So he’s in his late 80s and a big parkrun afficionado. Gave us the spiel, told us all about the run he had done this morning etc. He was still doing it even though his wife passed away a couple of years ago. He found it to be a good place to meet people and talk as otherwise his life was a little boring on his own. I certainly don’t mind talking to people and despite what everyone thinks about London, we do actually talk to strangers all the time. This went on for a few minutes and it came to asking what he was doing before he retired.
He was a British Airways machine shop operator and was responsible for working on tooling for various aircraft repair jigs and things like that. So a technical machine position but not that technical. He gave us a nice run down of how he used to work on Concorde which was rather cool. At this point I was rather pleased that the universe had blessed us with a connection like this.
Of course the universe is a perverse bastard. After retirement there was a problem with idle hands and brain. I expect to suffer from this as well but I’d really like to remain completely rational with it. This guy, not so much. He started talking about his inventions since he’d retired.
The first invention was pretty good. He actually had a gallery of 6x4 prints in his bag which he showed us. It was a modular bridge for getting soldiers and light weight equipment over 5m or so spans. The thing was flat packed, extremely, low weight with a whole bridge being portable by two men, assembled on site and used a cantilever mechanism to do its thing. Actually it was quite good. But when taking it to companies and the MoD it was rejected as they already had things that did it which were established. Tail between legs, he ran away to devise more things.
The next invention is where it all went to hell. Obviously devoid of the knowledge of physics he started talking about turbines and flywheels. Red flags to anyone who knows about fine crackpottery. He showed me photos of his first invention which could only be described as a bicycle wheel with head chopping blades welded to the outside. This was spun up by an electric motor in the middle with a counter-rotating mass on the other side of the motor shaft. This allowed the decapitron to “fly” (when attached to his washing line mostly by the looks). There were some mumblings about how this worked and would solve heating problems with high velocity aircraft. I did not process these mumblings too well, because I suspect he got the idea he was talking to someone “actually in the know” rather than the usual idiots and was talking pretty quietly.
The final invention was the one where things went really down the toilet. He had been reading about flywheels and come up with the usual hair brained scheme of making a flywheel drive itself. This was experimentally a 20lb (working in imperial units was another big red flag) flywheel which was spun up by an electric motor that took 100 watts of power on a 4:1 ratio box. So 20krpm in off the motor leads to 5krpm at the flywheel. Now with a 20lb flywheel he was convinced that attaching it to a 1kW or so brushless generator/alternator would give him 1kw out. If you put 100W of that back into the original motor then you’d still have 900W to play with. When confronted with the mathematics he descended into the usual perspective of there being a conspiracy. At that point I decided I had met my tolerance limit. To quote mnementh, “never argue with an idiot, because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”. So we made our apologies and went shopping.
I figured England must be full of these sorts of people if I casually bumped into one in Tesco Café. The real life Wallace but without the clue or success. Perhaps he needed a Gromit.
