1000 Engine at Astle Park

times on both days.

seen before.

I forgot to mention that I have forgoten the names of several engines. If you know them send me an E Mail & I will correct them. TIA

After an evening birthday bash at Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Hazel & I drove up to Manchester, stayed overnight & so to Astle Park by 10am. I saw lots of people I knew & actually remembered to introduce Hazel to everyone!

550 miles in the weekend ....

There were some very interesting engines on display & it was an enjoyable four hours. Then to the Anson Museum & once again I'm impressed to see how much work has been done there. The car park is bigger & has a new surface & the Gardener Room is better arranged as have several other parts of the museum. The new Crawley Hall has the ex NMSI Mirlees No 1 reclining on its pallet awaiting work and the gurt steam engine at the end is showing signs of work too. I was sorry to miss the open evening & hope everyone enjoyed it. Photos in a day or two.

Regards,

J. Kim Siddorn,

Haven't been to '1000' engine or Anson museum for 3-4 years. Drove up through filthy weather on Friday and feared the worst for the weekend. But Saturday turned out OK bar a couple of heavy showers and Sunday similar until the heavens opened around 2:30 at which point we decided to cut and run! Four hour drive back to London through equally dire conditions.

Engine display superb with a huge variety of stuff to look at from the established 'classics' to those seldom seen oddities which really make a rally for me. Something I haven't noticed before is a number of 'creations' by enterprising individuals eg; a horizontal Lister D and a couple of a very archaic looking inverted verticals, one fashioned from a miscellany of engine parts attached to a grinder pedestal and the other a Lister VA turned upside-down, converted to gas and 'open cranked'! Great fun, though I'm not too sure about hacking up a relatively uncommon VA.

Anson Museum has changed quite a bit and I was utterly entranced by the Otto and Langen atmospherics (suddenly one realises why the four stoke Otto 'Silent' was so named!) and the Atkinson Cycle engine.

I hovered around the beer tent at 1 O'clock on both days but apart from the welcome presence of Arthur Griffin on the Sat, the usual gathering of NG types appeared to be absent. Saw quite a few familiar faces around the rally field though, and I'm sure there are others I should have recognised (not a strong point of mine).

All in an excellent weekend.

Nick,

Had I known there was a beer tent and a beer in the offing I would have joined you, my mate and I left a 14:30 also and also detoured around Warwick to avoid the accident on the M1. I took over seventy pictures which I will put up in the next few days. I liked the home mades, I have enough bits to create one of my own :-)), I think I might consider putting in an entry myself next year I'm sure you could find something also.

"campingstoveman" wrote (snip):-

It is something I have toyed with on occasions, but I would tend towards a hot air/stirling engine rather than IC for such a project. This:-

is the first public disclosure of what might be called a 'proof of concept' model of a proposed Stirling engine linkage which I devised while messing about with Cinderella (no, not something that Helen would be distessed to learn - Cinderella is interactive geometry software!). Embodying elements of a bell crank and grasshopper beam mechanisms, it provides the required phase differance between the dispacer and power pistons, together with straight line motion for one or the other.

And this:-

is the germ of an idea for an 'antique' interpretation of same.

And why is webshots insisting that I download it's bloomin' software again before I can rotate my pictures - Grrrrr.

I note that quite a few exhibitors were touting

and its associated forum. I've had a look and call me a luddite, but I still prefer usenet to web based forums for ease of use - particularly as the latter's bandwidth hungry and graphics rich format makes them quite unsuitable for handheld mobile devices.

I don't think I'd want to use a PDA or mobile for any serious web work, my eyes are simply not good enough! The Ipaq HX4700's that we have are pretty good on screen definition etc and they have built-in wireless internet and Bluetooth, but I can manage to wait until I get home to start accessing the web.

The growing numbers of on-line forums just mean that any interest is diluted across more and more sites, and longer term it won't be a good thing for any of them.

When there was only one 'proper' engine email list, there was a very large number of folks who were on it and contributed. Daily messgae count could go over 100 on busy days. Now there are more and more places to visit, and the message count is down to zero some days.

As far as stationaryengine.org.uk goes, they don't seem to be atrracting a huge amount of traffic if that visit counter is correct.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

(snip)

PA> I don't think I'd want to use a PDA or mobile for any serious web PA> work, my eyes are simply not good enough! The Ipaq HX4700's that we PA> have are pretty good on screen definition etc and they have built-in PA> wireless internet and Bluetooth, but I can manage to wait until I get PA> home to start accessing the web.

I tend to use the PDA for a quick catch up - dead easy with usenet as you can quickly sync with you news server, switch off the power hungry wireless, read new messages and compose replies off-line, then on with the wireless again for a few seconds to re sync.

Living in a tiny 'two up, two down' with the PC consigned to a corner of the bedroom, it is not always convenient to switch it on, besides which who wants to wait for a PC to boot just to find that there are no new messages!

nickh=== Posted with Qusnetsoft NewsReader 2.2.0.8

I have just registered on

however I will only be using the for sale/wanted section as this seems quite good, however other than that I will be sticking to this newsgroup and to the Internal Fire website. This is because the rest of the forum is to complicated and takes too long to navigate my way around.

Mike M

miley snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

We forget sometimes that others are not so fortunate as us in terms of facilities etc.

We normally have one or two running all the time at the factory on broadband, and the same at home. If we are in, there's a PC on.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

"miley_bob" wrote

Yes, 17 sub forums (fora?) does seem a little excessive. I have often compared participating in this NG to having a good natter at a club night and I don't expect to be ushered into a different room every time the topic changes!

"Nick H" wrote (snip)

Martin has conveniently illustrated these thus:-

What do others think?

I forgot to say a big thank you, not only to the organisers for putting on such a wonderful rally, but also the exhibitors who maintained a 'the show must go on' attitude throughout (unlike Lamport the other week, very few tarpaulins were deployed during showers) and who must have had a pretty miserable time packing up after us punters had cut and run.

Thats exactly the problem i found with it. IF's forum is quite a good one, they only have 3 sub topics, each of which proves useful to be kept in its seperate area.

Mike M

miley snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com