Very thin leather?

That may be what theyre putting on, but its not what theyre taking off :-)

Cheers, Simon

Cowboys and D-i-Yers, maybe, but proper roofers still use lead.

Is it panto season yet...:-)

MBQ

Oh, no, it's not!

What do you use for balancing automobile wheels over there? Used to be you could get old weights free for the asking and melt.

I think they use something different on alloy wheels, but they probably still use lead on steel wheels. You can also buy strips of 1/4 oz (7g) lead weights from model train dealers, e.g. at train shows.

Can buy almost anything like this nowadays (just read latest Model Rail) but its an expensive way of doing it. One of my favourite purchase ideas is a puffer bottle, its a small, plain plastic bottle. The one I use has PVA glue written on it (contents finished, inside washed and dried). There must be loads of suitable bottles. I keep saying about how to find lead, has anyone tried and failed, tried and got some ?

Cheers, Simon

Fishing sinkers are another source.

Many thanks to those who contributed to the thin leather thread.

Perhaps we should talk to our other halves more often about what happens in our sheds, because when I did, she said that she had a bag of leather scraps that she had bought at a clearance sale, within which was enough thin leather to oblige!

It's not what you know, it's who you know!

-----ooooo-----

Researching for this project, I came across the site ...

... and if you click on the "The Mail" section followed by the "Exchange" section, there is a video at the bottom showing the mail pick-up in operation.

Very sad, though, to learn that it is now 40 years since this apparatus was last used in anger (after 168 years of operation), and 7 years since all the mail trains were discontinued.

This is very sad about engineering in general and railways in particular, that so much human effort is expended into developing the machines that feature in our lives, and after only a few years the whole caboodle is scrapped when a different technology comes along.

Not just the TPO in our case, but steam locomotion and mechanical signalling.

So much human endeavour that ultimately counts for nothing!