Remaining Meetings, Oct - Dec 2009 . . .       

Christmas Meeting          Cottage Engineering                                    Mon. 14th DEC at 7.30 pm

This will be a light hearted look at engineering at home. The session will be an interactive discussion led by John Rant and Chris Meakin (NES Members) assisted by NES Past Presidents and Council Members Chris Hoskins and (hopefully if he has recovered from his operation) Ray Hannent.

John Rant has written:-

' The Idea is to set a scene of engineering being a enormously wide subject and to focus through this "fog" onto some of the activities that one of the groups in the Norwich branch of the University of the Third Age has carried out. This group is known as the U3A Curiosity Club and over past years we have covered many subject areas some of which can be argued as being engineering based.

So .. I intend to browse through some of these exercises by discussing our comparative testing of Tungesten bulbs vs Long Life bulbs and our building of the sumplest rope making machine. This is where Chris Hoskins comes into the picture as the U3A experiments prompted him to build a more comprehensive device which I hope he will show us.

I shall then turn to the subject of flight. Within this subject I shall describe and hope to fly a powered flying model made principally from wall paper lining material, and from this I shall move onto the modification of vintage pre 1950) powered model aeroplanes by adopting them to more novel forms of power and modification of wings thier structures to achieve greater strength with less materials and better confirmation to the specified aerofoil section. This leads nicely into our U3A groups interest in demonstrating how a wing section achieves lift. Hense the design and construction of a wind tunnel by Tony Meacock.

Lastly I hope to have a number of demonstrations from the subjects discussed as the final activity of the meeting. Chris will demonstrate the rope making machine, I shall deal with absorption spectra in light bulbs, Ray will help with the model planes (he is an active and keen aeromodeller) and Tony will demonstrate the wind tunnel.

Nothing specific for the ladies although I do have a very small surprise for them in the form of a "Chinese Cottage Product"

With a bit of Christmas spirit (hic) I think one could say that this is all roughly in line with the phrase "Cottage Engineering" '