We had a stop-over in Stockholm on the way back from Helsinki and, coming into land...

... I spotted this rainbow - there's two of them if you look carefully. Another extraordinary sight - one that I saw in a hotel in Germany and forgot to mention - was this staircase made entirely of nougat.

On the second leg of our journey home, we made land over Minsmere on the Suffolk coast and trundled across London....

... for a straight-in approach to Heathrow. SAS (Scandinavian Air Services) pilots always manage to grease their 80-odd tonne aircraft onto the runway; I can't remember a single 'planting' in the last 20 or so flights.

Two jobs were high on my list of priorities as soon as I was at home. The finishing of the nickel plating for the Sunbeam and Straker Squire cars and the Hillman's pinion carrier removal and repair. I'd done the copper stage of the plating and was looking forward to seeing how the shiny bits turned out. Not as well as I'd hoped but, I'd forgotten that the existing nickel-plated fittings were showing signs of age, so my efforts fitted right in!

The sidelights, which should have been the best bits - I just couldn't get right. The copper plating was fine; that polished up nicely (important for a good finish on the next application) and I went through all the normal procedures of cleaning in the pickling acid (a new batch) and then straight into the nickel bath (also a new mix) at very low amps as the lamp bodies were quite large. I left each piece in the bath for about 30 mins with the solution continuously agitated by a fish-tank air pump and at a temperature of 24°C. I can usually expect very good results with these parameters and, if less than perfect, showing stuff to the polishing mop does the trick.

The lamp bodies did respond to the mop but I ended up going through to the copper in a couple of places. Eventually, I changed the position of the piece in the bath and that evened out the coating which, in turn, led me to think that my setup might need some further thought when it comes to plating more complex shapes. It could be that, despite the low current, areas of the sidelight body nearest the anodes will attract a greater concentration of nickel (evident around the rim and at the pointy end) than those further away. That doesn't explain the patchy dull/shiny result but, that could be to do with some ancient contamination the pickling acid was unable to shift - who knows.

I found a couple of pinion carriers under the bench and, working on the assumption that I might have paid less attention to the backlash setting and meshing than I should have on the failed part, I thought I'd do a bit of a refresher course on the Chinese puzzle that it is. First thing, I had to get one of the carriers apart - it's still sitting in the press and up till now, proving uncooperative. As luck would have it, look what I found in a box on another shelf...

Good spot Hoskins!