yen_powell

They do motorcycle training as well. When I moved up this way I resigned from my part time instructor's job, telling the owners that I didn't think I would want to ride down on Saturday and Sunday and spend all day on a bike after doing 500 miles of commuting during the week. They said that was silly, they did it, coming in to Hornchurch from Maldon every day. I pointed out that that they got the profits, I got minimum wage. I did drop in on a training school near my new location and they offered me a job, but I couldn't stomach the thought of it any more. I also paid Benson's a visit. Their yard opened out onto an unfenced quay side in Colchester. All new riders would have gone straight into the drink if they forgot to turn right as the left the exit.

I cut back across a recreation ground. Every time I go that way I stop to look at this small tree. It always looks like it has hair to me. Today it was windy so the hair was blowing about like David Coverdale trying to do his sexy look whilst a fan is doing 400mph right into his face.

Trying to go for a walk or a pedal every day if I can, sick of keep having to go up a trouser size every few years. Today was riding into the bitter wind day, can't believe it was summer only last week. I ended up in the town centre where there were some poor people wandering about, saw this out of the corner of my eye. I don't think it was a real frog, but it might have been a real Yamaha.

Can't remember, might have been something going on I wanted to be at. I didn't tell anyone at home I had no job for about 2 weeks, just went out on my bike in the morning and rode around for the day.

He had it back in April last year. He was hallucinating at one point due to a fever, frightened his missus at the time. It is still affecting him he says, gets breathless easily still etc. He owns a wood in Hertfordshire now, a roman road runs down one side of it and he has his own hives there and makes honey. There are two trees in the middle that have grown to embrace each other. The old owner used to let some 'witches' use it once a year for some ceremony and Dave let them carry on, he was worried about being turned into a frog I expect.

Don't know what a BFF is. Strange Dave has had the bad Covid. He's donating his plasma to the NHS now, which just sounds icky to me!

I reckon it was the same thing. It was one step up from the YOP scheme in that I got £39 a week instead of £25. At the end of the year they gave me a permanent job, still on very low wages mind, but a bit more than they paid the labourers. After about 3 years working there (I was about 20) I got called in one Monday morning by the owner, a bloke called Reg Simmonds who always reminded me of Michael Caine, a very nice man. I had forgotten to lock up the petrol saws we used to cut samples of bigger stuff on the Friday and they had been stolen, so I thought I was in for a telling off. But in fact he asked me if I would be interested in taking voluntary redundancy. He was quite upset about it, it was a small firm and he had never made anyone redundant before. I asked if I could leave on Wednesday which took him aback a bit. He said okay, if that was what I wanted I could. As I was leaving I turned and asked why he had asked me? "You looked the unhappiest." he said. When I left I got a small amount of redundancy, plus all my holiday money, plus a £100 from Reg and a £100 from his wife Deirdre. I went back to visit occasionally and the Irish yard foreman kept giving me bank notes, telling me Deirdre had left it for me. Reg sold the firm and did other stuff, especially involving the arts. He did tell me once that when he grew up in the east end of London he wanted to be a writer, but had to go out and earn money to help his family instead. I googled and found a picture of him, see below. He passed away from cancer in about 2012 I heard. The lady with him is his daughter who sometimes worked in the office of the yard during her school holidays, she's a film producer now. Another time I will tell the story of me making my magnesium bomb and him nearly catching me with the thing flaring up like mad and how I covered it up.

I have no areas of expertise except those specified by Pete. I remember the talk about graphene. I might be mixing it up with another wonder material, but weren't they going to coat food in it so it didn't go off, or put it on paintwork so dirt would not stick to it?

Shhh, careful, in case you say it three times.......

No idea, I never saw old Baz again after that. he'll be pushing up the daisies now I suspect, taken his secrets to the grave. The reason I used the spectroscope back then was I worked in a scrap yard in Barking as a sorter. We would identify and separate metals/alloys, mostly using a spectroscope on a trolley, or a smaller hand held version, sometimes with acid from a squeezy bottle (good on a windy day) or just by sparking stuff against a grinding wheel. There were only three of us in the south of England I was told when I started work on a youth opportunity scheme on peasant's wages. All done by computer and X-rays now I hear. I once fund a 40 gallon drum with some metal ingots in it, it was wedged up the back of a very big yard with a very old stock number on it. I brought one back with me and tested it on my spectroscope and didn't recognise any of the lines. Usually you navigated using a horizontally split screen, the bottom screen was the spectrum of a piece of pure iron, the top screen was whatever you were checking. You learnt the iron pattern of glowing lines and knew what other elements were by their position in relation to the iron spectrum. Comparing the brightness of lines on top with the bottom picture would give you an idea of an element's percentage in the mix. You could identify specific grades of stainless steels just by their molybdenum content for instance after first checking the iron/nickel/chrome ratios. No two titanium alloys have the same elements in them, so with those you just had to see what was there/not there. None of the lines I saw matched anything I knew on this strange ingot so I had to go back to basics. Find a good strong line and take a reading off of the spectroscope's dial (the image was so wide you turned a wheel to move it left and right). Each spectroscope had a matching book which made allowances for the lens differences. It told you what the angstrom reading was for any number on the dial. You could look this up in another book. Turned out it was a piece of depleted Uranium!

He may well have been there yes. He lives in Wales now, part owner of a pony trekking place in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

On another forum I am on they were talking about nuclear energy and I remembered something from my youth and posted this:- In 1983 I went on a spectroscope course somewhere in south west London with a very posh bloke who insisted we call him Baz. Suit, spotted bow tie, biscuit crumbs and a full china tea set. Mad, but a lovely bloke. After a few days of staring at spectrums and being tested on what could be worked out from them I was talking about a previous course I had done where one of my fellow pupils worked at Windscale and who had talked about how they kept changing the name whenever the publicity got bad. Baz said he had been involved with the nuclear industry in the 50s or 60s. He had been asked to find a way to identify an alloy when it was in the form of a tube set into concrete but without cutting a piece off which would have been difficult and would have meant rebuilding the whole thing. These tubes were the roughly the same size as scaffold tubes and there was a suspicion that the contractor may have tried to cut costs!! He made a rod with an electrode on the end, put it down inside the tube and arced it till a residue formed, then brought it back up and arced the residue itself on the carbon wheel of the main spectroscope and in this way identified the alloy. I asked him what it was made of and he said he wasn't allowed to say. Then as he walked away to get out the tea pot and cups he said over his shoulder, "They had to rebuild it of course, frightful shouting match going on as I was leaving!"

He fixed a bash plate and a crushed downpipe that was stopping the clutch lever releasing. He also turned a metal rectangular tube back into a pannier after it broke into three pieces! He was a bit northern, hence the captions I added to two of the photographs.

Long time ago (pre Ewen and Charlie), saw an article in Trail Bike Magazine that said big trail bikes not a problem there, as no mud to speak of (they didn't mention the ice), desperate to try it, talked three other people on big bikes (750AT, 600TA, 900Triumph Tiger) into going, two dropped out (lost job and divorce proceedings), remaining bloke invited his brother, I said yes as long as he had a big lumpy bike as well, they both bought matching second hand 750 Africa Twins. Then a 4th from my work invited himself and drove us all mad (we talked of killing him and hiding the body at one point), but to be fair his CCM was light enough to check out some tricky trails which had become streams/washed away and he fixed one bike using large rocks and gaffer tape after a crash. Took about 4 weeks, got my only puncture half a mile from home on the way back, local travelling people had burnt a pallet on a green lane I thought I would do whilst I still had knobbly tyres on and I copped one of the screws.

I took Izal to the Sahara, I thought it would be more resistant to damp weather stashed away in my throw overs. I brought it back unopened (it was in a flat square box). I'll bet it is still in my camping gear somewhere. It isn't easy to get, I had to call in a favour from a girl who's dad had the sort of 'sell everything' shop and who still had some stashed away.

Isle of Wight a few years ago whilst on a bike rally. 2nd picture was also the IOW. Couldn't believe my luck at that car parking there. I tried to turn into a painting on the PC but it didn't work out too well. Not sure where the original photograph is

I cycled over to the other side of my town today. Found this spot, I swear it is about a 100 feet from the local tip where I took my old oven a few weeks ago. The industrial buildings next to the tip are behind the trees in the last picture. Also, as I cycled through a newish housing estate on the way there I saw the top part of an old brick building above someone's garden fence. I went round the corner to see what it was. It says on the door that it is an old folly and a walled garden with a number to call if you want to look inside. I might ring the number and have a looksee in the near future.

You failed to find it, you know what that means!

I've seen Albania. Sitting in a bar in Corfu, it's so close across the water you can see the cars driving on the road at night.

I just bought the box set on DVD. It was after Pete told his being dressed up as a girl story. I have got as far as the I'm a Failure episode which is towards the end of the 1st series.

I'm waiting for the Scruffy Bastards' Ride.

Wow, that was some chain adjustment!

When you ride next don't forget to listen for the warning noises that your wheel is coming off.