Why would a prop be cut down asymmetrically like that? Under what circumstances would a previous owner have stripped the finish of it? It looks like something accumulated in the grain (?) or removed or otherwise reacted with the adhesive material between the plies (??) on the right hand side.

However, there are of course many people such as myself, who applaud the prospect of getting any aeroplane back into the air, but still find it extremely frustrating when a seemingly minor aspect of the restoration (the colours and markings) is wrongly reproduced. Like I said before, it’s rather like preserving a telephone box and pairing it blue. Okay, it is preserved, but somehow it isn’t quite as authentic as it could/should be.

Define ‘many’! How many of the thousands that saw XH558 during last year’s summer season felt robbed because the paintwork was a bit wrong? Would you be willing to venture a percentage of total spectators? If the CAA put their foot down about flying Jaguars then any other discussion is for the birds anyway. What would make the CAA change their tune?

Perhaps my comments were a little harsh, but this forum appears to get really excited about some ridiculously niche project that brings no money into the field of historic aviation (a partial reproduction of a cockpit in some chap’s garage to give one example) whilst creatively invents reasons to pour scorn on a project to get a Jaguar back in the air! The sort of thing that might maintain an interest in historic aviation over a longer period of time AND pay some of the bills along the way. As you confirm, nobody has suggested that the paintwork will be incorrect on the Jaguar anyway. Purely from a sustainability point of view I would back the latter project and ignore the former.

If the last publicly viewable telephone box was painted blue then I would accept it in the wrong colour, because I would be glad that I got to see the damn thing at all. I feel that a blue phone box would still convey most of the story of the phone box (in rural places they tend to turn pink, after all). For many, a phone box was the hub of the community, will be memories illicitly phoning their first girlfriend, will be the time they placed a call back home from a remote area whilst camping. For others the box will signify the stories of those that worked to install and maintain BT infrastructure. Giles Gilbert Scott’s marvelous design works well in any colour really. I’m not being glib here. XH558 will signify anything from ‘look at that big aeroplane up in the sky’ to ‘remember when we bashed the Argies’ to those that saw and heard her last year, and the paintwork will have only upset a token few.

Besides, in the case of some of the nit-pickers on this forum we are talking about this mythical phone box being merely a subtly wrong shade of red, or not glossy/matt enough. This is the sort of endless discussion you find on Britmodeller. Look up ‘Spitfire sky blue’ on Google when you have a spare day, and rake through all the Britmodeller threads on the subject. Guys get scarily emotional about the shade of blue Spitfires may, or may not, have been painted on the underside.

The phone box analogy doesn’t really work because of the sheer numbers of phone boxes in existence, and because they don’t fall neatly into ‘flyable’, ‘ground running’, ‘static’ and ‘relic’ categories. Besides, a blue phone box would not look out of place in a museum on Guernsey! :applause:

I’m still not following the argument in the first post of this thread. Rather than be insulting you could try and break down your argument slightly better. I thought old age brought wisdom, and it seems like the Coffin Dodger’s Ball in these parts….

Lincoln 7 has eye surgery. Lincoln 7 finds it difficult to administer eye drops. This much I can follow. I cannot abide anything getting near my eyes at the best of times, whilst my partner (who wore contacts for years before coughing up for laser treatment) is able to spray anything in her eyes; I think you have to grow up with the sensation. Lincoln 7’s local medical practice is unwilling to send out somebody to put the drops in for him, citing that they are too busy. Lincoln 7’s mate trawls some stats off the Internet that suggest Johnny Foreigner ‘bogging down’ the health system. Lincoln 7 has worked all his life, so (mistakenly) believes that his lifelong contribution in taxes has somehow accrued him a credit, or tab, with the NHS which he should be able to cash in at this time of need. However, said foreigners got there first (when and how many?) and somehow Lincoln has to put up with a lower level of care than he was expecting, and he feels cheated.

The less than subtle subtext here appears to be that if we had minimised immigration into this country then Lincoln’s local quackery would have sent out some buxom nurse to attend to his every ailment. I could parse the issue further here, and suggest that Lincoln’s rather perfunctory treatment is perhaps not exactly due to the fairly minimal numbers of Chinese, African, Polish, Ukranian, Lithuanian and Congolese (surely these come under African?) nationals that may have used the NHS over an unspecified recent period of time, but why bother? This section of the Key Publishing forum already functions solely as an echo chamber for a small group of old men that like to bounce around endless UKIP rhetoric, so what could I, the neophyte, hope to achieve? Lincoln’s claims in the first post are laughably vague, and sound like very generic right-wing paranoia. It seems to me that supposedly intelligent, wise individuals can be played like fiddles when they are presented with certain (incomplete) statistics that prop up a narrative, or dare I say obsession, that they personally wish to see, even if it only serves to make them angry. Again, what is the point arguing here?

I’m a bit late to the party. In short, eye drops are difficult to self-administer, because immigrants are clogging up the NHS, and is this why I pay my taxes?

Right?

Changing that sort of attitude is difficult at best and possibly close to impossible.

I was discussing this very topic yesterday with somebody who happens to work in education. My concern is that parents are, broadly, expecting the state school system to provide a level of care that was not previously expected or required. If anything, the act of a child learning something in any sort of academic sense is a happy bi-product of a day spent trying to equip them with basic social skills, hygiene and providing them with the one basic meal of the day.

In turn the local authority provides education services for parents, but none of them ever turn up. They can wangle it slightly by getting the kids to perform a song and dance number at the beginning of the classes, but the parents are generally not interested. I don’t blame the state for being either tardy or inept at dealing with the current situation here, because they aren’t historically cut out to do so.

It seems slightly dystopian to me; the heavy reliance on the state to provide basic education for all facets of a child’s life. This reminds me a lot of Calhoun’s ‘behavioral sink’ experiments. The material standard of living has increased in the UK over the last few decades. Whilst I wasn’t around in the ’70s, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who were and none of them wish to go back to living like that. We have better access to material goods (thanks China), food and other services. Yet we don’t appreciate any of this, and don’t place any meaning or significance on this improved quality of life. To quote from Calhoun’s experiment:

Many [female mice] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption.

In short, you give laboratory mice everything they need and they become selfish, anti-social and lose all grasp of their duties towards parenthood. In a roundabout way I agree with John Green’s sentiments in this thread

I’m not an electrician, but I wager that you would have to offset the resistance (and capacitance) of a 30 m cable somehow. You would also need to know how much current your setup draws, and use the correct gauge of cable. Skimp on cable and you could have at best a hot cable and, at worst, an electrical fire on your hands.

Seconds from Death sounds like a nice, sensitive and sympathetic title for a TV show. Given that it is on Channel 5, I imagine 50% of the viewing experience will be adverts and recaps anyway.