Craig Sawyers

Although the Suez canal has been deepened and widened several times since it opened in 1869, it clearly isn't deep and wide enough to cope withe that behemoth container ship jammed across the canal. My dad was in the merchant navy shortly after WW2, on oil tankers that were pre WW2 vessels. He went through the Suez canal frequently. although those ships were toys by comparison to the monsters that sail nowadays. He told a story about losing power half way across the Atlantic - the old tub had developed perforated boiler tubes and was losing steam pressure. To keep it going he found sacks of sawdust, and fed those into the boiler to plug the leaks. When he ran out of sawdust he got the ship's supply of porridge and progressively fed that into the boiler. That limped them to port in the West Indies. Without those stunts they would have been dead in the water mid Atlantic.

I had no idea that Sony manufactured such monsters. I'm assuming back in the day.

It was like a grand tour though, with excellent hotels in interesting cities on the way. Not like Joni Mitchell's Amelia "I dreamed of 747s over geometric farms" "I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes" Must listen to Blue today....Mitchell at her poetic best.

Intrigued by that old colorized photo, I did some google-fu about Imperial Airways (now called BA!). They were first to run flights to Australia. There were 35 stops on the journey, which took just short of a month to get to Melbourne. Apparently their safety record was not great....

Interior of a 1936 airliner, run by Imperial Airways, the first British commercial airline. Looks really safe.

Happy birthday!!

I use one of these https://www.peakelec.co.uk/acatalog/dca75-dca-pro-semiconductor-analyser.html Not as capable as the Locky_z unit, but compact, curve tracing via USB, and plenty good enough for matching. Limited to <12V, <10mA I also have the SOT23 adaptor for mine Peak unit, since many transistors are available only in this format now

Bloody hell - that is an insane price. And the lightweight screws that are part of the package are not metric - they only work with the supplied nuts. Don't try to use them in tapped holes in a cartridge (they will be M2.5) - the SME ones will bind and ruin your day. Try SME for the price - it can't hurt to find out. They still manufacture everything in-house. Even the screws, nuts, spacers, finger lifts - everything. The only thing they buy in is the raw tapered arm tube, which comes from Chicago White Metal https://cwmdiecast.com/ , but even then all post machining, painting, silk screening etc is in house.

I suspect you can order one from SME. It'll still be pricey, but at least it supports SME (in spite of their no-new-arms policy) rather than internet gougers.

Very hard to get my head about the fact that she's gone, so young. Fuck cancer It saw my wife's mother off nearly a decade younger, aged 42, when Carole was only 18.

RIP Sabine Schmitz, a major endurance racing driver, and Top Gear fun and crazy German driver. Died at age 51 after battling cancer for four years. Too early, far too early. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/motorsport/56420308

Have you actually *read and understood* the welcome message?

Happy birthday!!

That's a big knob

I think that movie poster ought to be replaced with how it was actually done using green screen

I've bought quite a few Linear Systems single and dual JFETs from Micross. The pain in the ass is that you have to complete and end-user form now for every damned order. It didn't used to be the case, but must relate to some change in US export rules, possibly during the administration of the orange menace. Mind you it is not as onerous as importing potentially sensitive semiconductors covered by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), which many space qualified semiconductors are. You have to sign documents that say you will go to jail if you sell them on, or even lose them. They need to be stored in a locked location, a register of use kept and signed, and any devices you don't use must be destroyed or returned. Fortunately launching into space qualifies as "destroyed"!

The only Aavid shoulder washer that is formally intended for the TO220 package is the 7721-7PPSG, but that has a really short bush length of 0.81mm, and will absolutely guarantee flash over. ISTR Kevin used those in development of the original T2 clone, and indeed got flash over. That must be buried somewhere in the early pages of this thread.

I like that washer a lot. I used the 7721-3PPSG. That has a longer bush length than the 7721-10PPSG (3.18mm compared with 2.41mm). But 2.41mm should be just fine. The downside of both our choices is the bush diameter of 3.56mm. The tolerance for a TO220 hole is 3.53mm to 4.09mm. Which meant that for some of my devices it was a really tight fit and needed to be pressed home. On other devices it just dropped in. But they fit into the hole in the ceramic washer just fine.

What kids won't be watching is a raft of Disney movies https://filmdaily.co/news/disney-plus-pulling-movies/

Plastic screws cannot take the torque, even at the correct an surprisingly low value from the On-Semi apps note. Found that out having bought a shed load of PEEK ones, only to resort to stainless. Don't forget a smear of heat sink grease between the package and ceramic washer, and between the washer and and bracket. Where did you get the rectangular bush from? That is very neat.

Jessie Matthews OBE, star of stage and screen - musicals mainly. This, looking like it was photographed recently was over 90 years ago aged about 20.

Happy birthday!

I think it is a different company. http://www.qstools.com/index.asp

I have that same Lie Nielsen low angle block plane too. Then I bought a regular angle and a rebating low angle block plane by superb Chinese Quangsheng. These are basically Lie Nielsen knock offs, but are fantastically good quality with a thick iron that takes a razor edge, and needs hardly any back flattening.

First the link. Chinese - what do you reckon the chance of obsolete sand from China being genuine? And second - What exactly are you saying? Please very carefully clarify.