It's been one of those weekends.
Our niece (the one we stay with in Dartmouth) came up on Friday to stay with her two kids, she had to attend a seminar in Northampton so it was pretty ideal for her to come to us and leave kids while attending etc.
So while we kept them quiet and occupied, I also had a fair bit of sorting out to do and moving of engines etc up to the farm.
We've had three bits of folded 5mm steel sitting inside the back door for a year nearly, these are the finishing pieces to go in the gateway in the wall between us and next door, onto which the largish access gates will hang when finished. They were a bit heavier than I remembered, each is 6 ft long and 9" x 9" or 14" X 14", and while 5mm is not that thick, it adds up!
So a couple of hours were spent getting them cleaned up , deburred and drilled for rawlbolts, then into the van ready for the shotblasters tomorrow. The new gateposts for the field were also got out ready for the trip, plus a couple of Lister 9/1 cast iron silencers (I knew there was an engine link somewhere!) which have been out in the weather for a couple of years. The silencers had to have rusty bolts removed and threads cleaned up, but being cast iron they weren't too much trouble. Although identical as far as dimensions and pattern numbers, one was considerably lighter than the other, making me grunt a bit as I picked the heavy one up...
Next was a lot of sorting out of a pallet load of machine tooling which we were given a month ago, and which was sitting inside the engine tent waiting patiently for someone to get involved.
Most of it was eminently usable, being a load of horizontal milling cutters, gear hobs, taps and dies and a box of assorted Coventry Die Head chasers. Once I had sorted the junk from the good stuff, I had a pile of new or resharpened cutters, a big tray of taps and dies, mostly 3/4" and above and 50 sets of chasers, all sorted into correct numbered sets and bagged up with a squirt of WD40.
I hate to think of the cost of all this stuff, especially the milling cutters, most of which were near new, and went up to 8" diameter. Three sets of arbor spacers were in the boxes, plus a lot of 50int tooling which I put on ebay as it is too big for me to use.
Next was moving another pallet which had our engraver and dyno's on it, up the road to the new storage area at our friend's farm. That was a quick trip with the trailer as soon as our next door neighbour had loaded it up for us with his fork truck. Nice to have such helpful and well-equipped people... :-))
Chris at the farm had already been marshalling our engines together into the new area, so we sorted out what we were going to do with the remaining space, and decided that twice as much would be useful....
In between times we had been up the field twice to sort the nags out, had lunch in there somewhere, taken the kids over to Northampton, missed the F1 GP, changed a load of the old poly tarps for the new PVC/Nylon ones, and now I am up waiting for an ebay auction to finish in the USA before I can get to kip...
zzzzzzzzzz
Peter
-- Peter & Rita Forbes snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Engine pages for preservation info: