GeePig

"And here is your new equipment, sir, and you don't even have to worry about unloading it."

So, if your vehicle is a bit tall, it might be an idea not to fit one of those things designed to ground out static electricity?

Very nice, I have ordered mine for Christmas!

As Prof. Holger Steinle said: 'So try it.'

I had hoped to make a bit of progress over the long may day weekend, but wifies sadly introduced a virus to the computer and it had to be carted away. Well, the virus could have been fixed in place, but the computer was filled to the gills with 5 years worth of dust, meaning maintenance was well overdue and welcome. So I didn't get anything done. I had had the image file open when the virus stepped in, and I was a bit worried I might have lost it, but everything was OK as I had save the file just before letting wifie play. I have resized the image to 6000 pixels wide, nearly 10 times the original image width, and have got stuck into the onerous task of doing the final resharpening to the whole image, all done by hand.

I use twitter, facebook, G+, Tumblr and some others I cannot remember just now and I LIKE to know when my brother visits Costa Coffee because I have not seen him for seven years due to the distance involved. My friends are not the same friends that journalists sometimes appear to believe in. They are sensible people - like translators, business owners, artists, members of groups or courses or companies I belong or have belonged to, and so on. Their average age must be about 50, so they have had families - and many are now grandparents. My wife has about 300 friends on Facebook, most of them about 20 years old, her current and former students, and they still don't get rowdy, and we still get more than enough time for a life. At the end of the day, my social media experience is a reflection of me, not what anyone else says.

An interesting question, whether one should spend cash on the enemy's artefacts. I live in Lublin, a city in eastern Poland, and about a mile up the road from where I am typing this is the former Majdanek Concentration Camp. Much Polish money money, and money from elsewhere, has gone to maintaining it for the past 70 years, and will continue to do so. I have no idea how much the Polish government has spent on its many Nazi-artefact concentration camps, but it must be a lot as the buildings are primarily timber. They choose to remember what is theirs and what is their enemy's, partly because in that way it stops people from forgetting or denying the existence of such things.

Stu, do you have a cable for the phone to connect to a computer? I usually connect my phone by a cable to a USB port on my computer, the cable came with the phone and it is a pretty standard USB cable. Trevor

You should have put the bent beam in your Aga until it glowed red, then let it cool naturally before straightening it... :cool2:

Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure? :rotfl: I would do it myself, but, you see, I have no dynamo. And I like my eyebrows.

I once took an axe to chop some wood, took the backward swing and... When I came around I was lying on the ground, the axe beside me and I appeared to be still complete. I had forgotten that there was a washing line behind me, which the axe had hit as I swung it back.

Oh, I thought this was Steve and Tony working on a part for their WW1 Thornycraft restoration: http://hmvf.co.uk/forumvb/showthread.php?13514-WW1-Thornycroft-restoration

I remember someone telling me that to get a dynamo to work they would fill it with petrol (I think), start the engine, set light to the petrol and then extinguish the fire when the ignition light went out. I don't recommend trying this AT ALL, EVER! But, if someone did, I would love to know the result.

Ah, Zil, used to have Zil trolleybuses here in Lublin, Poland, until about 8 years ago.

This weekend I was mainly working on another image - and sorting out helping wifie exchange her winter and summer shoes in the closet, not a small task by any stretch of the imagination. I sharpened up the truck layer, getting nice edges between areas of colour. At the same time I sorted out some errors like the fact there is a window on the rear of the cab visible behind the windscreen wiper that should be rectangular and visible. Because there are dark areas on the image, I have a white layer visible on top of the other layers, set at 20% visible, as this makes what is happening in the dark areas much easier to see. You can see this in the picture below. One area I have barely touched is the truck's grille, made up of a lot of vertical bars and slots. At the moment the image is 3000 pixels wide, which is a good size to get most of the details mostly right. Eventually the image will be expanded until it is 6000 pixels wide, after which much of the image will need resharpening to get nice clean joins between colour areas. I did not go straight to 6000 pixel wide as it is quicker to resharpen after expanding from 3000 pixels than do all the edits at 6000 pixels. After all, the 6000 pixel wide image is four times the area of the 3000 pixel wide level. Anyway, for the grill it is different, it is lots and lots of parallel edges that are close together. I will do all the fine edits after expanding the image to its final size. Knowing this kind of thing can shave days or weeks of an edit job.

Not sure what type of tester you have, Richard, but presumably set it to DC voltage? One lead clipped to earth, the other to whatever 'live' feed you are testing. Trevor

And remember to consider what you were last doing in the vehicle. Sometimes you disconnect something while working on something else, and then forget you have done it. You can always make a continuity tester using a bulb in an old bulb holder (I think mine was an indicator bulb holder from a Triumph Stag), adding a pair of leads to it with some crocodile clips on the other ends of the wires. Clip one croc clip to a good earth and then test the connections on the feed wires progressively all the way from the battery to the headlamps, via the switches. If you want to get to a hard-to-get-to connector, clip the croc clip to a screwdriver and poke around with that. I always had one of these in my toolbox back when I was a mechanic. Trevor

I suppose that rather begs the question of where you would want the dross to end up - in the hot, thick part at the top of the piston that takes the thumps, or the thinner, lower parts that are more lightly loaded? I have no idea which would be the better choice. Trevor

The other question is how good is the starter. Just because it turns the motor over fast enough doesn't mean it isn't stealing all the power due to failing components. When it comes to digital versus analogue instruments, I like digital. When the numbers start jumping it is telling you something is changing, but you don't actually have to watch the numbers flickering. If you get used to analogue you can end up expecting the digital to respond in a similar manner, and vice versa of course, but it is a very much different kind of information source, and will respond to things that are damped out on analogue instruments. It is like comparing religions - very different, and not always easy to value the other's belief as being equal to one's own. However, my best instrument is a small plastic box with an LED on it and some brass contact points and sockets that I designed and built when I was a student

Yes, there are some nice little tools around these days to do interesting things to photos - a whole lot easier than in the days of film!

Hi Marco, do you also have pictures of the truck before and during the strip. We love that type of thing :-) Trevor

I suspect that it is a whole lot more than a snapshot Seriously, seeing the amount of detail in the shadows of what was a very bright day, I'd say a good lens and someone who knew how to compose and take photos, and then process them. I would not be surprised to learn that this was from some archive, or by a photographer who helped create such an archive. I would have been very pleased if this had been mine. Trevor

I love the fact that you are riveting it all, a classy job!

Nice! Glad to see you here Trevor

At first glance, nothing much seems to have changed, but I have been working on the background instead of the truck itself. If you have never really used a photo editing program, then you might not have heard of layers. One of the tricky things to edit is where something nearer the camera partly obscures something further away, to get a neat join where they meet. If you have something like a jpeg or gif image file then there is only one layer, rather like a photo print. An editing program can save a whole stack of images, each of which is called a layer. Imagine you had 2 identical photos, and placed them one on top of the other. You would not see the one behind because the one in front obscures it completely. Now, imagine that you cut the background off the front image and put it back on top of the other - now you would see the truck of the front image, and the background of the rear image. And that is what you can see here. Now I don't have to end the window frame where it meets the truck, I can continue it a bit further, and when editing the truck I don't have to worry about accidentally clipping the background. Anyway, I have tidied away the cars that used to be parked beside the building by painting over them using colours from elsewhere on the building or ground, and I have sharpened up the windows and given the walls a rub over. The only thing I am still not sure about is whether to keep the sandy yellow piece of foreground.