I've finally received the plans of the Swan Launch from Hobby's as it was missing from the order a couple of weeks ago. The package arrived with the sides ripped open and the 'nailer' for helping insert the small nails used in model boat building was missing. It is somewhat surprising that that was all. The plan had been replaced by some extra parts for the launch that I had not ordered but may be useful as I've not been asked to return them. Scanning the plan is a bit of a pain given it's full size, and even with the A3 scanner it needs several passes to get the whole lot, but things like the bulk heads and the cabin fit on single A3 pages once scanned. So now a refresher on pulling them into FreeCAD, or it may be worth playing with some of the other tools to stick them together as a single sheet again first.

Another project coming together is the Taig Mill for which I now have a nice functional Variable Speed Spindle and need to get a couple of drawings done to make sure that the two pulleys track squarely and I can adjust the tension on the belt. I need this working to turn up the parts for the steam engine to power the launch. It is nice that things are finally coming together.

Bitweaver Bugs

Having tidied this up another little irritation poped up. The Linux desktop stopped responding! Mouse is still moving but nothing you click on works and does not switch windows. I had thought it was down to a flaky hard drive which has now been replaced ... AH the old drive is still mounted as I was cloning it's content. So lets get rid of it fully and see what happens. The computer is still running as I can SSH into it from another machine and manually reboot it so nothing is lost. After that it normally opens with a clean desktop and any libreoffice files can be recovered, so perhaps I should do all my 'leg work' offline and just upload the resuting content to the on-line repositories. 

Another less problematic niggle is that sometimes a new pop-up window opens as a black box. It does not render the content. Backing out and retrying normally fixes that but it does become a problem when it happens for several tries.  Not even sure just what package to blaim for it but it is obviously somewhere in the display driver process.

Have been looking online to see what other volumes of the magazine are available pre-1950 and there have been a few batches that may be worth buying to fill the gap in my archive. I also picked up the USB stick being sold on eBay - perhaps in breach of copyright - that has a disjointed set of volumes from the early days until today. I am still hopeful that I can recover my own later scans when the police finally return what they seized in 2019 and 2020. THAT meeting was to have taken place today but has been pushed back again to next Tuesday.

Extra - Having scanned some 28000 A3 pages, the document transport was squealing a little, but the repair in addition to replacing the faulty scanner head has also provided a new transport section. So while the count continues to rise, that can be offset by 28k in terms of pages being processed now.

The next job is to scan several years of the smaller format magazines and this is proceeding nicely having got about half way through already. The process is slightly different to the previous one for a number of reasons. The only colour element is the cover so I am currently running two scans, one in colour and the bulk in grey scale. This is documented in detail on another crib sheet.

The Brother engineer rang a week ago to say he was 'waiting on spare parts', but I have heard nothing since. I've held off on scanning the boxes of small format Model Engineer magazines, but I may make a start even if I have to put them through the scanner twice so I can finally clear that corner of the bedroom. I've ordered a better stand for the printer which will the the space anyway. eBay had an extra 20% off which ran out tomorrow so I was a little pushed to complete the purchase which was already discounted by 50%. It's not an ideal stand, but it will allow me to store the A3 paper and card flat below it as well as all the A4 stuff ... and hopefully the laminator will also fit in the space.

Have taken the time to work through all of the boxes of electronic stuff that I'd kept and everything is tidy in zip bags, labelled and organised. Plastic biscuit boxes are just the right size for the 88x130mm bags which hold most stuff. I had thought I would need to buy another box of 'crackers' for Christmas, but on a return to the garage two more of the deeper boxes turned up and while the 1/4W resistors could do with a deeper box, the slightly shallower one will do for now. I have separated out ALL of the parts relating to Divisionmaster and in addition to a finished standard and super units I have part built kits for more of each along with boxes and PCB's to complete at least another dozen units. Machining the box for the super is the only real problem as I don't have power at the garage to fire up the CNC kit as yet although there are a couple of inverters which could get me part of the way operational ...

I am hopefully now in a possition to be able to carry out repairs on Divisionmaster units and the CNC kit I've supplied in the past and hope to have the new stock up for sale in the near future. Could do with a little income to offset the costs of getting things running again.

In the meantime, while I still have the original magazines I have been rescanning those that I do still have and replacing the pages which have the fault on. Is it really necessary as it is only probably a single pixel wide white line? Probably not essential, but having a clean set of raw scans while I CAN repair the damage is just a time expense. The flaw had not been noticed prior to getting rid of the first large batch of magazines which can't now be reprocessed.

The main reason that I had not noticed the problem earlier was using the PDF Arrange application to manage multiple scans on one screen. The thumbnails on there obviously do not display a small blemish, hence missing the marks due to dirt on the scanner and even after monitoring that, the 'white on white' fault is even less noticeable on small thumbnails. The saving grace is that PDF Arranger does make interleaving the new scans back in place of the problem ones is a relatively simple process. The irritating part of this is something else that I have been learning the hard way. While PDF Arranger displays a properly organised set of pages, internally it does not ACTUALLY manipulate the raw images, simply creating a set of instructions that most pdf viewers can use to reproduce the arrangement of pages it has processed. On one hand, that the original raw images are never modified is a bonus, and when deleting the faulty scans, those images will not be saved in the resulting new file, the orientation of the images is getting a little messy. I do need some means of producing a clean set of images in landscape rather than the portrait view that the scanner produces. These landscape images can then be used to extract images and more important, line drawings for further processing. One of the main reason for scanning all this material at as high a resolution as possible is the production of a drawing set to go with a particular project. The earlier work was using 300DPI rather than 600DPI and individual scans at a higher resolution augmented that, so now being able to process everything at 600DPI is a forward step. The addition of a nice high resolution monitor (3840x2160) makes viewing the resulting electronic copies even better than the 300DPI ones that I had previously standardised on.