About me

I was born in the UK, Cippenham near Slough to be exact, and my family moved up north to Co Durham when I was 10 yrs old. I joined the RAF at 16 and did an Apprenticeship in Air Radar at Cosford. During my RAF career I converted to Flight Simulators and ended up in the computer side of that. I left after 12 years and joined a medical company servicing CT scanners, I worked for the same company until retirement, but 35 years ago I moved from the UK to Delaware in the USA. Basically I have been fixing things my whole life, so If you wonder where I got the bug to fix things then look no further than my Dad, even though all this stuff was before I was born it was in the genes...and I was sneaking into his well stocked workshop from an early age. Lets face it, I didn't have a chance!
Dad was a big bike fan before the war, he seems to have replaced bikes almost every year including Scott, Velocette, Gillet, BSA Empire Star and 3 Vincent HRD's one of which which he managed to keep hold of even after he married Mum. After that he seems to have gone to sidecars with Arial sq4 and Norton Es2 Here he is in the late 30's "scrambling" with his friends and what looks like a few BSA Motorbikes. Dads bike looks to be a 1936 BSA Empire Star, he's the one on the left. Below he is on the final Vincent HRD 500 and the bikerbabes on it are my Mum and Aunty Doreen, sometime in 1939. His subsequent cars were very boring..I think he didn't like cars as much!
After the war he had to loose the bikes and got an Austin-7 Chummy to fit all the kids- they must have been skinny kids!. He then moved his interests to the railways and built "Midge" from scratch. Here he is with Midge on a riding day.