Now that brings back long ago memories. During college, a friend had an MG---TD if memory serves. I helped him change the clutch one day, so he loaned me the car for the next weekend. I drove down to see my mother and my girlfriend, not in that order. It was an adventure. Only about 125 miles, from Albany, NY south, but it rained at a moderate pace the entire trip. The wiper motor--single motor--quit after 30 minutes or so, and the top leaked around the edges, the front and the seams.
It was also made for shorter guys--my buddy was about 5' 9" and I am, or was then, 6'2".
Swiping the water off the inside of the windshield with one hand, while swinging the wiper blade through part of its arc with the other, after disconnecting the motor and Rube Goldberging a bit, I occasionally managed to steer and was almighty glad the roads were nearly empty.
Other Brit vehicle adventures, all sponsored by Lucas, included the lightless Norton Manx...it was a delight, and the light worked beautifully, until you leaned it into a tight, blind curve. Or the Jag...ah well. It was fun, even the screwball Austin-Healey.
Oh Gods, Lucas. I rewired my Landrover once upon a time, I could not believe what I found that passed for a 'loom'. Pile of melted slag, more like. Little wonder none of the fuses seemed to do anything useful. The Morris Minor we had for a while was no better. I've avoided Lucas by driving continental cars since ;-)
IIRC, there was a rash of positve ground 6-volt Minors as well.
The firm, where my dad was an accountant, bought a VandenPlas 'R' as their limo for their high-end clients. I was always excited when my dad got to take it on a family trips. We got quite the treatment whenever we pulled in for a fill-up. I thought he was going to have a coronary one time when my sister and I were in the back-seat munching on candy. I also recall it being replaced with a Citroen because the damned thing was always having electrical problems. Windows, wipers.. that sort of stuff.
Bad restoration and preservation efforts in the '50s caused immense ongoing damage to the frames. Infighting for decades did nothing to solve this until the whole hull was no longer structurally safe. Then the masts were removed and replaced with lampposts. A week ago, Cutty Sark had already become a farcical Disneyfication with increasingly little even worth preserving. It was a faked-up box with some interesting exhibits in
The best thing that could happen would tbe to scrap the Cutty Sark and spend the money on other equally or more deserving maritime history projects. It's not even a unique iron-framed tea clipper in the UK - The City of Adelaide / Carrick has been rotting away in Scotland for years now, in need of a budget that's less than half the Cutty Sark already had before the fire. Now the push is to demolish and scrap the thing completely.
Of course re-directing a budget outside London isn't going to happen. The Cutty Sark will probably be rebuilt into an even less original boat-shaped box (avoiding that nasty wood as it's an obvious fire hazard) and will be used to milk ignorant tourists in a progressively more trivial "experience". The budget will be inflated, and it will still over-run by some obscene margin. Even if it were ditched and the allocated money freed up for some other maritime history project, the Olympian greed of 2012 would just steal it, as they've already done to the lottery funding.
The Birkenhead naval museum closed last year. After being the only thing that kept Birkenhead docks from being an abandoned ghost town for some years, yuppification and the need for a car park to serve flat conversions in the warehouse buildings drove the museum from the site. This also includes one of the very few WW2 U-boat survivors, the only large Type IX oceanic U-boat. Yet this is up in the North, so it doesn't matter.
HMS Warrior (a ship individually more significant than Cutty Sark, from a period that's just as significant) was rebuilt in Hartlepool, a city that desperately needs some good news and a tourist attraction. She was then whipped away down to the already-affluent South coast by an act of sheer piracy.
HMS Caroline (the last survivor of Jutland) is ignored in Belfast harbour and hardly anyone knows she's even there.
Nearby is the Nomadic, last (albeit smaller) survivor of the Titanic fleet. She was rescued by local efforts, not by London's vast budgets.
The problem with the Cutty Sark is that it's in London. London can piss money away on any rubbish (the Mandeldome, the Olympics, Wembley, Cutty Sark) and no-one expects it to work, or to be held to account for vast budget over-runs and dismal failure of results. Yet outside the M25, valuable projects achieving good results and popular attractions can't even afford their shoestring budgets.
Here in Bristol we've just lost the recently-built Wildwalk owing to a lack of secure long-term funding for it. Also the immensely popular Industrial Museum was forced to close against everyone's wishes, because the council wish to redevelop the site into a worthless "Bristol theme attraction" (a crappy "interactive" website in a building, with no real exhibits), then hope that this fails and frees the site up for another profitable apartment development. You could finance both of these from the budget the Olympics spends on junkmail.
Bad restoration and preservation efforts in the '50s caused immense ongoing damage to the frames. Infighting for decades did nothing to solve this until the whole hull was no longer structurally safe. Then the masts were removed and replaced with lampposts. A week ago, Cutty Sark had already become a farcical Disneyfication with increasingly little even worth preserving. It was a faked-up box with some interesting exhibits in
The best thing that could happen would tbe to scrap the Cutty Sark and spend the money on other equally or more deserving maritime history projects. It's not even a unique iron-framed tea clipper in the UK - The City of Adelaide / Carrick has been rotting away in Scotland for years now, in need of a budget that's less than half the Cutty Sark already had before the fire. Now the push is to demolish and scrap the thing completely.
Of course re-directing a budget outside London isn't going to happen. The Cutty Sark will probably be rebuilt into an even less original boat-shaped box (avoiding that nasty wood as it's an obvious fire hazard) and will be used to milk ignorant tourists in a progressively more trivial "experience". The budget will be inflated, and it will still over-run by some obscene margin. Even if it were ditched and the allocated money freed up for some other maritime history project, the Olympian greed of 2012 would just steal it, as they've already done to the lottery funding.
The Birkenhead naval museum closed last year. After being the only thing that kept Birkenhead docks from being an abandoned ghost town for some years, yuppification and the need for a car park to serve flat conversions in the warehouse buildings drove the museum from the site. This also includes one of the very few WW2 U-boat survivors, the only large Type IX oceanic U-boat. Yet this is up in the North, so it doesn't matter.
HMS Warrior (a ship individually more significant than Cutty Sark, from a period that's just as significant) was rebuilt in Hartlepool, a city that desperately needs some good news and a tourist attraction. She was then whipped away down to the already-affluent South coast by an act of sheer piracy.
HMS Caroline (the last survivor of Jutland) is ignored in Belfast harbour and hardly anyone knows she's even there.
Nearby is the Nomadic, last (albeit smaller) survivor of the Titanic fleet. She was rescued by local efforts, not by London's vast budgets.
The problem with the Cutty Sark is that it's in London. London can piss money away on any rubbish (the Mandeldome, the Olympics, Wembley, Cutty Sark) and no-one expects it to work, or to be held to account for vast budget over-runs and dismal failure of results. Yet outside the M25, valuable projects achieving good results and popular attractions can't even afford their shoestring budgets.
Here in Bristol we've just lost the recently-built Wildwalk owing to a lack of secure long-term funding for it. Also the immensely popular Industrial Museum was forced to close against everyone's wishes, because the council wish to redevelop the site into a worthless "Bristol theme attraction" (a crappy "interactive" website in a building, with no real exhibits), then hope that this fails and frees the site up for another profitable apartment development. You could finance both of these from the budget the Olympics spends on junkmail.
LAMPOSTS!? Good Grief!! The restoration efforts of the 50s may have been bad, but I had an enjoyable few trips to see her during the early 60s. I have a very strong memory of wandering 'tween decks hunched over to protect my noggin - and I'm
5'6". But Lamposts?! What a desecration. Be better to tow her out to sea and sink her.
snips
Is that pub in a cave still open? The one supposedly there since 900.
You guys know summat about maple, I think. Chop a couple of nice big ones down, crate them up and send them over. Should be just about ready to work with when they get here ...
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