Category Archives: engineering

city, engineering, travel, UK

Scotland for a night

Leave a comment

Trials of our SBR (synthetic rubber) through our sister plant’s granulator at Grangemouth necessitated an overnight visit to Scotland earlier this week.  The trials went well, the half a tonne of rubber we previously sent up was annihilated by the rotating knives (“Did you say knives?”, “Rotating knives – yes.”).  That left enough time to see around the rest of the plant, quite a different process to ours – solvent rather than emulsion based polymerisation.

Shaun & I popped in to Edinburgh that night, it wasn’t far & I was disgusted that Shaun hadn’t been before.  The grey day had given way to a very misty night with a light rain falling.  After a great dinner (mmm, haggis) catching up with family-friend Thomas, whom I stayed with on my last visit three years ago, we went up & found the castle entrance looming out of the mist.

After more time discussing granulators, balers & general Finishing Plant issues the following day it was time to head off to the airport.  Misjudging the time it would take, we were well early & popped down to the Forth to check out the bridges.  We managed to get closest to the rail bridge (on land anyway), & it is by far the more photogenic – thankfully the weather was much better on Wednesday.

An all-too-brief return to Scotland, I must get up there again soon – it’s beautiful & I’d forgotten how much I missed the accent.  Black pudding isn’t too bad either.

around home, bikes, engineering, history, MTB, UK, vehicles

Corfe Castle & Swanage Railway

Leave a comment

Somewhere reasonably local that I meant to go all summer was Corfe Castle, Swanage & the Purbecks.  Not being around for a single summer weekend kind of killed that plan, so with the sun shining brightly Saturday last I finally made the relatively short drive west past Poole.

A short leisurely walk from the Swanage Railway (more later) Park & Ride had me circling the base of the hill that the castle stands on.  Having been built by William the Conqueror, its a thousand or so years old, but was ruined during the Civil War when, as one of the last southern Royalist strongholds, it finally fell to the Parliamentarians.   As one would expect from a defensive position, the castle affords really good views of the picturesque Purbeck countryside.

With the castle such a ruin, although some of the walls still stand quite tall, there was plenty of space to wander around & explore – & avoid people, it’s quite a popular place to visit.  Apparently this is Famous Five country & the castle inspired the one on Kirrin Island – I was disappointed that I didn’t discover any dungeons, tunnels or bearded smugglers.

The other attraction around the village is the Swanage Railway that runs various steam locos down to the seaside at Swanage.  A much bigger operation than the Watercress Railway, I was surprised at just how popular it was – difficult to find a seat on one of the six carriages.  The Pullman Observation car looked pretty impressive too – alas, I didn’t have the pound coin needed to upgrade.

Down at Swanage it was time to finally visit the bikeshop I order quite a bit of stuff from – bit of a 29er, singlespeed, cargo bike haven.  I was quite surprised that they had Avanti bikes as their rentals – all the way from NZ.  Wandering down to the shore it was time for a late & large lunch – not much dinner needed that night.

Workmate Henry thought that eight o’clock on Sunday morning was a good time to meet on the other side of the Forest for a ride – he managed to choose the coldest morning of the season so far.  At least that meant it was clear again.  Driving out towards Burley in the mist from Brockenhurst I found all sorts of deer and longhorn cattle.  If it had have been a bit colder the ground may not have been so wet – however, we had a nice little pootle around before the others had to leave.

city, engineering, Europe, food, history, travel

Ravenna & Venice

Leave a comment

Barely having recovered from the exhausting journey back from NZ, I was off to Italy less than a week after getting home.  It was a little odd going back to work after NZ & having all sorts of people telling me I was going to visit one of our sister plants for a week to see how they operate their similar plant better.  It was a very productive, informative & interesting week spent with my boss & workmate as the Italian process engineers showed us around and gave us plenty of ideas to try out back at Hythe.  For the most part, the language difference wasn’t a problem as most, except some operators, spoke reasonable English; Steve (my boss) knows quite a bit of Italian & Henry (workmate) knows a little – I of course only know the tiny amount I remember from previous Italian trips.

Ravenna is a very nice little city (~160000) & fortunately we were staying close to the centre – so it was very easy to walk around town on the warm evenings.  We didn’t have a lot of time to see some of the renowned early-church mosaics (eight UNESCO World Heritage sights to be seen), but Henry & I managed to see a couple once Steve had gone back to England early.  Of course, being Italy, the food was fantastic & as the capital of Romagna region we were able to sample quite a bit of the local food & wine.

The SBR (styrene-butadiene rubber) plant was on a huge industrial site, a similar size to the Port Kembla Steelworks – but with more space dedicated to plant, rather than stockpiles. There were an incredible number of bicycles and small Fiats all around to save much walking.  There was an appropriately sized canteen, where the lunches were bountiful & cheap.  Perhaps I ate too much pasta last week.

It wasn’t too difficult to get my return flight pushed out by two days so that I could have a free day exploring somewhere else in Italy.  Conveniently, Venice is on my list and only a short, cheap train ride away from Ravenna.  I rolled in Friday evening & then had a twenty minute walk rolling my cases along a lot of cobbles and carrying them over many bridges.  The end of September is a good time to visit: it’s warm, but not hot; the famous stink wasn’t there; and the crowds are tolerable.

But what an absolute nuts city – built on (& sinking into) the water, it’s just mad.  Being so flat, it’s a very easy city to walk around & get to the main sights & even outlying neighbourhoods – pre-cached maps on one’s phone really help in not getting lost in the labyrinth (the GPS signal was surprisingly strong in such skinny streets surrounded by tall stone buildings).  While I expected no cars, the lack of bikes took a little more to get used to – especially after the proliferation of bikes in Ravenna.

Grand Canal

Rialto Bridge

St Mark’s Campanile

As usual, I walked an awful lot around the city popping in to a few of the famous buildings & museums – Scuola Grande di San Rocco (filled with huge Tintorettos – said to be his Sistine Chapel) was my favourite.  The Jewish Quarter was nice & quiet, but then so were a lot of the neighbourhoods away from the Grand Canal & associated crowds.

Somewhere along the way I stumbled across some sort of musical museum, so I took a peek and learnt all sorts about Vivaldi – I didn’t know he was from Venice.  But that’s not surprising as I am musically ignorant.  Which makes it even stranger that I somehow ended up at a concerto that night in a packed hall listening to (what seemed to me, at least) an incredible string recital.  It can’t have been just me that thought so as the applause was prolonged – they came back three times just to bow and another two times for encores.  Most of the evening was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which as well as being brilliant kept on fooling me into thinking that another summer of NZ cricket was here – thanks National Bank.

So that two hours of the four violins, a viola, a cello (the cellist was particularly exuberant and highly entertaining), a double bass & a harpsichord turned out to be the highlight of Venice for me.  A great place to visit, but with so much stone, so many people, no grass & few trees I don’t think it’s a city I could spend much more than a few days at a time in.

bikes, engineering, family, friends, MTB, NZ, snow, travel

NZ Visit – Southern Week

1 Comment

Continuing the multitude of too-brief visits, I said my goodbyes to Elizabeth & Cara at Wellington airport & flew south to Timaru where Dad & Adele were waiting for me.  With not having seen Dad in the three-plus years I’ve been away (two and a half years for Adele), it was great to see them again.  It’s a relatively short drive down to Oamaru and amongst poring (& laughing) over family photo albums we headed out to the Brydone (was there another choice?) for a meal.

The fleeting visit to Oamaru over (it’s never been home for me), we headed down to Dunedin to pick Mum from university (only eight months since I last saw Mum in London, but of course great to see her too).  It was an afternoon’s worth of leisurely driving through Central Otago to get to Adele’s place in Wanaka.

Adele gave me heaps for taking this photo through the windscreen, so I should share it

We stopped in St Bathan’s for a quick look at the old mining town (bypassed by the highway, so it’s pretty quiet) and a pint in the pub.

This passes for an old building in NZ, nice pub it was too

We were about a day out with the timing for the skiing, missing the biggest dump (60 cm) of the season just.  Still there was plenty of spring snow to play in for Wednesday afternoon.  High winds dictated that we go to Treble Cone – alas only half of their chairs were running.  When I say half, I mean one – a little smaller than the skifields I’m used to over this side of the world.

Still, with the setting above the lake, the snow-capped mountains surrounding and the high country not covered in snow – Treble Cone is one of the more beautiful ski areas I’ve skied at.  As this was my first ski since the shoulder operation, I was keen to just test the shoulder out gently for the afternoon.  (Bizarrely, the guy that hired me the skis comes from the same village that I live in here in the UK.)  Being mid-week & partially closed, the ski area was pretty empty and Adele & I had a good time on & off piste and I was well pleased with my shoulder.

Wednesday was set aside for tiki-touring.  As we got close to Lake Hawea, we could see a big storm rolling in from the west across the mountains.  We quickly did an about turn and headed south for a very pleasant day exploring old Cromwell (the town was flooded when the Clyde dam was built) and old hydraulic mining sites around Bannockburn.  There was a good hour-long stroll around the old mine workings – the gold was in the sedimentary rock & extracted by what was basically washing the side of the hill away with deluges of water.  This involved rather ingenious & large systems for storing and then directing the water to where it was needed.  The landscape was strangely reminiscent of the badlands of both Alberta & South Dakota in some ways.

Part of the mining area – original height would have been slightly higher that that on the right of picture

One of the bigger reservoirs & not a very interesting photo

That storm really did roll in that night as we were going out for dinner & the rain was still pelting down early in the morning.  The time that I was awake that night was pretty much spent thinking that I wouldn’t get to go for a mountain-bike ride with Adele (who thankfully has finally discovered while I’ve been away that MTBing is pretty cool) that morning before we headed back to Dunedin.  But peaking out the curtains at seven o’clock the sky was strangely clear.  I hustled off to rent a bike – I wanted a bog-standard hardtail but the shop was so disorganised that I ended up with a softtail 29er for the price of a hardtail, score.

Riding from home, we were quickly climbing up the Sticky Forest.  My leg work at the gym while shoulder was recovering seems to have paid off, the hills weren’t much of a problem – although that may have been those big wheels turning.  The trails had drained pretty quickly & we stayed relatively mud-free. We skirted around the edge of the lake to Albert Town before crossing the Clutha River.

The object of the crossing the river was to get Deans Bank Track – a recent DOC project.

Wonderful get-up borrowed from Adele – my old Dobies shorts & a commuter jacket

A few switchbacks to get up on to the plateau before north-west

Pretty spectacular spring morning ride

It’s a well thought out loop & I imagine a very fast loop if it’s properly dry – we had a good time checking it out.  Once again I was pleased with how my shoulder stood up to its longest ride in a long time.

Heading back to Albert Town, you can just make out the new trail down there

So that was a great ride out, about four hours and interrupted only by Adele somehow managing to gouge her big chainring in to the top of her calf – still don’t know how she was able to do that while riding uphill.  Back to Dunedin that afternoon, coincidentally good friends the Careys (where I had one of my 30th celebrations) were down visiting (youngest daughter) Fiona – so that was a good excuse to have another meal out, not too mention seeing James & Becca (I lay the blame of me moving to Canada for a year firmly at their feet – not that I’m complaining about that).

We even remembered to have a family photo, I’m sure I’m not that much taller – must be the cowboy boots

Goodbyes were said Saturday morning (best I don’t dwell on that too much) & I was back up to Auckland for a final pack, check progress of Andrew & Shelley’s kitchen and then fly back to London via LA.  After years of people saying how much of a hassle security is at LAX when in transit, it turns out that is all false – we didn’t even have to go through security again, unlike at Hong Kong.  Home Sunday, back to work the next day to find that I was being sent to Italy the following week for work.  That was a real shame.