I suppose I could be an extra in a pub – any pub.
I’m quite good at drinking. 🙂

I’m feeling quite left out here. I haven’t seen it for a few years, and although having a tape somewhere, sat down to watch it on Ch5 the other week.
As it started the ‘phone rang and I spent all apart from the last few minutes sorting problems out.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I haven’t been to Hendon for a couple of years, and then only briefly, but I do have a comment about the cafe, if it’s where it was then. It also shows there are other views to those expressed here, although I do largely agree with most of them.

I took a couple of ex-RAF blokes from my local down to the Mossie Museum and as we had a little time to spare, we went to Hendon first, knowing it would only be a very brief visit. A few weeks earlier, one didn’t know the Museum existed at all and the other didn’t know there were any aircraft there.
The sight of two chins hitting the floor as we went through the door I will never forget.
Dougie couldn’t walk very far and I kept trying to get him to turn back but he wouldn’t stop. He made it to the cafe, which then had the Beaufort and Beaufighter next to it, I believe. He just sat there looking around, hardly able to believe his eyes. After a coffee and a break, he’d recovered enough for the walk back. He was really pleased to see the Canberra, and said “I worked on that aeroplane!” Apparently on it’s way back from the Antipodes it stopped at Singapore with an oil leak and Dougie was a very junior member of the team that fixed it and sent it on it’s way.

We intended to go back for a proper visit but sadly Dougie died last New Years Eve.

I doubt I’ll ever use the cafe again, but I was extremely grateful it was there then.

I supplied an Epson Perfection scanner earlier this year. I can’t remember the model now but it was around £150 with a built-in slide/negative scanner. Considering the price I was very impressed.

My standard reply when the salesperson asks is “don’t be silly”.

I spent many years flogging aluminium so have some, half forgotten, knowledge.
I didn’t personally have anything to do with aircraft released materials but I did pick up a little bit.

When melting scrap ali for reuse, unless you know all the material is the same spec, and what it is, it has to be purified and then re-alloyed. The sheet, extrusions and castings from a scrap aircraft would all be totally different alloys so that’s the first problem. Secondly as somebody already mentioned, it couldn’t be used for aircraft use anyway as there couldn’t be adequate certification.

The paperwork trail for released materials is awesome, which is one of the reasons why the stuff’s 10 times the price of commercial. It used to be said that you could trace aircraft materials back to the bloke that dug the bauxite out of the ground. I’m not sure that’s totally accurate but it’s close. One reason is if a part fails that shouldn’t have done, you can trace everything else made from that batch before it fails.
As I said, this bit is based on what I picked up and although it may not be 100% accurate, the basic principles are correct.

Hamtech -A perfect monocoque structure occurs naturally. An egg!

As already mentioned by Chiron in post 6.

Hamtech. Nice gift. For the Australian Imperial or UK metric version. 🙂