I'm not kidding about this guy. He was a wonderful friend, with some true eccentricities.
I did ask him why he couldn't just use his garage for the lathe: apparently even his motorbike had been relegated to the lawn, displaced by the remains of two cars, piles of sheet copper and steel and the spare acetylene tanks. And possibly some other equipment as well.
When he bought the lathe, it had to be winched in, I presume via the window, since it weighed around a ton. He seemed honestly surprised that the company selling them had never had a home order before.
Apparently the loss of kitchen - for cooking purposes - didn't really make much difference, as he ate roughly one cheese/tomato roll every second day, plus baked beans, and got any residual calorie and vitamin needs from beer and occasional doner kebabs.
I thought his single finest creation, however, was a pager amplifier he made. We were both on-call for IT support at the time, in the days of simple 'beep' pagers - 10 beeps and a small flashing light. He had the habit of sleeping through pages (possibly connected to the beer), so he took an old speaker, wired it to a light-sensitive cell, built on an amplifying circuit and maybe some other small bits (I'm no expert). All these were soldered/wired together onto a small plank. He then left the pager on the light receiver... so when it flashed it whined with roughly the volume of a car alarm...
I think it worked. He seemed to miss less callouts, anyhow. |
