THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

Quite correct Tiz and in later days when some mills used women on the mules they were described as little piecers as well.

[Stanley]

I love my stove in the front room but even though I know how inefficient an open fire is I have to admit that nothing compares with them for interest and comfort. There's something very fundamental about sitting with a living fire....

[Stanley]

I know that in so many ways I live in the past. I love the simplicity of the old adverts for strange things like the Seebackroscope, the Zonk brush stail holder and the Flatley Dryer itself, nothing more than a box with an electric light bulb in the bottom to give heat to dry the clothes hung above it. In my defence, I am also interested in many other, more modern things, but my comfort zone is history and my steam engines.
What prompted this bit of self analysis is a feeling that so many people nowadays live such chaotic and frenetic lives, constantly distracted by modern media and advertising, that they never find their comfort zone. I look at a bloke like Johnny :Pickles who was a master of his craft and carried it on as his hobby. Perhaps one of the goals we ought to be aiming for if we want to improve most people's lot in this world is to help them to find their comfort zone. Can it really be as simple as that?

[Stanley]

Shortly after the war my father brought an electric hot water bottle home. With hindsight it was simply a 60 watt bulb buried in insulation inside a stove enamelled metal outer shell, totally enclosed. If you left it in too long it scorched the sheets! It was soon deemed to be handy but too dangerous!

[Stanley]

When gas ovens became common may houses still had the side oven incorporated in the range. They soon became places for drying kindling and warming bricks which, wrapped in a piece of blanket made good bed-warmers. We forget how cold linen sheets could be in an unheated bedroom in the depths of winter!

[Stanley]

Posting that reminded me of the frost that covered the insides of my bedroom windows on a cold winter's night. The only heating in what was a modern house (1935 build) was the fire in the kitchen. We used to warm a penny up and melt a spy hole in the ice..... Unbelievable these days....

[Stanley]

I was interested to see in Bob's Bits that his freshman year philosophy course began with hobbies. I like the concept that the brain is exercised and encouraged to enquire by physical activity. I look at the fact that there were many more workers in industry before the days of automatic machines and production line 'efficiencies' where one person did one job who had to actively think in order to do their job. Think of skilled fitters and machinists.... Did this have more widespread effects on their brain and in many cases spill over into hobbies and, because there were fewer distractions, into what the academics call 'higher thought'? Does modern industrial manufacture tend to discourage individual thought?

[Tripps]

Sorry to spoil it for you - and I agree with all you have written - but he said Hobbes not Hobbies.Here he is Hobbes. Clever though he was - I see he lived at the time when they were executing people for 'witchcraft' in Lancashire and elsewhere.

"Does modern industrial manufacture tend to discourage individual thought"

I think this is the philosophical question of the age. Thanks broadly to technology, there is not enough work to go round.

[Stanley]

Thanks David, it just goes to show the perils of bad eyesight! Roll on July 24th and my window cleaning procedure.... My left eye is getting worse, virtually useless now but they assure me that it will be 20/20 after the blast with a laser. I hope they are right!
Glad you agree with my general thesis. Marx warned us about in Das Kapital c. 1850. He was a smart kiddie. I can remember when I first saw a very early CNC miller cutting lubricator bodies out at Kirkham's in Bolton. John was showing it to me as part of his explanation why his men were no longer capable of making the two big lubricators I needed to replace stolen ones on the Ellenroad engine. He had the patterns and could cast the bodies but in order to cut the 26tpi thread on the lid and the interior of the body he would have to buy a 4" tap and die which would cost a small fortune. Even then he wasn't sure if his men could do the job. Newton and I made them. To be more accurate, Newton made two and I made one in the same time. His matched so we used them. Mine still sits in the treasure chest upstairs.



Here's the one I made. I never finished it because we used Newton's and if I ever found a use for it I would have to make the base connection to suit anyway. In the old days John's men would have rattled this off and cut the threads by striking them by hand....

[Bodger]

A pal of mine worked at the Empire Engineering, Salford, in the 1950s, see link
http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/File:Empire_Engg01.jpg

[Stanley]

Nice examples of the Lunkenheimer pattern hand lubricators. I have a new one made by Kirkhams and we had an original one made in America on the HP cylinder of the Bancroft engine. Very good for giving an initial dose of oil to the cylinder before starting when the big Kirkham's lubricator automatically took over.



Same on each side of the Ellenroad engine as well...

[Stanley]

Looking at the lubrication arrangements on the Ellenroad engine it's interesting to note that the makers of the new HP cylinders paid a lot of attention to the lubrication but did nothing to improve the original LP cylinders. No skin off their nose if the old cylinders wore out more quickly!

[Stanley]

One of the most impressive skills to be found amongst those associated with transport in any form were the men who could diagnose what was wrong with a motor just by listening to it. There was a bloke called Collett in Halifax who ran a family haulage firm (still in business) who was widely regarded as the best diagnostic mechanic ion the area. He had to be because the standard of the vehicles he used on farm milk pick up were not the best in the world! Another such man was John S Counter in Skipton who was famous for buying second hand wagons that had been well-used and rebuilding them for use in his business of carrying quarry stone in tipper wagons. The thing that I wonder in this age of ever more rigorous regulation and in many cases computer diagnosis is whether these rare skills are still about in the industry. A bit like de-skilling in manufacturing industry, the incentive for independent assessment and action is limited. Harrison's bought a new Bedford 7 ton wagon and extended the chassis by six feet using a Bako Extension kit. I doubt whether that would be legal today.

[Stanley]

In those far off days before the 1968 Transport Act and much more rigorous regulation of heavy vehicles tyre wear was not regarded as serious. Jack Harrison reckoned that when a cross ply tyre (no radial carcass tyres in those days) was showing two layers of canvas it was just coming into profit. We didn't do a lot of miles and were local with no high speed running so it wasn't really a danger. The biggest problem was if we got a puncture, they were all tubed tyres then, the tyres had been on the rim for so long that the retaining flanges of the three piece wheels were rusted in place and the tyre itself was almost welded to the rim by rust built up under the bead. In really bad cases we had to burn the tyres off the rim! I have spent many happy hours pounding the beads of a tyre we were going to re-use with a 'pounder', a short blunt bar with a sliding weight on it to give you a heavy blow in the right place. Once off we had to clean the flange with a hammer and chisel to get the caked rust off.

[Tizer]

`Tyres' are a sensitive topic for me at the moment - I've just suffered a `flat' and had to change a wheel on my car for the first time in many years. Mrs Tiz went out to drive the car and found it sitting on the rim on the rear offside yesterday. When I got the wheel off I found a Stanley knife blade embedded in it. No wonder it was flat! I'm hoping it was pure accident and not some silly game being played by a maniac with a Stanley knife.

[Stanley]

Jack Harrison used to say all the farmers repaired their clogs on their milk stands! A small clog nail could quietly work it's way through the heaviest tyre and reach the tube. You would think a thin piece of steel like that would lie flat but they manage to stand up like little soldiers if the front tyre throws them up.....

[Stanley]

One of the great myths of wagon driving was the 'double blow out' when both tyres on one side of the back axle failed. No such thing! What happened was that the driver never notices that the inside tyre has gone flat and it's the outside one that blows under the strain. What often happened, particularly if you had been over a rough site was that a large stone of brick got lodged between the twin tyres and gradually wore the wall of one of the tyres until it punctured. It paid to keep a close eye on the rear twins......

[Bodger]

It used to scare the sh-t out of me driving behind a truck with a stone jammed in the twin back wheels

[Stanley]

I used to keep a careful eye on them as well Bodge. It was always a good thing to take note of the wagon in front because some funny things could happen. I was once following an artic low loader with knock-out four in line wheels at the back near Forton on the M6 and noted a lot of sparks. I passed him, pulled him in and pointed out he'd lost the offside twin wheeled unit and the back corner of his trailer was dragging on the ground. He'd never noticed! God alone knows where it went.....

[Tizer]

In the 1960s I was on my James motorbike behind a flatbed lorry travelling from Blackburn to Darwen. As we came alongside the Royal Infirmary a spare wheel fell off the back of the lorry. Luckily for me it landed on the tyre and then bounced and rolled along the road, deviating toward the pavement. Just there was a bus stop with a line of folk waiting...Luckily for them it just missed the queue and hit the wall instead. I tried to flag down the lorry driver but he took no notice - either he thought I was a nutcase or he knew what had happened and didn't want to risk going back in case the wheel had cause damage or injury.

[Stanley]

All too common Tiz. Ever followed an overloaded quarry wagon with rocks and pebbles spilling and bouncing all over the road?

[Stanley]

Visualise the scene. Our extended Bedford is loading for Bradford in the dock at Marton....



Jack and Billy Harrison are underneath it changing the off side rear wheel bearing. (Yes, on the jack as it was loading!). Harold Stone finishes loading, Jack and Billy finish the repair, Harold sets off for Bradford. Three miles up the road as he approached Niffany Bridge he notes his off side rear twins, complete with brake drum and half shaft overtaking him before breaking through the fence and rolling off into the fields. A quick phone call, another wheel bearing and off he went again. No problem this time, Billy and Jack got the tabs on the lock washer properly bent down into the keeper which stopped it screwing off again. That was how we ran the fleet in the good old days......

[Stanley]

I once followed a four wheeler with an impossibly long overhang at the back. When he pulled into a café I followed him because I was intrigued. Turned out he had lost his trailing rear axle due to the rod brakes locking up and bad fastenings of the rear spring hangers and was limping home....

[Stanley]

I once had a day off from can pick-up when I worked for Harrisons and when I went out the following day there was something strange about the way the wagon was tracking. It took me a couple of days to work out what was the matter and when I told Billy that the rear axle was bent he just laughed. But I persisted and in the end convinced him. It transpired that the spare driver had cut a corner at Broughton Hall and hit a large round boulder placed there for just that eventuality. There was nothing for it, we had to fit an entirely new back axle casing. I would have thought it was impossible but it had happened....

[Tizer]

Many folk don't know how much damage they can do to their wheel rims by parking with a wheel partly on the kerb or by `tupping' a kerb. I know I've sometimes hit a kerb but I'm sure it's because they're changing the shape of street corners!

Talking about wheels and tyres, I saw AA advice about keeping your tyre pressures correct so that you don't use excessive fuel. Good advice but what worried me was that when they gave an example of the increased fuel consumption they used as example a tyre that was 8lb below recommended pressure. I'd have thought there would be more important things to consider than fuel consumption if your tyres were that far down!