Strip Show #3

We'll go in from topside in the fulness of time and drive screws in, but here I slap PVA glue around the margins and set the spars back in place to fester overnight... we are working on the underside at this stage of the game.

Nowadays this kind of thing would be done in an autoclave, but we don't need that shit do we Gromit?

Ed. Plus you can't work out with an autoclave.

Strip Show #2

We'll do the planform first, laying out the 2' by 4' ply once cut in half, and adding spars to form a 'picture frame' to either side.

Those are the lateral strips parked there alongside and I thought about insetting them within the ply to make things look a little neater, and then couldn't be bothered; thus we can set them to one side for now.

When the Titanic was built the outline of its cross-sections would be chalked up on the floor at full-size in the shipyard for the workers to base the metalwork on, and so I feel we're recreating the glory days of shipbuilding here in our own tiny way. 

British Acquisition Enterprise (BAE)

Developing drones the quickest and cheapest way, by buying up the companies who do so. This is Callen-Lenz's Nyan, which judging by the extent of carbon-fibre can't be at all cheap.

Drones in the Ukraine, where they're undoubtedly most advanced, are developed in garages and put on sale on commercial websites. Whilst procurement in Britain has long been pursued on a revolving-door basis, lobbying its most important arm... BAE often investigated for the brown-paper envelopes that are a stock-in-trade.

Accordingly, try to find out anything about who Callen or Lenz might be or where all the cash for this came from is practically impossible... transparency not something we do in the UK.

Then again their effort is based in Salisbury, a place best known for its Novichok'd door-knobs, so perhaps it's no surprise.

Ed. Colin was quietly ghosted by the NWAA or North West Aerospace Alliance, not least because BAE is among the region's principal employers. He did say however that he'd never join a club that would entertain his type as a member.

Strip Show #1

I have a desultory kick around in the garage and figure we've enough material left over to build a lookalike for patent purposes if nothing else at half-scale viz. eight feet long.

From left to right, spars from a deconstructed drone for the cross-bars, and then a strip for the lateral supports, another for the hydro-skis and another for the booms respectively.

Atop all this is a light plywood sheet and another in laminated foam... albeit cut into pieces for a build at half-scale again, but which I am confident I can re-construct.

What I call a 'look-and-feel' is important for projects of this kind, and it's what I was arrested for at a meeting of my acolytes in the Nevada desert.

Jet Pack

Lovely shot of a low-loader at Hilton Park services of a summer evening, but what's inside? Well checking out the shape, my guess is a jet engine being shuttled from an airport down South to Manchester or farther afield?

The largest ever robbery in the UK, I think, will have taken place at Heathrow when a gang entered a compound and intent on something else, spotted a pallet of gold bullion. It had not, as I recall, been able to fit through the door... something that I find endearingly British in a Keystone Cops sort of way.

But while I plied my trade as a heroic captain thereabouts, someone actually drove something like this airside and with accomplices, forklifted one such onto the flatbed and was never seen again. British Airways ~ bailed out as ever by our good selves ~ barely gave a fuck.

But stripped for spares, my guess is there'd be a value on a par with that of the bullion.

Ed. Police are searching for a man photographing a truck on the M6 before coshing its driver.

Concrete Post

Much controversy here in the UK over the development of 'smart' motorways, which are basically ones where the inside lane ~ once reserved exclusively for breakdown ~ has been opened up for use. Instead, every so often there is a lay-by to pull into instead.

I've a lot of sympathy for this as I always considered that inside lane could be used in this way now that cars are altogether smarter and less prone to breakdown. The problem is, people are altogether less smart than they were in the days tyres blew, fan-belts broke and electrical points became corroded by sparking.

Now instead people sit in whichever lane at point of stoppage like zombies, unable to fix anything and rarely if ever assisted by anyone else now that we live on-screen lives... and as a result die in the inevitable shunts due to being rear-ended by drivers messaging at 80 m.p.h.

My favourite unintended consequence though is the bridge just south of Sandbach services southbound on the M6; a place I intend to organise a trip to should your numbers warrant it.

For driving back northbound some years ago at around 02:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning I was intrigued to see a truck separated from its trailer, whose contents of fruit and veg were spilled over a half-mile of carriageway. This closed it for the next six hours, whilst Police made a reality TV program... meaning people who'd set off to fly from Gatwick thinking that they were ever-so-clever, missed it instead.

Reason being, when that stanchion supporting the bridge was built, it was separated from the roadway by a 'hard-shoulder' width, whereas now it's adjacent. This means foreign truckers (as they all are at 02:00 a.m. except for muggins), understandably half-asleep, swerve to avoid a drift toward the edge: and tho' the cab makes it, the front of the trailer goes its separate ways.

This I think you will agree, is obvious from a close-up of the edge of that concrete casting? Funny thing is, they only added the stripes about four years later and after the accident had been repeated over and again ~ the edge of the bridge fading-to-black at night-time.

So we've smart motorways in the UK, but nobody smart with a tin of white paint.

Ed. The author has since been jailed for pretending this came from his dash-cam.

A (do) RON (ron, ron, a do ron ron)

South Korea's maritime agency first to certify an aircraft optimised for surface-effect operation but capable of free flight, beside trolling around on the sea. All you could hope for, a boat with a sort of car on top and wings on either side (though not fitted yet as it appears here).

That nice man Paul Dutch with his ground-effect channel attributes a revival of wing in ground-effect types (WIGs) to Regent kick-starting the process in the US with an electrified passenger type (the type and not its passengers) beside military demand in and around the South China Sea for rapid, inexpensive and low-observable forms of aircraft or watercraft.

To the extent special forces specialists Patriot3 in the US have co-opted a licence for use of the Aron-80 elsewhere in the world.

The initiative grew out of government research of a sort that Japan's MITI is known for in an effort to grow consumer electronics, or indeed China for its domination of the global EV market.

There's nothing comparable in the UK, which is why I'll be in the conservatory later with a tool-box instead.