Current "telescope" 10x50 bino on gitzo

My current "telescope"..... 10x50 bino on heavy Gitzo

Working at the vacuum steel hardening furnace

Old, very very old, but still going strong..................this vacuum furnace was once the "pride of Philips"........









Some small minor issues with the control, but all is running more or less ok again. See the very mall fuse, right just a little bit from the top, it trips every time, because of a shorted motor, but we will find and solve it.............

Sitting in the garden................

Some nice clouds over Hooge Mierde...........







Who's eating our "boldistel"?







And here's another one eating our "boldistel"......

Slightly better moon picture

Improved the spraydryer again

This is the old -seventies- spraydryer. I built a new control system for it in 2002, but still some small tweaking had to be done to improve its operation..............

First they renewed the whole spraydryer chamber and improved the insulation.




And I replaced the very old max. temperature safety with two digital autoresetting ones. Before this you had to reset the button on the safety each time by hand after a power cycle.
This was very very annoying.............

But now also this has been solved, now the whole thing can go to the UK also!

1st time clear evening sky in weeks

Here's a nice view on a half-lit moon.....

Rainbow!

After big rain, we saw this nice rainbow over our town....

Sipping coffee in Leopoldsburg

So, after some riding we like a nice cup of coffee.........at one of the nice terraces of Leopoldsburg of course...






There was also a nice old Sherman tank standing next of the Cafe.

Pictures from Wales

Here's a nice waterfall........








And a nice church in Chester......

Kiln ready to roll!

Here it is, it is finally running more or less smoothly.......

Wales: nice things to see

A trainstation with a VERY long name, look closely.......






Nice mountains................







And nice clocks too.........

Day off: we go to see the aquaduct

Today we went to the Pontcysyllte aquaduct built by Telford.
It is a navigable aquaduct, you can walk over it and you can also pass it with a boat!




It is a real engineering feat. Built more than 150 years ago! The water inside the aquaduct is in a large iron trough.










This is a view from the valley on the aquaduct from the original small valley bridge over the river Dee.






If you look carefully you see a boat on the bride going from one side to the other.

The kiln we're re-starting!

This is the kiln from 1983 we're trying to startup, many things have to be repaired, but we did 2 simple testfirings without air/oxygen and this more or less went fine.
We have to replace many heating elements and some thermocouples though.......Here you see it from the side.





And here you see it from the "loading side". The big pipe in front is feeding the cooling air during cooldown.








And here is a view on the controlpanel, this is more or less still ok, it was built by us in 2001. Only have to upgrade the cpu and communication cards.....

But this evening the 24VDC/30A power supply broke down. Ordered one straight away from RS and hopefully it is arriving in the factory tomorrow.........I'll keep you posted.