What did you buy at Sodbury?

Excellent day out - helped by some good weather. I got off fairly lightly today, just a very nice Tangye Jack, and a tiny fly-press for 2 quid, bargain of the day I reckon.

There was a lot of stuff there, but an increasing amount of tat and a deficiency of good complete engines - maybe we've bought them all and there's nothing left!?!

Saw a few of the usual suspects - sorry if I didn't get to meet everyone - I did think that I was looking mainly at piles of junk and not the people around me. I'll be intrigued to know what Kim was pushing around on a trolley....

Cheers

Dan

Missed you Dan although it was a good day for spotting people, presumably because the tat was just that unless you like tractors. Apart from the mortal remains of an 8hp M that I had agreed to pick up and the rest of the fuses for my recently acquired P-L, I came home with a few choice spark plugs, a Petter air filter and 1922 oiler, A T-B mag (complete but dead) and a machinists block. Can't remember its proper name but its a 9" cube full of holes and slots and at £15 was the bargain of the day. I was tempted by a Victory and a very tasty Jellymould 5hp but Chris B saved me from myself. Thanks Chris :-) I think it was food in Kim's trolley ;-) Now off to Club AGM. So much fun, so little time! ttfn Roland

I bought some newer bits for the Lister B governor and Moo bought some jigsaw puzzles.

Nice to meet Kim Siddorn (very briefly)

Missed everybody else including the Bedos.

Simon Taylor

Good thread Chris ;o))

I got there early (9.45) and was glad I did - it continues to astound me that there are so many people interested in rusty and oily old engines and the things they drive. They have obviously had complaints from the police, so they let us in and lined the vehicles up in a block perhaps ten rows deep. And there we all rested for twenty minutes or so.

Eventually, the line moved off, but as they only had a couple of people taking the money, there was a good deal of pushing and shoving like spoilt kids in the tuck shop queue. I had a bloody great Land Cruiser on my right that thought he could bully me into letting him into our line - and I would have done so most cheerfully if he or his passenger had looked at me, if he had signalled his intention in any way at all - or acted in any other way than that befitting a primary school bully. However, I am a right determined grumpy old man these days and placed my shiny paintwork between me and him. After some inching brinksmanship he gave up. Pah!

End of rant ;o))

Now the plot thickened and down at the gate stood an increasingly large mob of people, all waiting to be let in. Wearing my other hat has given me a pretty good idea of crowd size and I'd be surprised if there were much less than five or six hundred in the crowd.

I started at the wrong end of the field and so found first a Coventry Victor AC4, (air cooled flat four) complete but with one plug missing and seized. It had that "locked up piston" feel to it, so we dickered and I paid him, asking for a receipt as I suspected he'd be beleaguered by many after me (and I was right, too!) offering a lot more than I got it for and - well, one cannot be too careful ....

There is a B&W picture of one at

I bought a lovely NATO aircraft servo test set, all meters and switches in an excellent black aluminium case and complete with leads. Upon examination, I find one of the settings tests a Mach Two component, so I'm inclined to believe that it was English Electric Lightning test gear as the vendor indicated. There was an laboratory condenser in a well made wooden case and a ex GPO ringer that also called to me to take them home.

The find of the day was an 80 watt charging set (I was told it was a Tiny Tim - is that right?) and I was almost set upon by a Villiers specialist who had been looking for one for ages in order to complete his collection of several hundred Villiers engines. And there was me thinking they were JAP! I started on this first - I can carry it unaided, (unlike the Coventry Victor which is a ballbreaker for two strong men!)and found that it only has the very faintest of sparks, despite cleaning the points properly. Any ideas gentlemen?

Anyway, I hired a trolley and with the Coventry Victor wobbling around on its flywheel, pushed it VERY steadily back to the car park where Kenny the Wild and Wolseley Scotsman appeared like a genii from a lamp at exactly the right moment to help me walk it into the back of the Volvo, which at once assumed a nose up attitude which always puts me in mind of a Spitfire ready for take off ;o)) Thanks Kenny, your appearance was as opportune as it was welcome!

That was it really, Hazel was not best pleased as the arrival of another large lump of (mostly) aluminium, but as she is off to Venice for a week with her mate Jan, the moral highground shifted to and fro quite nicely and nothing more was said than a sniff and a shake of the head.

What am I going to do with it? Dunno, but I bet I have fun!

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

There is a Tiny Tim as well but if it looks like the one I showed you then it isn't a Tiny Tim but the Edgar Westbury designed 80 watt set made by a great many firms. The C-V is lovely but I'll bet it will prove to be horrendously thirsty. Apart from thoroughly cleaning all the conducting surfaces/brushes in the mag, check the resistance from HT lead to earth. It should be 8-12k ohms. The dead Thomson-Bennett I bought for 35 proved after cleaning to have 9k and an excellent spark - bargain as I have a spare pickup to replace the missing one:-) ttfn Roland

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A little birdy told me today that you had to remove the windscreen of the volvo so that you could steer it from the bonnet where you sat to try and put a bit of weight and get the front wheels back on the ground. :-))

Martin P

Roland and Celia Craven wrote (snip):-

Defniatly one of they, you should be able to identify manufacturer by code letters - ST for Stuart Turner, DK for Douglas of Kingswood etc etc. Both the mags I have are OC on the secondary but spark ok after a period of drying out. I have tried to convince myself that there is an 'intensifier' gap built into the system somewhere, but it is far more likely that the OC reading is due to green spot corrosion somewhere in the winding and that the coil will break down completely after a short period of use.

There were also several Tiny Tim sets at sodbury, but only one was marked as such - the manufacturer in this case being Continental. I think these sets originated in the 1930's and then went anonymous in WWII, probably being made by a number of different firms like the 80w lightweight.

NHH

Hi, There is a manual for a 'Neptune', air cooled flat four on the website, don't know if it is the same one.

Paul

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Internal Fire, Museum of Power, Wales

(under construction)

All,

I managed to meet Dan, who kindly made a delivery, Roland and Phillip T.E. who assisted with a Petter, Kenny and Kim. Not sure how we missed Simon as we were there from 9 till 4:30 !!

I would say that Sodbury was a good do this year, but mostly tractor gear. I can?t complain though as I picked up 2 very nice engines. It was just a bit lacking in engine jumble.

The two engines in question were both Petter M types, one being an Early Jelly mould which Roland believes to from around 1915. Very nice original condition and quite different from other M types I have seen. The second was a Victory model mounted on its original trolley with tank. Looked like it had never been touched since it had left Petters.

And so to the next day out, that will be the Cheffins Auction...

Regards

Chris Bedo

"Roland and Celia Craven" wrote

Ooh, that sounds more fun than these nasty oily engines !

Does it test synchros / resolvers ? There's a few here if you fancy having a fiddle.

I spent the weekend on a blacksmithing course in Letherhead, so I don't feel too bad about missing Sodbury. I also have an interesting collection of blisters and singes. Beware the double-ended blacksmithing tool, for one end may be hot from its last user !

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

Had a splendid time, but found very little of interest in the engine line. I did miss some goodies -- Blackstone exhaust pot etc.

Enjoyed the sun bathing, but couldn't tell the wife as it poured all day back home.... Found a bunch of good aero stuff -- 1930's Flying Aces, 1940's Aeromodellers, 40's & 50's aero mags; set of 4 1920's vols of Motor Cars & Commercial Vehicles; variety of 20's & 30's railway modelling mags; brutal brushcutter (need the brownie points); box of end mills, variety of deep sockets; 2 dozen ammo boxes to pack up a pile of items in store ...... etc etc.

I enjoy Sodbury as I have a catholic set of mechanical interests & always find something unexpected, but I thought the engine stuff much less rewarding than previous years. Only major engine task was getting registered for Knowl Hill 2004 -- already tight on numbers.

Colin

That sounds interesting. Come on Andy, where was it and what' involved? Was it good? I wouldn't mind a course like that myself sometime.

John

I knew someone would ask that.

Some time ago, I bought my friend Richard (we both went - he's the guy in the pictures) a book on smithing. It's one of the few decent books on smithing that I've seen, amongst a whole pile of poor ones.

Peter Parkinson "The Artist Blacksmith"

Then we found out that the author teaches courses. Some are at Westdean College on the South Coast, some are at Fire and Iron gallery in Leatherhead More info is at

It's a two day course, with a manageably small number of students. First day is a few demonstrations, but mainly it's hands-on time with the instructor wandering about. You make one standard item first (forging small leaves), then it's either fooling with techniques on scrap, or making something of your own design.

Many people seem to go back for a second course, just to get some more working time. The pieces that get made are incredibly adventurous for people with no experience of forgework, and often no experience of handling metal.

200 quid for the course, but we spent a little more for accomodation with the gallery and workshop's owners and the tutor - an education in itself. I'd certainly recommend it.

-- Smert' spamionam