blakeyboy

It is odd that centimetres seem to get ignored most of the time.....

The US used 16 fl oz to the pint, hence the pint/quart /gallon being .83 of the size of the UK equivalents. The one thing with Imperial is that it evolved to fit humans- some measurements like rainfall end up with double or even triple figures, difficult to envisage, when using millimetres, whereas "Bloody hell, we had 3 inches of rain yesterday" makes sense, especially when the exact amount is not important. '75mm' means '75mm', whereas '3 inches' can often mean an amount that just looks about right, but may be actually 2 3/4" or 3 3/8", but who cares? '75mm' is what a person running a weather station would say, but '3 inches' simply means it pissed it down. You have to look beyond the figures, and how the units relate to people.....:-)

I have about 30-40 bunches of Muscat d'Alexandria grapes sweetening up nicely. I can't eat all of them.......so is there a winemaking member who would like to make some Château Milton Keynes 2021?

Thanks for that- makes sense. I'll try the grape jelly route.....the grapes are delicious, and have that flavour that drinkers of Muscat dessert wine know well, so the jelly should be fab.

My dyslexia has reached a new owl.....

Ha! Not five minutes ago I was thinking 'coin shaves owls' or some such... Great minds etc...

All details lifted from the Baldwin's site...

Not enough CO2 to run hospital machines or make fizzy drinks....that's the trouble with this bloody planet- CO2 levels are dropping and there's nothing we can do.......

A very pregnant Rachel Riley putting up the letters this week - I paused it and took this picture, once I'd stopped laughing.....

I use both systems interchangeably, often on the same equipment. An intelligent example: from the late 60's onwards, Rupert Neve and Co. made the modules that sit in their studio recording consoles 45mm wide. The consoles channel sections, or 'buckets' that hold the modules, commonly in sets of 8 or 12, were multiples of 1.8" wide. In the horizontal aluminium extrusions that make up these buckets, lie threaded strips so the modules can be held in with thumbscrews. The tapped holes in this strip are spaced .2" apart, even on 'later 'metric' consoles, and can therefore hold the 45mm modules 1.8" apart. The result of this is two-fold: The modules, when in the console, have a gap between them of .7mm, since 1.8" is 45.7mm, and therefore never jam, or are a sloppy fit. The second benefit is that the console frame metalworker only has to work to two significant figures, everything being multiples of 1.8", and the module metalworker only needs to work to 45mm..... A very elegant use of two systems at once. If I'm making a big piece of gear, I'll join it with M4, M5 M6 bolts etc, but if the work requires a very tight tolerance, I will cut the aluminium using millimetres, but tap the threads BA. This is FAR better than using metric in aluminium, for many reasons. A _much_ better thread for soft thin materials - stolen from Swiss watchmakers 100+ years ago. ( BA is actually a 'metric' thread- they all have a relationship to each other, and the clearance size of one is the tapping size of the next, in the even or odd number sequence. The even numbers were used widely, the odd numbers rarely, which is why the GPO made all their equipment use the odd sizes, so employees wouldn't steal the nuts and bolts...! ) If you have a small telescope or camera, the thread in the bottom is 1/4 20tpi BSW (Whitworth), NOT metric, and the thread ( often in the plastic bottom of a camera) therefore doesn't wear quickly, like it would with metric. If you are interested in mechanics, both systems should be used. If you have no interest whatsoever in nuts and bolts or measuring things, the metric makes sense. The Americans take Imperial a bit too far- if you buy firewood, you have no idea how much a 'Cord' is, and to sound impressive, they insist of using 'thousand of pounds' when describing the weight of a truck, or the thrust of a jet engine, when 'tons' would make more sense, and is easier to envisage.... Just my 2¢ (1.5 pence)

£2.80 of bronze is a kilo, which would maybe get you No.1 or Heavy copper price, so around £5.40 ish. How you would disguise the coins as just bronze /copper turnings etc. is another matter, as is the illegality....

I am pleased to award you 'Blakeyboy's Line of the Month'. Not bad, seeing it's only just the 16th....

..a bit like the theory behind the halide cycle in halogen lamps. However......a new filament is shiny, but an old filament is very granular in appearance, since the re-deposition of tungsten isn't a nice new layer, more following the crystal structure i presume, so the re-deposition of silver will surely make the surface of the coin look different?

Hooray! Thanks Mike! I'd given up hope of ever owning one....

Such a looker when she was younger. Now she's just a scalpel freak. So sad when that happens.

I never saw Genesis- they had moved on to the commercial crap by the time I felt like going. I saw Hackett many times and would again, so long as he has lost that TERRIBLE vocalist in the video. Who is it?

Can I pretend it was mine?

I just tried to find the 1882 on Baldwin's site, but no luck searching for 'penny', since 'penny' isn't used in the coin's description. '1882' as a search term went straight to it. Are there other pennies in the auction that are similarly 'hidden'?

Bitcoin really can be the 'Mal' in 'Malarkey'......

We lost a good David Robert Jones in 2016, now we've lost another... I didn't know the man, but I 'm going to miss his posts on this forum.

ah...I just uploaded one fine, to the uploading pictures problem thread, but, reading this, made me realise that I just had an image, emailed it to myself, so I could control the image size, and dragged it into the post. I didn't use and folders/menus etc. No problems. And that first sentence had SEVEN commas!!! SEVEN!!!!! I used to go out on Friday nights. Now I stay in, drink heavily, and get excited online by English punctuation. Mother of God.... I want to have my hair cut. Dunno why...I haven't got any...but this was years ago.... she asked what I wanted, and I said "do something to make me look sexy", so she started drinking....

Canna 'Shenandoah'. Tricky and delicate but wonderful. Pics upload seems fine.....