wanted it for my latest Aerokits hull restoration. I bought this on ebay for 99 p. Yes, really! Must have been wrongly listed, I can't now recall.  I am not a huge fan of the Sea Hornet as designed. Too busy, too much intended to go on, on the upper works, so I decided to do a Chris Craft on it. I started thinking 2 cockpits, but even that was a bit fussy, so I found the Special Racer or sometimes called the Custom Runabout.  A heavily tumblehomed stern, but not quite as rolled as the Barrel Back.  Then I thought it would look good painted, for a change, instead of varnished mahogany.  Then I found this...perfect....

Of course, the model is a looky likey, rather than a spot on job, but nobody would know as nobody in this benighted land could give a shit about classic speedboats. And fewer still know one from a canal barge.  Whereas, Moi?  I detest tugs, tankers, traders, warships, torpedo boats, coasters, ocean tugs, footy yachts and springer tugs, prate galleons, clipper ships and square riggers of any kind, IOM yachts, modern yachts of any kind in fact, generic offshore power boats and silly overpowered Zenoah weed whacker powered stuff (although I do like the excellent finishes usually applied to the latter.  I am, in short, a fussy sod.  I like vintage yachts and classic speedboats and although I lived on an historic canal boat, I can think of nothing duller than a model of it on the water!

I am a fan of the mahogany hotrod.  And very little else.

Here's my 99p Sea Hornet with its new deck.

The long engine hatch will have to be made to its own frame to maintain the crown of the deck. I have the smaller hatches for access to steering servo (side) and tiller (aft).  The transom should be slightly curved but you gotta stop somewhere when modifying a standard product.

The deck will have to be slightly engraved to represent the planking, before painting.  But painting it all will save me hours which need to be spent on the Spitfire kneeler outboard, Greavette Gent's Racer and Darby One Design in the shed, not to mention the finishing (after 55 years) of my Crash Tender.  Oh and the Vanity Victorian Cutter model, which is very close to finishing.  Something tells me I'll be carrying this lot into Winter rather than the usual diet of slot cars and scenery.

And den I got diss and diss and den dat and...

Another birthday, another haul of goodies.
I got a Hobgoblin T-shirt to add to my other one, yet I have never drunk a pint of that beer.  A bottle of Southern Comfort, most useful.  A nice coffee cream cake and an Indian takeaway...Chicken Achar. Yum, my favourite Indian meal on a stuffed paratha.
Chris bought me a set of ancient Yeoman white metal fittings for the Crash Tender, a bag of Modelling Timbers very final glazed hand turned portholes and a set of new RC gear.

There, happy with that lot.  I'm just finishing cleaning up the white metal fittings. Nothing too much required. Just a coat of primer before final colours.  AND, the portholes are perfect for the wheelhouse too. Saves me the hassle.  The RC gear, ludicrously inexpensive, works perfectly too and will go in it as 2.4Gg frequency doesn't suffer from early sparky electric motors. And my Crash Tender has a Taycol Supermarine of considerable vintage.  Not the fastest, but then this type of Crash Tender would have spent very little time flat out anyway. It just didn't have the fuel capacity at 65 gallons per hour PER ENGINE!  Of which it had 2.
So, my finishing off of the CT is nearly there.  Filling, sanding down, a bit more filling, then final paint.  The window frames are made with windows and the gutters added over the cabins.  Mast made of brass.

Time for another Southern Comfort, methinks...

Annual leave...

When one is used to working for oneself, long hours and all the rest, one rarely gets a chance for an annual holiday. 
And it occurred to me that now I am retired I don't have to think that way any more, so I decided to push my me time on weekends rule to a full week, maybe even more.

With that in mind,  I have got the 54 year old Aerokits Crash Tender out of my son's loft and determined to finish it, once and for all. Yes, I had a 54 year old model which I had never actually finished!  I'd used it, often as a kid, but just never put all the final bits on it.  In fact, somehow, it had lost odd bits of itself. 
There has had to be an element of restoration as time has had its usual effects on even good quality plywood and a few areas needed gluing to correct small bits of  delamination, but generally it just needed finishing, rather than re-finishing.

I first had to clean the muck of ages out of it with a pointy stick, a stiff brush and a Hoover with a clever micro tubes attachment on it.  Then an all over go with epoxy resin which behaved itself beautifully despite its age.  This would have strengthened it up internally and helped waterproof externally.  The epoxy was filed and scraped down and then painted several coats with a thick cellulose primer and rubbed back.  That is now ready for a spray coat to get a nice finish.  I had noticed that round the bottom of the cabin sides there was a batten to aid waterproofing on the real boat so that was added, as was the toe rail on the deck, the dummy door framing and the rubbing strake round the hull were also put on with another hatch and runners on the middle of the wheelhouse roof.

I am currently making the window frames and gutters for the windows.  The mast has been made from brass.

I will be using the original Taycol Supermarine motor, because it is only right and proper. I would have insisted on using the  original REP radio gear, but some bastard stole it years ago, so I will use a modern one that doesn't risk being interfered with by the radio frequency "dirtyness" of the old motor.  I'd hate to lose this old girl. 

For annual leave, this has proved well worth the effort.

For every supermarket...

Time was.....choice...

Time was...I used to draw what I wanted  photo-etched, with a Draughtsmans' pen (remember them?).

I'd draw it 4 times bigger, so that a)it was easier to draw and b) it would be crisp as you like when reduced to actual size on the local printer's repro camera (remember them?).

He liked a lemonade or two , so I would wait till about 12-30 and find him in the Crown, where I'd buy him a beer.  At about  1-ish we'd roll back to his little graphics office and he would make me 2 negatives, emulsion side down, one for the front, one for the back, charge me a fiver and I was on my way.  I'd turn the back one into the correct a/w for the nature of the work with a paint called Rubilith, a real of the sticky tape version of which I'd got from said printer a long time previous for another pint.  The registration gunsights were bang on because they were on the basic artwork I'd drawn.
This then got sent off to Photo-Etch Consultants, Photofabrications or Chempix and a week or so later I got an 18x12" sheet of 10 thou. brass or stainless steel for £18.  Done.  Because I'd sent them camera ready artwork, they had no need to make a "photo tool" for which they would charge me. I'd given THEM one, all they needed from me. 2 negs, emulsion side down, same size.

NOW, the artwork has to be drawn on a computer and a special file type produced. This is sent off to the etchers, who will then check it over and make their kind of phototool, for which they will charge you. In fact every minute they spend doing something to your a/w, a/w you'd thought you'd finished, they charge you at maybe £25 an hour, much more than you can charge for making the model that these bits will go on, even though you are, by far, the more skilled man.
If you can't work Corel Draw or Illustrator, you will have to pay someone else (at at least £25 an hour) to interpret what you give them. They will NOT be model makers, probably not even draughtsmen, (remember them?), pipe optional,

yet they will regard themselves as worth a bloody fortune an hour for merely redrawing what you gave them.  That job used to be called tracer and paid way less than a proper draughtsman. Usually trainees.  You know, like paying £60 an hour at the garage to have some gormless grease monkey "fix" your car.

So, finally you have a chance of getting your etch made weeks later and then the etchers cock it up and send you a fret exactly one third smaller than it should be. They will not, they will NEVER admit fault and so expect you to pay for their mistake. You couldn't have checked what the computer nerd drew as the file is not what a normal machine can read or open.

Time was, exactly the same crap for having decals made.  Black drawings per colour, each on a separate sheet of drawing film, gunsight registered with a Pantone reference for the colour to use. Send it to the screen printers and pay pocket money a week later.  Not any more. More bloody computer files required. Then a print that means no carrier film, weak, flimsy ink and a need to cut carefully round any image before water sliding it.  All because silk screen is now so rare and expensive, because negatives are no longer made because the chemistry used is no longer made, etc., etc., etc.  A vicious circle that has made these two processes impossible for me to do and therefore makes life difficult for the people for whom I used to make patterns AND offer an a/w service for etchings and decals.

Oh, but computers give you so much choice!
BOLLOCKS!!!

Look what I found in Dadddy's garage......

When I look at most videos of old cars it is quite obvious that the average age of the owners/drivers/attendant viewers means they are set to croak in no more than 15-20 years, leaving the cars/boats/aircraft/motorcycles where exactly?

One exception seems to be the Chain Gang.  That collection of reprobates who populate the Frazer-Nash club, mainly the owners of the Chain driven cars, along with their mates in the Morgan club and the other chain driven oddball clubs.
These seem to have as many young strutters as old farts. Even the old farts seem to have some extra life from somewhere.
The big question is will the Ollies and Justins of the world be real enthusiasts?  Will they be prepared, halfway up the Stelvio, to take the left cylinder off their J.A.P. KTOR V twin to see what that mystery knock is?  Could they improvise a repair?  Will they keep the club going?  Well, since anyone with a 'Nash nowadays needs to be stinking rich they will probably know enough of their public school chums and Uni. muckers to keep those all-nighters going at the Club dinners and, even if it is by a newer tradition than most of us can come close to, financially, at least, keep one club's long traditions going.
As to the rest of the clubs, those with few if any such traditions, I fear the cars will just be put away and forgotten about.

Art, craft, trade, blag?...

So often one reads in comments about an averagely nice job done that it's a "work of art", etc, when actually it's probably just a nice job, done by a half competent craftsperson.  There is little or no "art" in it. It's just a well planned and excecuted job of craftsmanship and none the worse for that.  Frankly I get very annoyed with the way the word art is thrown around as some kind of superlative.  Look, if you will, at most art these days.  It's execrable garbage for the most part, so I really don't want someone who hasn't thought it through calling what I've happily practiced my craft on, "art".  It is NOT art, it is craftsmanship.  Cut the legacy class crap and deal with the fact that craft is good.  Not bloody "crafting", for God's sake, that dead end glorified recycling of household goods, but real, hand made, mind conceived, eye checked (constantly), craftsmanship, borne of years of instruction and practice.
I regard a few particular crafts as Godlike.  Horology, Coachbuilding, Graining and Marbling (where a little artfulness might reside), Fine Cabinet Making, Silversmithing.  Can't think of that many others.

Trades?  Well there is some crossover there, hence the term Craftsman Plumber for instance, meaning doing that noble trade like it used to be done with wiped joints and hand formed zinc flats, church roofs and rainwater furniture, not sticking PVC pipes together with a pot of glue.  No shame in trade either.  Regardless of what the Victorian snobs reckoned.

All the rest is bodgery, blagging and conmen. Cowboys as we now call them.

I would like to be thought of as a Master Craftsman, but I have not studied one narrow craft long enough or sufficiently thoroughly to be called that.  I was today described as a "Real Craftsman", and that, I regard as a true compliment.

Plus ca change....

He said, with a nod towards his best chum's current predilection for trotting out the odd expression in Yer Akshul School French.  And it's not even right, because what I really wanted to say was the very opposite of that well know phrase.  I wanted to say, "The more things stay the same, the more they change, but my school French was no better than to give me fully 2% in the mock O-Level, for I seem to recall, spelling my own name in French with my tongue firmly in my cheek, so cleverly turning that phrase back in on itself is beyond me.

It occurred to me when I was pressing on with a master made at my choice in the hope someone would adopt it, of the achingly beautiful Morgan SLR.  Four cars were built.....the first on a TR4 chassis, the rest on Morgan frames.  This left the Triumph chassised version a few inches shorter in the section forward of the screen. 

That, you would assume would normally be the end of that.  But NO! Closer examination reveals that all three are different from each other.  Odd, when one assumes the great Williams and Pritchard, coachbuilders to the world of racing cars for so long would have made a wooden buck over which their four similar bodies will have been checked.  Well, if they did, it is not obvious.  OK, the general shape of the red, green and even the blue TR based ones are close (leaving out the 4 inches in bonnet length of the latter), but what gives with the natural metal one?  Same underpinnings of the other two longer wheelbase cars, but  the front wings are sensually raised, the shoulders are softer.  How could this one have fitted the buck?  OR, was it this one rebuilt elsewhere after a fire?  Hmmmm, could be.

Oh well, I like it best, so will make the master this way and concientious kit bashers can file some off the wings and build up some filler on the shoulders.  Oh and reshape the bonnet bulge and remove the smaller one.  Oh and yes, the windows are all treated differently, being largely Perspex, rivetted in.  Getting that effect with vacuum formed plastic on a 1/32nd scale slot care body (requiring as it does a very thin edge to the window aperture inside which the window proper goes) is almost impracticable.  The natural metal one has rubber seals. Much easier to represent. 

Back to the grindstone.

From the village pump...

Where I now live is a village where Thomas the Tank Engine was born, albeit in better days. Thomas was an offshoot of the earlier Toby the Tram engine.  Toby used to trundle up to 40 full fruit vans along the rails at the top of my road. I could even have seen it from my garden at a squeeze.

The Rev. W. Awdry, teller of the above tales,was the village rector.  Most of the other inhabitants are the village RectUM.  Chavs, under class, pond life of various degrees who think nothing of tumbling down from their perches dressed in pyjamas and dressing gowns, in big Bird Boxes.  You know, those Boxes on wheels that birds drive. I believe the manufacturers like you to call them SUVs.  Nothing else is even advertised these days.  And the ghastly, over-weight, ugly, slack jawed, knuckle dragging, aggressive, fishwife-mouthed dregs who infest this village all drive one.  Deciding which bedware to take their spawn to school in the morning, they leave their fat little sprogs in front of the telly, possibly watching the latest iteration of Thomas that Disney wants them to see, in order to keep them quiet until they shoo them off to school in those same Bird boxes, where they park in such a way that the bus can't get through that part of the village, even though the lazy sluts could easily walk the offspring so short a distance and do themselves some good into the bargain.

Thank God we live on the very edge of the village and only occasionally have to venture into the centre to buy essentials or use the Post Office.  Fortunately by the time I go to the Chinese Takeaway, most are gone, watching their favourite crap on the TV.  I have lived in other villages and know many more, all were very pleasant, but this one takes the biscuit. Thank heavens we can shut our front door and ignore that Chav Central exists just down the road.

Downsizing perhaps...

I apologise to my tens of followers for the long gap in blog updates.  I've been busy with the Vincent motorbike master and slot cars.  Yes, my huge collection of body shells for which I made the patterns going back years.  So, I joined various Facebook pages concerning slot cars and found them all to be so very friendly and helpful. OK, I was helped by one or two in the railway world, but I couldn't take all the kit snobs. The daft sods prepared to spend a King's ransom only to end up with the same pile of bits that anybody else could have.  THEN spend the same again on the extras like wheels, gears, motor, paint, decals, weathering, und, und, und....I hate all that nonsense.  And the fact that scenery still hasn't scored more than 3 out of ten on the necessity score chart.  Laser cut buildings costing a fortune, yet looking like they came off a robot with their horrible regularity and miss-matched corners.
Nope, life, I have finally discovered, is too damned short to have some old fart's better pension rubbed in my face, followed by their comfortably fat arse in the ticket queue at some cloned exhibition where the kit envy and kit snobbery reach spoken fever pitch and those who have wrangled online can finally insult each other face to face.

I decided that I actually rather enjoyed not merely making model car patterns, but moreso restoring some old Revell slot cars that a good friend kindly gave me for my last birthday.  I lapped up piecing bits of styrene and Milliput filler putty into previously chewed out wheel arches.  I loved that people on the pages would offer their spare bits to the project.  Getting it all primed and painted and decalled up looking pristine again.  And I don't even have a track!  Or a local club.  Doesn't matter. I now have a fleet of 50 year old model cars that still go like the clappers but look better than new.  Then I was given a spare Stingray body so I'm turning that into a Gran Sport, a rare version of the Corvette that was parked next to us in the paddock at the Goodwood Revival.  Boy were they LOUD.

I have a spare GTO body too, so that will become Sir Stirling Moss's lime green version, with lots of detail and probably a home made chassis from brass, or maybe the one my son has 3D printed for me on his machine.

Then it seemed to me that I ought to have the cars I had as a kid all those years ago.  I now had the Revells with their revolutionary "can" motors, so how about the Scalextric vintage Bentley and Alfa Romeo, the Airfix Lotus for which I'd paid 13/10d.  Or the gorgeous 1964 GTO that Monogram made and then licenced to MRRC, my favourite make.  Asking around the pages I found a GTO, a complete kit sent to me by a friend and a spare body he wanted me to modify into a different version for him.  A cheap Bill Thomas Cheetah came from Spain, another MRRC body.  That's gone on an ancient Supershells chassis courtesy of Tony Condon, who wrote the history of slot racing a few years ago and recently bought the entire stocks of SRM/Supershells.  The wheel inserts and tyres came for that today  Guess what I'm doing tomorrow.

And I got that Airfix Lotus.  2 to be precise, in immaculate original sets for a great price locally.  So now, all I'm lacking is the MRRC vacuum formed Stingray body to put on my VIP Club Special chassis. That will leave just a Microperm motor which I built into a carved balsa wood Ferrari 158 in 1965 and won a big F1 open meeting against adult opposition at Runnymede.

I have quite a past in model railways, yes, but they're all dead or gone and it counts for very little now, but when the oldest friend you have (we met on the first day we ever went to school), Steve, goes to the trouble of contacting you via PMs on a slot car forum after 46 years AND makes the effort to meet up and have a drink and a chat, I think my days in slot racing are more important, so, I shall flog off what railway stuff I have that is saleable and my R/C gear which belongs to a now unaffordable hobby and I  will spend it on wheels and tyres, guides and gears.

All the huts and sheds I've made for model railways can be put on my son's 1/43rd scale hillclimb track pretending to be Marshalls huts and paddock cafes and I will build a track on one of his spare doors, hinged to the wall of my workshop.  One day there may be a club in this area like there used to be.

Me, second from right with that Corvette vac-form.  Steve (Uncle Albert on here) far left.  Note the ties, folks.  Around 1964.