Category Archives: engineering

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

NZ Visit – Southern Week

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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.

Asia, city, engineering, Europe, travel, vehicles

The Promised Post

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If anyone was wondering, here finally is the last of the posts of my week in Turkey. One filled with observations on the kind of things I notice – apart from all the usual things that one sees in a foreign country & around its tourist attractions.

Firstly, on one of my back-street wanders between attractions (in this case the Golden Horn & Galata Tower) through reasonably normal city shops I stumbled across dozens of little shops. Each shop seemingly devoted to an individual aspect of, all things, engineering – covering process, mechanical, manufacturing & more.

Want a fan or blower?  There’s a shop for that:

How about an electric pump? There’s a shop for that too. Actually, I was keen to investigate replacement soap initials pumps for work – but I don’t think they would have fitted in my baggage allowance & I don’t know the Turkish for flowrate, head or impellor.

Pallet trolley?

Petrol-driven pump? Compressor?

Traffic management items?

A very bizarre little shopping area to wander around. Air-tools, welders, power tools, hand tools – there were shops for each of those too & many more.

Once I was in Cappadocia, it was a much more rural area – which meant tractors. I was most pleased to see that ninety percent of the tractors used on the many fields were of one type. Classic Massey Fergusons – for some reason my father has a particular liking of these small tractors. Consequently, I’m quite fond of these little red workhorses as they remind me of Dad & my childhood growing up on the orchard in Papamoa.

Most of the Massey Fergusons I saw were 135s, – such as the one below in the main street of Goreme – which were built between 1964 and 1975. I’d always been under the impression that Massey Ferguson was an English company – probably because ours was built in England; but as it turns out Massey-Harris and Ferguson were two Canadian companies that merged in 1953.

The Massey Ferguson 35 is probably the most recognisable model, it was the largest selling tractor in the world. It was made from 1957 through to 1964 in various countries – this is the model that we had when I was still small enough that driving it was a bit of stretch. There were a few around town – this was the best looking example. I must have looked rather strange – a tourist wandering back through town after dinner out, spending an inordinate amount of time peering at all the details in the dark.

As well as old tractors, there were scores of old Renault 12s.  These were discontinued by Renault thirty-odd years ago, but there were so many still around I was bewildered.  Apparently, they still sell for six thousand lira (just under £2000) – which is astounding as my ten year old car only cost me half that.  It turns out that variations of the 12 were made in Turkey until 2000 – so not quite as strange as first thought.

Asia, city, engineering, Europe, history, travel

A casual Istanbul day

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With the forecast slightly cooler for Wednesday, it was a good time to don trousers early in the morning so I could visit the Blue Mosque – Sultan Ahmed Mosque.

After putting my shoes in the little plastic bag, I was free to wander around the mosque.  As far as the floor goes, it was a little bare inside – this guy had his work cut out for him with such a small vacuum cleaner. Once again, there were hundreds of small lights suspended from dozens of cables. The designs on the ceilings were astoundingly intricate & it was so long I stood staring up that I’m surprised I don’t have a worse crick in my neck.

My airbnb (sort of like couch-surfing, but people rent out their spare rooms/houses) host, Erdi, had recommended that I visit the Basilica Cistern – which is underground near Hagia Sophia. A sucker for engineering & history – it instantly appealed.  There are many cisterns under the city dating from Roman times – this one is the best kept & best to visit. Built in the sixth century to store water brought in on an aqueduct (substantial remains of which are near where I was staying) from almost twenty kilometres away, the 336 marble columns hold the roof nine metres up.  With a substantial floor area, the cistern once held almost a hundred millions litres!

Most recently restored & opened to the public in 1987, the cistern is flooded to a depth of about a foot & there are sufficient walkways to walk the length & breadth of the area.  The lighting & background music is really well done to create quite the relaxing atmosphere.  It was of course pleasantly cool down there & nice to escape the bustle outside – the four metre thick brick walls sure do keep the sound out. One of the highlights of Istanbul for me.

The base of a couple of the columns had inverted carvings of Minerva on them

I had a quick walk through the Grand Bazaar before popping out at Istanbul University – which provides a reasonable photos of big flags. Turks love their flag & it’s easy to find it flying somewhere or other – another country that makes me wish we had a better NZ national flag that we would more readily fly & use to identify us.

A quick trip home to get into some more suitable clothes for the quickly warming day was soon followed by a walk through back streets to get to the Spice Bazaar & the ferry terminal again.  I took another local ferry across to the Asian side of the city to have a little explore.  There’s not a lot over there for the tourist to see, but I always enjoy a good walk around – even better when it’s hot & there’s a ready excuse to buy ice-creams.

Looking back over the Bosphorus to the Old City from Asian side

Maiden’s Tower

around home, engineering, history, UK

Gosport Museums

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After last weekend, a switch was flicked somewhere & it’s been summer ever since. All week with temperatures sitting in the high twenties, it’s been rather uncomfortable wandering around the plant at work. At least being pretty close to the Solent, there is usually a breeze around. With it not getting dark until well after nine now, I’ve been enjoying getting the only outdoors exercise my shoulder allows at the moment (walking) in the Forest, along the beach at Lepe and across numerous fields in the heat.

With a relatively free weekend on the cards, I thought it was a good weekend to visit Portsmouth for the first time in two and a half years. Considering it’s less than an hour’s drive away, a day-trip there was well overdue. Pleasingly, I remembered just in time that I’d stored the fact that Gosport would be worth a visit one day, after reading about it some months ago, somewhere in my mind. So I headed off to park at the wonderfully named museum, Explosion!, on the west side of Portsmouth Harbour just before anything opened. As I wandered around the old buildings, it was obvious that it’s not far across the harbour to Portsmouth and all its things naval – both old & new. While the groundsmen finished off mowing the lawns, I ducked inside right at ten o’clock & bought my multi-pass ticket – Explosion!, the Royal Navy Submarine Musuem & a day-pass on a water-taxi between the two, Portsmouth & HMS Victory.

Explosion! (really the Museum of Naval Firepower) is at Priddy’s Hard & centres around Grand Magazine which is an impressive brick structure built in 1771 to house gunpowder. I got through the first room, which was based around the memories of those that used to work at the Ordnance Depot, before ducking out to get the first water-taxi of the day to the submarine museum. The schedule is well timed so that when you step off the boat, having cruised past hundreds of boats packed in the marinas & numerous waterside apartments, you are soon able to get on a guided tour of the HMS Alliance. (Although not for long as major maintenance work is soon to begin.)

Being early in the day, there were only fifteen on the tour – which is more than plenty on a sub, I wouldn’t have been keen on being a submariner in here with sixty other men – none of whom have showered for six weeks. A diesel sub laid down near the end of WWII, it was fairly antiquated – but that just makes all the various valves, large batteries, pipes & so forth more interesting compared to what I imagine are much less cluttered modern designs.

I usually struggle to get representative photos of the cramped conditions on subs, so here’s a standard torpedo tube shot.

Our guide was excellent, having been a submariner for many, many years & actually having served on the Alliance. It’s so much more interesting with stories of what being on the watch was like, the thrill of chasing & evading the Russians in the Artic, & as it’s about the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War – a first hand account of being on the sub that sunk the Argentine cruiser Belgrano.

HMS Alliance – looking quite shabby outside, showing why it’s down for major work starting soon

Other submarines of interest at the museum include Holland I, the Royal Navy’s first submarine – built in 1901. It had a crew of just eight (it was quite small & used for coastal defence and basically to see what this submarining thing was all about), with a petrol engine and 25 tons of batteries for use under water. Having spent a little too long underwater (almost seventy years) after sinking while being towed to be scraped, she was raised again in 1982 and has been on display around various restoration works since.  In the main inside display area is the midget sub HMS X24 that was used in WWII to sneak in to heavily guarded harbours & deposit its two large bombs under targets (docks, ships & so on).

Holland I tail-fins & propellor

I rushed around the last of the very informative displays so that I could catch the next water-taxi across the harbour to Portsmouth for a spot of lunch (Italian market – yum) & some much needed clothes shopping (something that is always needed as I put it off so often) for an hour.  It was great tootling across the harbour dodging small yachts, superyachts, ferries & large power boats under the sun.

An hour was enough to scoff a couple of calzonnes, buy some clothes, gaze around at the sights – so it was back on the Jenny R for the double-leg back to Explosion! – via the main visitor attraction in town HMS Victory & HMS Warrior.

HMS Warrior

Back at Explosion! there was time to learn/be reminded about fighting sailships & various explosives before a very good multimedia presentation in the Grand Magazine. The Grand Magazine, with its eight foot thick brick walls, took three years to build and then another three years for the mortar to dry out (gunpowder doesn’t like moisture so much). I was pleased to learn I was standing in the very room where explosives for Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar were stored prior to the battle. There was a great mix of military history, social history, physics & chemistry to keep me well interested. The stories of all the precautions that had to be taken over the 150+ years of work here were fascinating. As with many industries in both world wars, many women took over the jobs of the men that had gone to the front. Hearing how the women had to work with cordite (which had replaced gunpowder by that stage) was especially neat as it was in a munitions factory that my great-grandmother (Mum’s mum’s mum) worked and was awarded an OBE for preventing some sort of explosive disaster.

The rest of the museum is given over to various large mines, torpedos, shells, missiles & such forth. All very interesting & technical – but didn’t hold my attention as much as the tales of the people that had to work in such a large & dangerous facility. All in all, a great day out with two fantastic museums & a time lounging in the sun on the back of a little boat pootling around the harbour – not bad for fifteen quid.

I had a bit of time to spare at the end so wandered in to Gosport – fifteen minutes past large old barracks that are now nice looking housing & newer apartment blocks. Gosport’s High Street isn’t so much to wander around, especially as I’d been over the harbour wandering around Gunwharf Quays a few hours previous.