Your Today in Pictures...

[Ed Gordon]

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

Well done Sir! I am glad the beast did not tip over on you. That would have been death by projector. You are not out of the woods yet; if your wife reads this post, your fate will be worse than death.

[Douglas Meltzer]

A fowl kind of day...

[Phillip Campey]

I have started shooting on super 8mm film and have to say it’s been a mixed experience. We took the grandkids away for weekend and stayed in Robin hoods bay. We visited Whitby and I shot a roll of film but soon realised the film was not moving so it had filmed nothing. I gave the cartridge a shake and put an x with a marker to check if the film was moving. Success. It was quite a dull day when I shot this but I was quite pleased with the results. https://youtu.be/q8AkyOFmrrA?si=LTp-sYHCA0b1_UCj

[Simon McConway]

Amazing work Phillip...good to see someone actually doing some filming, instead of the endless discussions (aka moaning) about price that seem to go on within forums, resulting in nobody actually doing anything. Or the person who says to me every year at Blackpool "well, I'm going to do some filming, where do I get film?" and to my knowledge has never done any! What you have there Phillip is now a priceless permanent record of a great time! Well done.

[Phillip Campey]

Thanks for your kind words Simon. I have another 2 roles to use, just waiting for us to go somewhere interesting to film.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Phillip,

Very enjoyable, nicely done! Could you please tell us which camera & film stock you were using?

[Phillip Campey]

Hi Douglas. I shot it Chinon 313p XL camera using Kodak colour reversal film as I like to project the results on a big screen.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Thank you, Phillip. A wonderful job, fun to watch.

[Graham Ritchie]

Excellent Phillip, that's what shooting home movies are all about.

[Steve Klare]

There was a band concert up at the Harbor last night: a little park with a band-stand on the east shore. We went up and had dinner and set some camping-chairs up on the lawn. We enjoyed the music and the sunset too.

Now, I'm a canoeist, so my boats are usually found hanging from my garage celling, but if I were to get a motor boat or a sailboat, I live in a pretty decent place to have one!

[Graham Ritchie]

One of our members dropped of some carpet this week for me, so this weekend I tidied thing up a bit around the Westar with it. Still more to do but am happy with things so far. I was talking to a German tourist the other day who was enjoying a visit to the park, he did mention that back in Germany you don't see many things that the park offers as during the war they were melted down for the war effort, so its always interesting talking to folk and hearing what they say about the place, as for the Westar, well its running like a swiss watch

[Steve Klare]

So we took a Sunday drive Out East today, saw some sights, enjoyed some good food, imbibed responsibly. We were passing through Calverton on the way back home and stopped in to visit this rare bird.

Back up into the mid 1990s, Calverton was the final assembly point for Grumman Aviation. Large assemblies brought from other parts of Long Island by truck and sometimes by train met up here for final integration and testing and the end result was rolled out onto the runway and took off: mostly destined to land aboard a Navy Carrier soon afterwards and get to work. This particular one is is a pretty early F-14 Tomcat: you may remember them from Top Gun. (Don't let Tom Cruise deceive you: The F-14 was the star! -even if that Blonde was kind of nice, too!)

Along with the LEM, the wings on the Space Shuttles and various other Grumman aircraft and spacecraft going back to World War II, she is a local product that we're a little proud of here.

I always thought I'd join hundreds of thousands of other technical people and work at Grumman myself, but I got in the business a little too late and Grumman faded from Long Island before I ever had a chance to apply. A good friend of mine from a job I had about 20 years ago spent most of his prior career in the hangars at Calverton sprawled out on the wings of various new Navy aircraft with an oscilloscope poking test points through some access panel figuring out why some plane's cockpit displays were acting whacky. When he joined me in the power-electronics business he commented it was nice to work sitting in a chair for a change!

Calverton could be a pretty loud place: with military jets taking off and landing multiple times a day and the occasional (unplanned) sonic boom. Today it's pretty quiet. Calverton was US Navy property and after Grumman left, the Federal Government turned it over to Suffolk County for re-development. There have been various ideas including a local air-freight terminal and the sky-diving operation that was based there for a while. There is a small industrial park located there now, but it's not anything like those old-days!

(The day that Tom Cruise makes a movie about PVC fence-products, you'll know Calverton's glory-days are back once again!)

Some pretty notable things happened there back in those days that helped shape history pretty-much everywhere, so there is now a little memorial park, including a couple of decommissioned Navy Grumman planes and other outdoor displays. This one is actually sort-of aligned with the runway she took off from when brand new as if in a steep climb, yet not quite exactly aligned since they sometimes need to take off and land aircraft there that aren't displays.

[Melvin England]

For me, the heading "Your Last Week in Pictures" would be slightly more appropriate.

Last week I was on my travels again. Not too far this time, about 90 minutes away to a place called Louth in Lincolnshire UK.
The fun thing was that the place I stayed at reminded me of a couple of films...

That's right...... The Cabin In The Woods. So peaceful and tranquil as you can imagine.

However, perhaps not. Were we visited by an unwanted guest????




The Blair Witch ????!!!!!!



However, one place I visited which I am sure will interest quite a few of you, seeing as it appears to be the runner up hobby to film and projectors......The Lincolnshire Wolds Steam Railway which currently runs between Ludborough and North Thoresby. A grand distance of 1.75 MILES !! It's a straight track so you can still see the train when it reaches the opposite station. A line that currently runs from nowhere... to nowhere! Two very tiny villages! They have a fund raising campaign going on at the moment to extend the line into Louth and the opposite direction to extend the track to a distance of around 9 miles. The very best of luck to them!

[Steve Klare]

Hi Melvin,

I like that Cabin! I think I see some sort of lake in back, which really completes the picture for me. I'd be out there in my canoe after dinner.


Personally, I am a member of a railroad museum up in Maine with .5 Miles (Note the decimal point...) of mainline. They actually have 3 Miles of right of way but a property owner would not let them cross! After they got stymied like this it also came up that if they cross the public road between them and that neighbor's fence-line, they will come under Federal regulation and life will become very complicated for a narrow gauge line running 100+ year old equipment!

-so, .5 Miles it shall be! (We'll call it a "manageable size".)

I have traveled the entire line on a handcar non-stop. How many railways can anybody succeed trying to do that?!

[Lincoln Thorn]

Finished a new drawing after a couple months of not picking up my pencil. Happy with how it came out