A series of articles covering items of miscellaneous technology. Technology defined here as an item designed to do a specific job, whether manual, electric/electronic, articulated or otherwise.
Each article can be accessed by clicking / tapping the relevant photograph below. A link at the end of each article will return you to this page.
One for the steam railway enthusiasts. I'm still scanning old photos and in this article we're back to black and white and a day out to the excellent steam railway museum at Carnforth just north of Lancaster and Morecambe. Lots of photos and little text (stop that cheering!) because I'm no expert about railway stuff. The date was Wednesday 25 February 1981. Enjoy, but just as a reminder please read the copyright notice in the left hand column.
There were a number of famous locomotives housed at Carnforth including Sir Nigel Gresley (above), The Flying Sctotsman, Lord Nelson and a locomotive that some twenty years later would be painted red and pull the Hogwarts Express...
On a Wednesday in February there are no engines to be found working. We wandered round the engine sheds, almost without seeing anyone else!
The collection had locomotives in all conditions but not much room to step back to admire them!
A nice reminder of a day over 35 years ago to look at machines from 70 or more years ago!
The other day Mum rang up and after the usual family news and so on, said she had been doing a rummage and had found Dad's old cine camera.
My thoughts went at first to our Super 8 zoom camera but when I went round a couple of days later it turned out to be the old Standard 8 camera he had and made films of me as a baby!
It was a Dekko camera with a clockwork mechanism and he had both telephoto and wide-angle lenses for it besides the standard one. The telephoto lens is shown with here.
The real surprise came when I opened the back of the camera only to find there was an exposed film in it. The camera took a 25 foot spool of 16mm film but only exposed half the width. When the spool had been used up you reversed it to expose the other half. After the film was processed it was split centrally along its length and the two halves joined to form 50 feet of film lasting approx 4 minutes at 18 frames per second.
Now my problem is - were both sides of the film exposed or just one? And will I be able to get it processed as the odds are for it having been a pre-paid processed film and of course the envelope to send it away has long since been lost! Well, that's my challenge for this next week!
Doing a bit of rummaging - you can't beat a good rummage - and found this!
It's a radio believe it or not. Capable of receiving anything up to 2 stations - you click the switch - it dates from the 1950s I believe and was given to me by my grandfather sometime around 1962. You plugged it into the microphone socket of an amplifier or a tape recorder and it had two small screws on the rear to tune each of the radio stations. You attached a long piece of wire to the screw on the top to act as an aerial.
I've never managed to get it to work, but it would never cope anyway with the many radio stations we have now, crammed into small frequency ranges. It would probably pick up 6 at once even if I could get it to work!
Yesterday someone left a comment asking about the film scanner I use to scan my negatives.
It's a PrimeFilm 1800u which I bought in 2000 from Jessops.
At first I was a little disappointed but the software drivers, or my technique seem to have got better as I've upgraded through Windows95 to XP and now Vista. It seems to make a better job of colour negatives than it does black and white, which like colour slides have to be spot-on exposure otherwise trying to adjust seems to reduce the number of shades/colours to around eight giving a somewhat Salvador Dali effect...
For that reason I scan black and white negatives as colour and then convert to black and white once the image is in Paint Shop Pro. When scanning negatives and particularly slides which aren't stored in close fitting containers, dust can be a problem. Some of my slides are so dirty I just can't be bothered trying to clean up the thousands of black dots and just try to get rid of the larger blobs! On negatives the black spots are white of course. If the same mark shows on several photos it's because dust has fallen off a negative onto the light tray of the scanner. I keep a small artist's paintbrush that I use to periodically clean the tray.
Similarly if lines appear on the scanned picture it's a piece of dust that has got onto the moving lens that trundles out and over the negative so the paintbrush does for that as well. In nine years it's amazing how many particles seem to have fallen into the scanner and onto the white surface under the glass but, whilst I've worried about them and tried blowing through whatever gaps in the casing I can find in an effort to dislodge them, they don't seem to have any effect on the scanned image.
Nine years life for something like this isn't bad. It's been hammered over that time. I have around 30,000 negatives and slides and they are not quick things to scan. I still have a lot that have yet to be scanned, although I'm getting through them slowly! As technology moves on and monitors have got better resolution (and gone widescreen!) I find I now want to go back and rescan stuff that I did at the beginning! A never-ending job! Hope that helps, Travis!
And just to prove that I really did find out just this minute, tonight, sitting all alone in the Jurys Inn in Newcastle... here I am...
I lost an Ebay auction for a Garrard record deck earlier today so thought to cheer myself up by crawling up into the attic and finding one of my record players out to play with.
The Magnavox is a deluxe type of Dansette, with a second speaker in the detachable lid and a stereo cartridge. Unfortunately it refused to play at either 33.3 or 45rpm but the 78rpm speed is working ok so at a guess either a belt has snapped or is slipping.
Anyway I dug out a few rock and roll 78s and spent a few minutes chasing the Ebay blues away!
When I was a nipper this was the must have expensive toy.In response to a couple of emailed questions, the record deck I use most of the time is this one.
It's a Pro-Ject with a built-in speed box for push button speed changing from 33⅓ to 45rpm. On most Pro-Ject decks this required lifting the platter - the turntable and moving the belt from one pulley to another.
I still need to do that to play 78rpm records and they also require a special stylus as the grooves are so much wider than on the more modern records. Finally, it has a built-in pre-amp so that I can plug the player into either modern amplifiers that do not have phono inputs or straight into the line-in socket on my PC. A deck like this will not play on its own - it needs to be plugged into a separate amplifier and speakers, but your PC will stand in quite happily in this regard. Cost will be around £250 sterling.
I really can't remember why I took this particular photo - it must have been on some extremely boring afternoon in or around 1980.
The cans of drink have a new-fangled thing (probably not all that new by then actually) called ring-pulls. As can be seen clearly, they pulled totally clear of the can. To avoid dropping litter, the usual method of disposal was to drop the detached ring-pull into the can and then drink from it. Two minutes later your friends could practice the kiss of life (or CPR as the Ladies Over The Water might have it) as you stopped breathing due to "drinking" the ring-pull. Many an amateur tonsillectomy was performed accidentally during the act of removing one of these from the back of someone's throat...
Earlier drinks cans had no ring-pull or self-contained opening mechanism at all and required one of these fearsome weapons which hooked over the rim of the can so the pointy end could be levered down to puncture the tin. This, for any fizzy can of drink, caused a huge geyser of sticky sugary drink to fall all over the person standing opposite who up until that point had been enjoying the sight of you wrestling with it. The other, blunter, end is for taking the crimped caps off bottles of coke and other similar bottles. Sterilised milk used to come with such caps in pint glass bottles. I remember it tasted horrible and I could never understand as a kid why anyone's Mum would torture them so...
I like this!
Remember back in May we got a free sample Gillette Fusion razor through the post?