lasermonkey
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Posts posted by lasermonkey
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Two C-130s in loose formation, fairly low, heading out over sea, I’d guess over Dunwich. Neither were squawking. I heard them coming and got a look through my binoculars. They were two tone grey, so possibly from Mildenhall.
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2 hours ago, Neil.C said:
Neil Young's book - Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars.
A great read.
More barn! More barn!
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Well, cover me in orange marmalade, roll me in feathers and call me Susan. I’d never have called that in a million years!
Edit: I confused Arma Models with Arma Hobbies. I have no idea if there’s any connection.
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3 hours ago, MrB17 said:
Does anyone remember the Notox citrus based glue in the 70’s? Smelled like lemons. I used it to build the Lindberg Vulcan, one day my bedroom door slammed shut from the wind. The Vulcan “rekitted” itself. Ahh the good old days.
Cheers
Jeff
Not that one, but I did buy some Ambroid liquid adhesive years ago that was citrus based. I lost most of it due to evaporation, even though the bottle was firmly done up. Never did work out how that happened! I think limoline is the name of the solvent.
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*Standing ovation*
Lovely job!
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I’m in East Suffolk again and a Swedish C-130 has just flown over, possibly heading towards Fairford.
Incidentally, I suspect that the Freeradar.co.uk app has been hacked. The only thing showing up is a UFO in Peru! -
18 hours ago, masterKamera said:
there is no actual linkage besides very specific, and very famous cases of "serial killers".
dwell on this. the "environmentalists" have no issue with me purchasing "bug fogger" machines that KILL anything in range, even wee lil birdies, but yet they want to ban fishing because they think the fish will feel pain.
I don’t think you’d like me.
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1 hour ago, Brandy said:
As long as it's not "feltch". That makes my skin crawl every time I hear it.
If you're not familiar, Google it, I will NOT explain it here!
Ian
Probably best to not Google it, especially at work or in polite company. Once you know, you can’t un-know.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
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I *almost* pulled the trigger on a Special Hobby Bugatti 100 which was on eBay for a reasonable price, but it was from Model Hobbies who were active for a few days and then “went on holiday” again. I wonder if I dodged a bullet there?
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4 hours ago, masterKamera said:
Thing is, this could get political rather quickly and along decent lines as well.
At what point do you understand that nature happens, and as with nature all things die. And that one must balance out the end result + all the misery an animal will undergo to be "cared for and repaired"?
I don’t think anyone is disputing the brutality that exists in nature. Everything is trying to eat everything else. That said, much of nature is suffering as a direct result of our actions, and hedgehog populations in the UK are plummeting. We have lost 75% in the past 20 years. Are we not duty bound to help where we can?
The senseless cruelty of shooting into a wildlife hospital is another thing entirely. There are established links between people who mistreat animals, psychopathy and violence towards humans. This is something that needs to be nipped in the bud.
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I despise people who are cruel to animals as much as I admire those who show kindness.
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I honestly couldn’t tell you what age I was, but I think it was probably when I bought the proper Precision Paint* colours for my Matchbox Beaufighter TF.X. It’s probably fair to say that when you decide that you want the model to look right, it’s probably not a toy anymore. That said, older kits that weren’t up to standard or had got damaged were summarily blown up or shot at. I’ll never forget the way my Frog Ar 234 exploded with the cap and match head bomb we had created.
*it’s wild to think that once upon a time, the small market town I grew up in had several shops where you could buy paints such as Humbrol, Airfix, Gloy and Precision Paints. The latter were stocked by a newsagent, of all things!
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I’m glad this thread has popped up again, as I’d like to add a few more. The Miles Gemini has been mentioned, but it’s a favourite of mine and I really would love to see a plastic kit released. The same goes for the Miles Falcon.
I don’t think anyone has done an A.W. Atlas in plastic, and that’s one I have been hoping for. I’ll also add the Luscombe Silvaire, Chilton DW1, Comper Swift, Auster Autocrat, DH 84, DH 85, DH 87, DH 90 and a whole load of other light aircraft.
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Something with a big, burbling radial engine yesterday, though I didn’t catch what it was.
Today we had a hummingbird hawk moth on the buddleia. That was unexpected but very welcome.
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1 hour ago, jackroadkill said:
Blimey, that's worse than getting caught using a Mexican Fender, surely?! I'm lucky that for a period of my life (now long over!) I had a well-paying job and few responsibilities, and was able to amass quite a nice little collection of US-made guitars and British and American amps. There are still people I know who tell me that I'd sound better if I used one of my LP's as my main guitar rather than "just" my Mexican Tele, or sacked my Fender amps in for a Marshall...
I have a sneaking suspicion that you would sound like you no matter what guitar or amp you were using. It's funny just how much you can change with no apparent difference in the end result. I remember being surprised to read that Peter Buck (REM) swapped his Rickenbacker/Vox AC30 setup for a Les Paul/Marshall on The One I Love and yet it still sounds exactly like him!
My pro musician friend has a deal with Gibson where he gets guitars at cost. He chooses to use Epiphones (Gibson's lower-price brand, for those of us who aren't guitar nuts) as he reckons you get much more bang for your buck, although he does have a few old Gibsons that he uses at home and in the Studio. Speaking of which, when I visited his studio in Seattle, he was using a decidedly budget Mackie mixing console. The sort of thing you might find in small, independent venues or bedroom studios. He has made some great sounding records with it, so you don't need a $1M Neve or SSL console, even if they are nice if you get the chance. He did have the one Focusrite mic preamp, but that wasn't one of their top-of-the-range ones.
I haven't played a Mexican Tele, but I always thought the Squier Teles were way better than they had any right to be at the money. I did play a Mexican Strat once, and even though I'm not a Strat guy, I thought it was one of the better Strats I had tried. There's always a point of diminishing returns with any hobby and I think that once you get to the Mexican Fenders, you're probably getting the best quality vs price ratio. My Fender Bass VI is Mexican built.
I also miss the days when I had disposable income. The only thing stopping me buying guitars back then was the space to keep them! *sigh*
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I used to be a member of a music production/technology forum a fair old while back, but ending up leaving due to rampant snobbery. If you didn’t have the latest multi-thousand pound microphone preamp or had the temerity to own a synthesiser that wasn’t an actual Moog, you were nobody. One of my friends is a professional musician/producer and he couldn’t stand it either.
Nice tools are all well and good, but it’s the results that count, whether it’s the quality of the end product or the enjoyment had in the process.
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7 hours ago, PhantomBigStu said:
Not experienced it on here, but when I first entered the hobby was told to my face that only children use acrylics with a brush, actual adults use an airbrush and enamels
I use enamels and an airbrush and my wife is adamant that I’m a child!
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I had a bit of a Cure session last night. I started with Japanese Whispers, which was a compilation album which featured all the songs from three non-album singles. For me, the best songs are Just One Kiss and La Ment, as they both retain the dark intensity that Robert Smith was desperately trying to shed at the time. The preceding album, Pornography, was by all accounts a harrowing experience to make and it’s not an easy listen by any stretch. The singles Let’s Go To Bed, The Walk and The Love Cats were a reaction to that.
Interestingly, The Cure were accused of ripping off New Order’s Blue Monday with The Walk, with its octave synth bass and drum machine, but it was actually recorded ahead of Blue Monday, even if it was released later.
To counter the upbeat songs, I followed it with Pornography. I mean the album, not pictures of nakey people! It’s intense, dark and mind-bendingly psychedelic. It remains of my favourite albums of all time.
After that, I thought I’d give their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, a listen. I get why I haven’t heard it in such a long time. I don’t think it’s aged at all well. Smith was not happy with it, the songs having all been chosen by Fiction Records’s Chris Parry, who also did the production. As a result, Smith insisted on full artistic control for the band on all subsequent records, so it was worth it in its own way.
I feel that the record is kinda directionless and only on Another Day and the title track does that band hint at what is to come. So What did make me smile though, the lyrics mostly consisting of Smith reading out a promotional offer from a bag of sugar and has the same kind of camp delivery that made The Buzzcocks so appealing. At the time, Smith was influenced by The Buzzcocks and Elvis Costello and was aiming to do that kind of spiky punk-pop. It was only when he had to step in as guitarist for Siouxsie & The Banshees (the guitarist and drummed bailed on them mid-tour) that he realised what direction he wanted to take, with the next three albums being increasingly dark and foreboding. If nothing else, I feel that Three Imaginary Boys is an important historical footnote., but otherwise unremarkable.
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4 hours ago, RidgeRunner said:
Very nice, mate. This year I have had Poplar, Privet and Elephant HMs. A couple of nights ago I got a very pretty Yellow Shell :). https://www.sussexmothgroup.org.uk/site/latestSightings.php
This year certainly isn’t as good as 2020, when there was an abundance of many species.
I’ve had a terrible year, moth-wise. On any given night, I could expect to see several of certain species, such as common wainscots, willow beauties, double striped pugs, least carpets, riband waves, dark arches, mottled beauties and various types of rustics. Some nights I’m not getting a single thing. It’s quite concerning.
The elephant hawk moths were a very welcome sight. One of them parked up over the day, and my wife was able to see it. She’s not a big fan of moths to say the least, but she’s fine with them during daylight. -
A Canadian CP-140 Orion just went over. I had expected it to be a C-130 by the noise, but was very surprised when I looked it up on Free Radar.
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1 hour ago, John Laidlaw said:
Well, great - now I have to have one. Dammit
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My wife has called me an enabler on several occasions. It’s a fair cop.
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I got two more pedal circuits up and running today. First was a clone of the Death By Audio Interstellar Overdriver. Now, Death By Audio (DBA) are renowned for their *ahem* unusual way of doing things, favouring back-to-front transistors and weirdly wired potentiometers, amongst other things. The less kind in the pedal making community say that they don't really know what they're doing but to be fair, they have some unique takes, their pedals don't really sound like anything else and they have quite a following.
When I plugged the circuit into my test rig, it didn't work at all. A quick look revealed that I had forgotten to cut the necessary bits on the stripboard tracks. I've built hundreds of pedal circuits and never have I done anything this daft before! I cut the tracks, hooked it up again and it still didn't work. With the drive control on full I could get an overdriven signal, but it was incredibly gated (i.e.the sound cuts off abruptly when the input goes below a certain level, rather than sustaining), but backing off the drive, even by a touch, killed the output entirely.
I had read that circuits with reverse bias transistors can be incredibly fussy. Although I had built the circuit several years ago, I had done a bit of research and put in transistors with a current gain (hfe) of around 600, as this is what people were saying worked. Well. mine didn't. I removed the transistors and replaced them with sockets so I could easily play around with different transistors. I then tried some higher gain MPSA18 transistors, but these didn't pass any audio at all. I then went the other way and tried some 2N5088s with an hfe of around 350. The circuit sprang into life and sounded more or less like the demo video I had watched. Further experimentation revealed that an hfe of around 450 yielded the best results.
It's a thick, gooey overdrive with more than a hint of fuzz about it and I like it enough to put it in the "to be boxed" pile.
I also finished another circuit. This one was, I believe, a DIYer's take on the Electric Amp Innovations MV120 amplifier, but as an "amp in a box" type pedal. Rather that use JFETs instead of valves (or tubes if you live across the pond), this uses a dual op amp and both stages are cascaded and have clipping diodes. Now, the MV120 is kind of a modified Matamp style amp, but built in the US. It's favoured by the stoner/doom fraternity, and while I'm one of those sensitive indie kids, (albeit a 56 year old indie kid) I do have a penchant for downtuned, sludgy, doomy guitars.
I was intrigued, what with the circuit topology, as to how it would sound. I have built a number of JFET amp in a box pedals, including my own take on old Matamp and Orange amps, but never tried an op amp based one. It's pretty darned accurate, truth be told. Compared to the demo video I watched, it nailed it. Enough that I'm probably going to abandon my own JFET based MV120 project, which is much more complicated and expensive to make. It really does get that loose, fuzzy, vintage stack feel and it has bags of low end. It's a one trick pony, but then you wouldn't buy an MV120 for Fender style clean tones! Doom for days. I must try it with my SG copy.
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Whilst in the workshop tonight, I put my LED lights on in the window, after having seen a few nice moths in the garden over the past few days (including an old lady, which settled down for a minute before flying off again. Definitely the biggest one I've seen yet). I managed to get at least four elephant hawk moths, which settled down at various points. I got to see some of them flying around, some of which bounced off me. I tried to coax one onto my hand, but he wasn't having any of it. I got a few photos, which I shall post here soon. One of the other villagers had thirty eight elephant hawk moths in his trap the other day and he took a great photo.
I also had a garden carpet (which somehow got into the workshop and had to be rescued), four common footmen, a treble lines, a brown tail, a riband wave and a few more that will require further study.
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Outstanding!
What’s flying over your house #3
in Real Aviation
Posted
As we were driving along the A14 on Monday, on our way to Suffolk, I spotted something unusual. Driving past Bottisham, I was absolutely positive I saw a P-51 parked up by the white-painted, ex-military building on the right hand side. I have no idea what it was doing there or, indeed, how it got there.