henk wrote:
Oehrick,
You were all ready in technics at a young age. Some have it others will never.
Never seen one either.
Henk, I blame it on.........
Meccano, a Bowman oscillating cylinder steam engine, a Polish father who worked for a telephone / timeclock / tannoy rental company and never threw anything away, plus a Great Uncle who was a partner in the local garage. I had no shortage of tools, mechanisms to experiment with or skilled people to observe in action.
At a tender age (probably about
, father, who was responsible for a number of master / slave clock installations in the area was paid an extra 8 hour day for the Saturday each time the hour was advanced or retarded, so I was dropped off somewhere 'tame' to put forward or hold back the master while he did another one elsewhere in parallel, never quite got it down to 4 hours but it came close ! So I ended up inside some big engineering works and other factories and you can witness all sorts interesting operations while waiting an hour to restart a stopped clock and when you are young you absorb it all, even if you don't quite understand at the time sometime later it comes to your assistance.
Unfortunately the youngsters of today experience so little of the real world we may be the last generation of truly skilled mechanical tinkerers.
50 years later I'm still looking for one 
