HoardingWillenium says: I had to bring some floppy disks into work which I had been saving for 10 years "in case I might need them". Tell us when your hoarding skills have come in useful (or not, as the case may be)
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 3 May 2012, 14:03)
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Charlie lived about three doors from Dave's family homeAnd Charlie was some kind of relative - Dave's Mum's older second cousin, something like that.
Charlie had been a local legend. He built his own TV set so he and his amateur athlete wife could watch the 1956 Olympics from Melbourne, no matter that the nearest transmitters were hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away, he made it work, according to Dave's Mum. If you wanted your radio, public address system or commercial two way system fixed, he was your man. TV? No worries.
His wife died suddenly in the late 1950s and Charlie went a bit funny. He started building amateur radio equipment, masses of it, and he started to hoard. Not paper, old supermarket bags, tin cans and such rubbish, tools. Heaven knows how much he spent over the years.
Charlie died in 1998. Dave phoned me a few weeks later and said there was to be a sale of Charlie's stuff one Saturday and would I like to came as a buyer. I'd never been inside the house, didn't know what to expect. Walls in three different rooms were solid radio equipment, all hand built, all sprayed that pale grey you used to see on professional gear. All of it used valves (vacuum tubes). I'm no expert on this but from a few loose units you could see it was beautifully made, not a blob of solder out of place, the steel chassis had been expertly cut out and fitted together, not a gap or a sharp tag in sight.
The house, apart from a surfeit of obsolete but classic VHF and UHF gear was fairly clear. But then we went down to the garage. Lathes, milling machines, nibblers, those things for bending sheet steel nicely, I don't even know what they are called. welding gear, soldering irons, bicycles that Dave said that Charlie built from tubing.
Unopened packages of drills and small tools with prices in pounds, shillings and pence. Australia adopted dollars and cents in February 1966. I got sets of drills and a set of screwdrivers, at least 30 years old and never out of the packets.
(, Sat 5 May 2012, 23:56, 2 replies)
brakes;the things that bend sheet metal nicely, they call them brakes
(, Mon 7 May 2012, 4:36, closed)
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