Technik Lite

Second blog about the Speyer Technik Museum.  This time I'll let the captions do the work.

A Russian  on the way to space

A Russian coming back from space

Another Russian coming back from space

 

What happens to you guys up there?

A little bit of Russian Space Shuttlewiring.  What could possibly go wrong?

Really? A driver's shaving mirror?

Amusing Englander transport! Ha! Ha! how ve laughed!

No, you've hung it upside down!

Munch 2-stroke triple.  Actually looks OK to me!

Rescue boat caught in the act of giving birth!

There's nobody flying this thing!

Das Go Technik!

I've tried to avoid turning the blog into "what I did on my holidays", but there is one place we went which deserves special mention.  It is the Speyer Technik Museum in Germany, which is a transport museum.  As such, it's got all sorts of vehicles - motorbikes, cars, aeroplanes, railway engines, boats, submarines and spacecraft.  They've got a Space Shuttle!  OK, it's a Russian one, not an American one, but still pretty good.

Me standing under the Space Shuttle of Damocles

You can have a look inside - it's got a big space for cargo, a fairly standard-looking cockpit, and a very scary amount of wiring.

One of the things I like about this museum is that everything is mixed up in a seemingly completely arbitrary jumble, which makes for more surprises as you wander around.

Mixed transport, including fairground roundabout

Corvette, 3-engined Tractor, helicopter etc...

And, of course, it's in Germany, so you get a slightly different perspective from the one we are used to.  They are very proud of the service record of their Messerschmitt BF109, for example, and happy to point out that Maybach cars  unquestionably exemplify the pinnacle of equipment, luxury and quality in car manufacture.  Who knew?

interesting...

There's a huge space allocated to the Munch Mammoth motorbike and its illustrious, if little-known, forebears, and even evidence that someone once found something interesting to do with a BMW flat twin, along with tons and tons of other good stuff.  For example, venerable racing car maker Auto Union made a sort of Sunbeam Alpine (i.e. a small European Ford Thunderbird copy) in the '60s - quite cute, but with only 55ps? Really?

Auto Union Alpine-thunder-chicken

Outside, there are lots of big things, and the "it's German" difference is the preponderance of Russian stuff like Sukhoi fighter jets and Antonovs.  Oh, and there's a 747 about 30ft up in the air, which you can walk around in.  They ripped the inside out so that you can see the structure, which is good.

 Altogether, great stuff.  If you can't quite make a visit, check out the website:
https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en

Do you know what?  I've got so many pictures, I think I'll do another blog on this topic.  With jokes maybe!

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

As a deliberate celebration of my new-found lack of responsibility I decided to not take any kind of shaving device on our trip to Italy.  A tiny part of the justification was to save weight and space and clutter in the camper van, but mostly it was to avoid having to shave.  Of course I expected that I would get gradually hairier, but I didn't expect to end up looking like the Onion knight, Ser Davos Seaworth, thus:

Ser Davos

Me

I imagine that's why I got so many strange looks across the continent.  But of course, all such fripperies must come to an end eventually, and when we got back to Blighty, the lovely Jackie asked if I could possibly get rid of the beard, or at least make it a lot shorter, for the reduction of tickliness, and so that we wouldn't get stopped in the street all the time by gawping Game of Thrones fans.



And so I did - trimming right down to a rather more formal 9mm all over look as a starting point; but never imagining that the result of THAT would be that I would look disturbingly like ex-Federal Reserve head Ben Bernanke.  Doh!

Me

Ben Bernanke

Clearly ths would never do.  After a very brief spell at designer stubble (it turns out that's not really my look either) there was only one place to go...

...and so I am now, for the first time in over twenty years, beardless!

Unrecognisable!

How long this will last, remains to be seen.  I certainly preferred the maintenance regime that went with the Ser Davos look (nothing).  Anyway, if you should see me on the street one day and wonder why you don't recognise me at all, it will probably be because I look completely different!

Pizza, Italian Style

A little anecdote this time.

We stayed with some Italians (in Italy) and offered to take them out to dinner to say thank you for their hospitality and great generosity to us.  They said, "Sure, we'll go to our favourite pizza place, it's just around the corner.  We always go there for meals out".  Sounds good to me.

So there we were, Italians in an Italian pizza restaurant in Italy, complete with a very long list of pizza toppings - all the usual ones and a few different combinations of the usual ingredients, but I didn't notice anything especially "whacky".  Imagine our amazement when one of our number was served her favourite - the chip pizza.

A chip pizza is a pizza base with tomato and cheese, completely covered with a layer of chips.  Actual fried potato chips.

Wow. Neither of us had the heart to take a photo, for fear of causing embarrassment, so you'll just have to believe me.

I have had to consider the Saturday lunchtime "macaroni cheese and chips" my mother used to make when I was a kid in a new light.  Maybe not so inauthentic after all!

In fairness to Italians everywhere, I should say that the young lady in question is only 13 years old.  She's also a gymnast of approaching national competition standard, and (needless to say) extremely slim and fit.  Ah, youth!  It's amazing what you can get away with when you're young.  Even so, I suspect her chip pizza days may be numbered.

Motorbikes

For the Moto Guzzi enthusiast, a trip to Italy is bound to have some fleeting highlights when driving, as the distinctive across-the-frame V-engine of a Guzzi flashes past in the opposite direction, but I have to say they've been disappointingly few so far.  Imagine my delight then, to find this parked outside the Pit Stop cafe:

1951 Astore 500cc single

Nice eh?  But my delight grew to wonderous proportions when  I discovered this ancient gem nearer to the building:

‘Guzzino’

Its a ‘Guzzino’ (more properly a Motoleggera 65, made between 1945 and 1954) and despite using what look like the bicycle wheels and tyres of the day, it's a proper motorbike (not a moped) of 65cc capacity featuring hand gearchange, front and rear suspension, as well as a sprung seat and a sprung luggage rack!

Girder front forks

Rear swing arm

Sprung luggage rack!

But most amazingly, none of these springy elements have any damping AT ALL.  The whole effect must surely have been like riding a motorised pogo stick.  Probably just as well that the little engine with its three cylinder studs and 5.5:1 compression ratio can't have made a whole lot of power.  More like the electric bicycle of its day than the 500cc Astore, which made a massive 20bhp at full chat (4300rpm!).


Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, for the modern rider (with deep enough pockets - about 30 grand new, although you can get one for 11) there's this:

Ducati Panigale

which makes a much more impressive 172bhp at the back wheel, and only weighs 188kg (wet), which gives it a fearsome power-to-weight ration of more than 900 bhp/tonne (as long as the pilot doesn't weigh anything!).  Crucially, it does have dampers at both ends.  And you can adjust them electronically, while you're riding along.  The speed limits in Italy haven't changed much though, so there's nowhere to show off your 200mph top speed.  So much for progress!

An absurdly over-complicated project, Italian style

One reason for not doing more projects is the necessity to visit relatives. Fortunately the lovely Jackie is half Italian, so she has cousins to visit in Italy. One such cousin (Elena) very kindly let us stay in the house her which father Nello (now deceased) built. He was a mining engineer, and the house features a workshop underneath. I particularly liked that the entrance to the workshop from inside the house is down a marble staircase from the hall – classy!

Marble steps to the workshop (Carlo Scarpa style)

Once down there, the workshop area has several rooms, the largest part being about 15m long and 5m wide. I had major workshop envy.

The main workshop vista

Lathe corner.  That's quite some lathe under there!

But the piece de resistance, project-wise, is a concentrated solar water heating system which features a massive mirror array on a steerable mount, focussing the sun’s rays onto a blackened copper water coil, fed through its supporting pipes and conveying the heat back to a water tank in the workshop.

I’m not quite sure how the steering system was supposed to work; I couldn’t see anything to sense which way to turn the array, but the motors and mechanisms were all in place. To be fair, this system wasn’t a home build, but a commercial product, as you can see from the back view.

Nevertheless, it’s a monumental thing to install in the garden, and a grand ambition.
Sad to say, the whole thing was a bit of a flop – the tank turned out to be too small, and couldn’t sink enough heat; the concentrator coil boiled and ruptured, and the whole thing was a victim of its own effectiveness. By this time the old man was quite old, and he never repaired it, so now it stands as a decaying monument to marvellous ambition, thwarted by drab reality. At least it went out with a bang, though.

That loft ladder

Just in case anyone out there in blogland is still eagerly waiting for a conclusion, I can now provide a report on the state of the loft ladder automation project. It’s not all that satisfying though. Basically the need for a top-closing loft hatch has now gone, with the departure of the house of luuurve from our house, and while it existed it was adequately met by the single-string manual hatch closer with bungey-powered bottom flap assistance described earlier. The main stumbling blocks to automating the whole thing were:
- Surprisingly large forces required to start the lifting process (conical capstans maybe?)
- The need to lift from very different places at different angles of descent/ascent (microprocessor control, perhaps?)
- Nowhere to to hide the machinery - motors, capstans etc (hmmm...)
- Far too many other things going on to think about it
- The necessity to have everything working every night
- The lovely Jackie saying there wasn’t any point in automation, as she could always get me to do it manually.
The last was the real killer of course, being so disarmingly true. But I’m still harbouring a tiny glimmer of hope that one day I’ll have nothing better to do than have a proper go at this. Surely mere practicality shouldn’t thwart the creativity of an absurdly overcomplicated project forever?