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Fascinating combination, selling wines and spirits together with engineering. Hope noone did too much of the latter while patronising the former!

Andy, you can't do this to us! A partial view of an interesting old catalogue(?) with just enough to whet the appetite, but all the essential details obscured!

Er - have you looked at the sizes involved? Even if it were possible to buy a suitably sized router cutter, which I doubt, you'd need the arms of a gorilla to control the router!

Wonderful trip down memory lane! My first lathe was the Gamages-branded version of the Minor, which served me incredibly well, supplemented with various bits off a proper Minorette. Complemented with a Consort to provide a slightly more upmarket sawbench and planer. "Ah, they don't make 'em...

And, of course, it was looking at the mountains in Scotland that gave James Hutton the ideas that underpin modern geology. Can't remember the names of the two guys who researched round Assynt and built on his ideas, but there is a nice statue of them in the interpretation centre there. What's...

Where exactly in South Northants? We lived for a few years in Westbury and younger daughter was born in the wonderful Brackley cottage hospital. Which has no doubt been closed by now as uneconomic. There was a plane-blade maker in Westbury, but can't remember his name; got one of his blades...

I'm with Inspector about the "veneer hammer". One of those definitely wouldn't have a blade likely to dig in to the veneer. Not convinced that's a nail remover either. As in all cases with these doubtful tools, suggest something for leather/shoe work. Think I've seen one, but can't remember...

Not really a generalisable answer, but when Mother in law died, the solicitor who was handling the estate bought and paid for removal of the stairlift to go in his mother's house. Not sure how ethical this might be, but it solved a problem.

Much the same as others; bought a 110V drum extractor years ago which had a huge transformer with it, too heavy even then for me to lug around. It now sits in the workshop, with a flying lead to a fixed socket outside on the wall. Used mainly to run an 18" Stihl E220 chainsaw for logging, but...

Spoke too soon. Rang SiL yesterday about the wheeled strimmer "yes, it's here, working fine". So went and picked it up, thought the primer bulb didn't feel right, but persevered. And persevered. Tried all the tricks I know, and did get it to run for about 5 seconds. Then examined the primer...

Definitely not! But if you have a mixture of styles of grass as I do, then they are an excellent solution for the short bits, meaning you can concentrate the petrol power on them, rather than trying to find some machine that will mow to a bowling green finish with stripes, AND tackle the metre...

Nice example. Especially as it doesn't have the "arc of shame" of drill holes in the table. When I got mine secondhand some 30 years ago, it showed a pretty near continuous arc of holes. So rang the company to ask if they had any new tables; the receptionist said they had some old ones, and...

Another vote for a robot. Mine is a Worx Landroid, bought secondhand three seasons back for about £250 and, touch wood, still working fine. I let it loose (very difficult not to think of it as an animal, and occasionally talk to it when it does something silly!) twice most days on a 300-400m2...

Trying to remember how much we paid for the work Mayfield (to my mind, a much better, but fairly rare, machine). It was something exorbitant like £200. But that was in 1968....

Interesting to see how many share these feelings. We had to say goodbye to our 21 year old rescue cat in February, and she's still missed. Has her own carved headstone at the back of the garden.

Yes, the Allen scythe wheels were powered, and as I pointed out above, the clutch didn't always disengage when you wanted to stop. Despite using walk-behind sickle bar for many years, they always scared me! Of course, if you wanted a REAL nightmare machine, there was a sickle bar attachment...

Interesting. I picked up some exactly the same, and was going to use it when my chemist daughter pointed out that the term "chrome leather" arises from the use of Chromium in tanning. She pointed out that chromium, in chromate form, is highly carcinogenic and insisted I didn't use it.

The frames holding up the roof of the church lych gate where we lived some 30-40 years ago had rotted where they joined the wall plate, so paid a visit to the local salvage yard and came away with four balks of pitch pine for, from memory, about £20, which got spliced in to the uprights. The...

This conversation suddenly awakened a memory from one of the dusty corners of my mind. The rural Grammar School I attended in the 1950s acquired some additional buildings a few hundred yards from the main school, and the chemistry master (no idea why) was appointed to check things over. He...

A while back, posted some pics of a hog house I'd had to make for daughter to appease her conscience over stabbing the hedgehog in their compost heap while she was turning it. Hog made a full recovery and uses the house every day. So now had to make a cat-proof feeder for it, as on the advice...