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First off, I tried putting something similar to this on Facebook. Not only did it fail, I couldn't edit it, and FB then ate it, and the bloody homework with it... BAD DOG 😡
Right. Fuck Facebook. It's eaten two attempts at posting today's events along with the photos.The photos are on my phone, and can be reuploaded, but not the bloody text, which was typed on my phones virtual keyboard.
Accidentally left my notebook cover, containing a notepad, and my rose gold Kaweco fountain pen, on the coffee table in the 'output' area at work. Never noticed until I had arrived at my changeover point to drive my first bus, yesterday. When I got back, surprise surprise, it wasn't there. And no-one handed it in. We appear to have a thief at work 😡
What's so $%^&* annoying is that this isn't the first time it's happened. Last time, I lost a notepad cover, and a pair of excellent Rite In The Rain twist pencils, which RITR had discontinued in the interim. So, those were lost forever.
This time, it's the notebook cover that's been discontinued, a rather bleeding good and handy Maxpedition cover, a Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil, AND my Kaweco rose gold fountain pen. I can replace the fountain pen, but it's now 60 quid, not the thirty I paid for it, and I can replace the the Perfect Pencil as well: It's twelve quid through Amazon.
But I cannot replace the cover (3” x 5” Notebook Cover), which has since been discontinued by Maxpedition, dammit 😡 It had very handy velcro sections on the outside, to customise the cover. That had three morale patches on it. I have spares, but I shouldn't have or need to use them.
The reason I'd hauled out the cover? I'd left my usual fountain pen and pencil (both Kaweco) at home yesterday. It was a Monday. Figures. Thankfully, the item I pulled the notepad cover out to use, my emergancy Blaze Orange RITR ball point pen (RITR metal clicker pen, OR97), wasn't lost: I had stuck that in my vest penloop when I got distracted. That's 30 quid I don't have to find, at any rate.
I'm bloody furious for two reasons: One, that it's partly my fault they're gone (I should have put the gruddamn thing back in my vest pocket. I got distracted and forgot), and Second, that there's a $%^&@#* THIEF at work 😡
So. Lesson learned. It's not going to be expensive RITR waterproof paper in the notepad cover hereinafter, and replaceable gear. This means a bland black RITR 3" x 5" notebook cover, plain paper top-bound notepaper, and cheaper, replaceable, pens.
Most of all? I *want* that thief. I wanna do unspeakably KINETIC things to his hands involving bench vices, 20lb sledgehammers, nails, and pungee sticks. I wanna do that until the audience, Crown Prosecution Service, and the Police, scream and pass out from the horror of it all, not just the thief. I wanna go medieval and Inquisition-like on his extremities, and make Torquemada look like a merciful rank amateur.
Moreover? I'm FURIOUS he's made me this damned angry 😡
Lots of the folks where I work are amazed that I use a fountain pen; one of the more printable comments was "Wow, that's well old school!". Well, yeah, I guess. When I went to school, the Parker 25 was kinda popular.
But over the years, I've gone from fountain pens, to ball points, to roller balls, back to ball points, and again, back to fountain pens.
Why back to fountain pens? Simply put, I find them easier to write with. You need less pressure on the tip, the nib, in order to deliver ink to the page. The flip side of that, is that not all paper is alike; some are really good for fountain pens. Others are horrible for fountain pens.
By the same token, some fountain pens are great, and others utterly rubbish.
You pay your money, and you take your choice, as the hackneyed old saying goes.
Of late, there's been something of a resurgence in people taking up fountain pens to both write with, and collect. There are forums and Face Book groups - Fountain Pens UK being one such excellent group.
Small manufacturing businesses have also came into being, to sell newly designed and made fountain pens. One of the ones that I've got a lot of time for is Gravitas Pens, run by Ben Walsh, on the outskirts of Dublin, in Eire (The Republic of Ireland, to give it it's UN-recognised name). Full disclosure, I have no financial links with Ben, I'm just a very satisfied customer.
I've got one of Ben's Pocket pens, in brass, and a lovely bit of kit it is too. It's my daily pen, carried with my Filofax Pocket "Identity" organiser.
However, the Medium nib it came with was a tad, shall we say, "juicy", delivering the ink a little on the generous side to the paper; nothing drastic or horrid, just a smidgen too much, such that ink took a little longer than I really wanted, to dry on the page; additionally, I found that the thickness of the nib was a bit wider than I really liked.
So, I bought a replacement nib in Fine, from him.
As expected, it took about two or three weeks to get to me; he tends, I suspect, being a one-man-band business, to do his dispatching once a week, and an post, the Irish Post Office, isn't well known for speed. Hell, neither is Royal Snail - I mean "Mail" 😉 - come to that, of late!
However, it got to me, in a nicely padded envelope, along with some ink cartridges (Pelikan 4001, in blue), a business card (of course), and a natty little metallic-effect sticker.
Cleaning out the pen, prepping it, and swapping out the nib for the new Fine one was a breeze. Only, I forgot to coat the threads of the nib and feed holder where it mates with the section with silicone grease, so had to do it again 🙄 D'OH.
Anyhow, the pen still works, delivers ink to the nib, and thence to the paper.
Only, now I have to find a darker shade of Olive to write with, as, naturally, while the ink delivery is now properly controlled, it appears a bit paler than with the original medium nib. It's no failing, just one of those things.
I should note in passing that this isn't my only Fountain pen. I have what, nine others? Two Chinese ones, possibly Jinhao-manufactured (one 'silver', polished - HIGHLY polished - aluminium; the other 'brass', likely a lighter alloy of brass, but it's yellow metal, and I like it), which work perfectly well, three Lamy Safaris in different colours (Charcoal, Terra, and Olive), and four Kaweco pens (Brass, Rose Gold, Olive, and Terra) to which something of a saga of problems is attached, but which all work just fine, now).
Y'know, this Fountain Pen thing is beginning to be a habit 😱
And the less said about INK, the better 😂
Interesting.
The London Borough of Bromley (the borough in which I live) election results are in.
There's no real effect on the borough, as the Conservatives still have a majority in council, but still, 2 x labour, 5 x Indies, and 3 x libDems have taken ten Tory seats in the Council Chamber. The Tories still have 35 of those 55 seats, so not an overwhelming majority, but a clear majority none the less.
BBC News story linkIt's well worth reminding everyone that a LOT of people have voted as they did for the WRONG reasons.
This will not affect the way the COUNTRY is run in the slightest, but it may affect local councils (actually, it will: Some have changed hands overnight), but the end result will only affect local areas, not the country as a whole; foreign policy, defence, strategic policing, the NHS, and so on, that are not run by local councils, will NOT be affected.
What MIGHT change is the local election we had yesterday may cause the Conservatives to rethink their election strategies for the next GENERAL election.
And that's it, folks.
Have a great weekend 🙂
Just a quick tip, for those of you refilling short International ink cartridges with your own preferred inks, and using the international cartridge stoppers from Hamilton Pens to seal them when they're yet to be used...
One tin holds three International (Short) cartridges *with stopper inserted*, and held in the tin within a small ziplok bag, just in case. One cartridge is refilled with Diamine Green/Black, for my personal stuff, the other two are refilled with Diamine Blue/Black, for my work stuff.
This keeps them together, and, more importantly, protects them from knocks and bumps that might dislodge the stoppers - and the ghastly results from such a horrific occurrence 😉
Hope this helps someone 😊
It would help if I remember to turn the bloody keyboard on when I want to type. D'OH (Bluetooth keyboard that gets turned off when the computer is off, to save the batteries in the keyboard). Now I gotta type a load of stuff again 😂
Anyhow.
Normally on a 'long weekend' (Thursday through Sunday, inclusive, that's two days from each of two back-to-back weeks, welded together to form a four-day weekend) from work, I'm shattered.
This is because the 'long weekends' are *always* preceded by a seven-day series of shifts, normally of long 3 to 4 rounds per shift; those are ten and a half to nearly twelve hours long, each.
The exhaustion mounts up, of course, so that by the end of those seven days, all you want to do is sleep for four days.
I was lucky this time, as I only had five days of shifts to do, as I'd just come off a seven-day stretch of blocked leave a week before this weekend (in the main, leave - holidays - from my Company are booked by the Company - you don't generally get any choice in the matter - to ensure that the routes are all staffed and covered, so that all buses run as required.
It doesn't always work out that way, but that's the reason for the company telling us when we can take leave. I've been there going on 19 years now (VERY senior driver!), so get a lot of extra leave (roughly two weeks more than a new starter in the job, one week of which is tacked onto the summer block, making a three week summer block instead of the fortnight that the others get) that I can book outside those blocked leave bookings.
Anyhow, I had TASKINGS to do this weekend just gone, so rolled out of my pit on Thursday, and got cracking while the weather held.
It's been a pretty good result. I only flubbed on one tasking. I didn't wash the car. Oh well. The rain in the week that's coming should take the worst of the dust off 🤣
I finished off the side gate to the back garden (Preservative painted on, latch mechanism fitted and working), and got two fountain pens working properly again.
Saturday, the exhaustion caught up with me, and I imitated a hibernating Dragon most of the day; Sunday, though, I managed to rescue Mothers Day for my mum, which damn near got buggered up thanks to a major let-down by a certain company, who will remain nameless while the complaint goes through - NOT Royal Mail - as her previously scheduled card never arrived.
So, a swift visit to the local Sainsbury's to rescue the day with a card AND flowers 🙂
And then, a curry for dinner, which we haven't had in a while. She didn't need to cook it, I just threw it in the microwave, so not much of a rescue, but still appreciated 🙂 Thanks M&S Simply Food, for that one 😂
So, yeah, not a bad weekend.
Mum's happy, I'm reasonably satisfied, there were no major disasters (Hey, with DIY and me, that's a major miracle!), and everyone's relaxed at the end of it.
I call that a success 🙂
Hope you lot had good ones too 🙂
I spoke too damn soon.
The Gravitas Pocket fountain pen I bought at the London pen Show a few weeks back jammed up about a week ago.
Turns out, after much gnashing of teeth and dark mutterings, not to mention a liberal quantity of very rude words, that it was the damned INK that jammed up all three of my fountain pens.
Who made the ink, I hear you ask?
Kaweko. The same people who made my other two pocket-sized fountain pens.
Seems that the batch I had - which I've now binned - was heavy with particulate matter, possibly as a result of the dye (black). Whatever the reason, this is what buggered up all three of my fountain pens.
I sent the two Kawekos to my niece, the family pen guru, who has unjammed them with a thorough and detail-level cleaning, and I managed to unjam the Gravitas with a warm water soak, followed by a warm water soaking, followed by a clean warm water flush or five, and a different ink.
It appears that the year-plus old Kaweko black ink I was using may either have been an iffy batch, or time expired, or something. Either way, it was the ink that screwed things up. I've since changed over to Diamine Blue/Black, and it's working properly again 🙂
Now, Kaweko have an ongoing issue, according to some, with their nibs. I'd have to say it's their ink, given my experiences with two Kawekos in my collection, but that's water under the bridge. Some of their kit is extraordinarily good - such as their converters (refillable in-pen reservoirs for fountain pens), and I've got a Kaweko converter in my Gravitas Pocket fountain pen right now.
There's only one problem with it, and it's not anything to do with Kaweko - it's the design of the Gravitas pocket, which is just barely long enough to accept an international-size ink cartridge, but too short to accept a fully loaded converter cartridge, because it does not permit a fully charged converter to be fitted to the pen, as with the pen body screwed back in place, the plunger of the converter would push back down and flush ink through the nib, which is not a Good Thing (tm).
So, why did I use a converter this time? Simple: to properly charge the pens ink flow system. You dip the pen, with an empty converter, nib-down into a bottle of ink, draw back the plunger, and by suction, the reservoir is filled with ink.
As the reservoir fills, it pulls the ink through the nib, and the ink delivery system that forms the rear half of the nib assembly, properly priming the delivery system for when you write with the pen: There are no air pockets between the end of the nib, and the fitted cartridge as a result, so ink flow is instant, correct, and reliable. After that, you simply either keep refilling the pen using the converter, or fit a freshly loaded cartridge into the pen to continue writing when the previous load of ink is depleted.
The two plugged cartridges in the photo are spent Kaweko cartridges, cleaned out, and refilled with Diamine Blue/Black, and plugged with "Great Fountain Ink Cartridge Stopper - International Standard" turned brass plugs from the Hamilton Pen Co. Good bits of kit 🙂
All in all, I'm now happy again with this pen, and the ink I'm now using.
I hope I'm not tempting fate (again) by saying that I dare say this state of affairs will continue unabated 😃
I'm reasonably happy with that: They're small cartridges, the International size, and shouldn't last all that long with regular use.
Cleaning out the old cartridge was dead easy using the hobby syringe kit I got from Amazon; I flushed out the old cartridge with a 1ml syringe a few times with warm water, and it's now completely clean. It'll take a day or two to dry out inside, but that's no bother, as I don't plan to refill it for a few days yet.
It also means that in another week or so, I'll have two empty, cleaned cartridges that I can refill with the Diamine blue/black I bought at the London Pen Show.
The photo shows my Gravitas Pocket fountain pen, with full and empty Kaweko-brand black ink cartridges, and a couple of different model plunger format converter cartridges, that regrettably aren't much use, as the hold even less ink than an actual International-size cartridge.
In addition, the converter plungers will be pushed in as the end cap of the pen is screwed into place, forcing ink through the nib; that reduces their usefulness in this particular pen even more, which is a shame, but not the end of the world.
So, refilling old, empty cartridges may well be the long-term solution for this pen. I still have a couple of Kaweko pens, that are with my niece (Haze Peers) for fixing/repairing (she's well into fountain pens 🙂 ).
However, this one works nicely, writes even more nicely, and I REALLY like this pen too 😉
So, colour me rather happy with this purchase 😃
I attended the London pen Show today. First one I've been to. It caters to pens, obviously, but mostly fountain pens, which I like. However, my last few haven't really done well with me; two Kawekos, a Platinum, and a Lamy Safari, and before that, in school (AHEM years ago!), a Parker 25.
The Lamy and the Platinum still work fine, I just can't get comfortable enough with them: They're too light, and there's no real feedback when I have them in the hand (I prefer a pen with a bit of heft in it). The two Kawekos jammed up all the time, which was a pity, as others have had good results with the brand. The Parker 25 was lost in the mists of time.
So, the London Pen Show.
The show was small, well attended, and for a fiver admission, well worth the visit to Hammersmith in west London on a damned chilly morning, at yougottabekiddingme o'clock in the morning?! I work LATES, for pities sake! What's the "morning" thing?! 😂
Anyway, I was up at 7 in the a.m., on a train by roughly 9 (again, in the "ayem"), and at the show by just after 10, whereupon I linked up with my brother-in-law, neice, and some of their friends.
My niece is an admin of a UK facebook group, the "Fountain Pens UK" group; she's also VERY knowledgeable about how these pens are made, and how to repair and maintain them. She also knows a number of people in the trade, and put me onto Gravitas Pens, and their very compact 'pocket' model, in this case, a brass body with a medium nib.
Also, have a look at that photo, at the cap at the bottom of the shot. Notice the logo Gravitas uses: It's VERY much like the old British Army "Crow's Foot" (a.k.a. the "British Broad Arrow Mark"), that used to be plastered/stamped/printed on pretty-much every bit of Army kit in inventory until well into the 1980s 😂
I also picked up some ink, and a few notebooks for the pen (well, you KNOW it's rude not to, and all that 😉😂
Anyhow, I now have a decent fountain pen, which didn't cost a mint, and got home happy, satisfied, and yawning like a very tired thing (late shift worker, remember?).
All in all, not a bad way to spend a lazy Sunday 😀
Also, bugger. The weekends single job has morphed into three, this morning.
Job #1. Replace shredded garden gate.
Job #2. Fix apparently blocked water trap to down pipe from gutters to water butt.
Job #3. Replace 22" LCD computer monitor, which just this morning died, dammit ðŸ˜
Well, dodging between the hailstones, I partially drained the water butt so it was no longer overflowing, unblocked the down pipe from the gutters, and cleared the trap by the butt. Water is now flowing as it's supposed to, although I got a bit of splash from the 12 inch column of water from the recent rain and hail 🌧️ that was held back by the soggy mess of moss in the drain and trap 😱
So, one down, two to go...
The last two storms to come through here, Eunice and Franklin, really did some damage around the country; this included blowing apart (damn near shredding, even) the garden gate and ripping it in half here at home, meaning that I have to set to and replace the damn thing.
I have a rough idea of how I'm going to go about replacing the gate, and it involves laying my hands on ten feather fencing boards (thinner on one edge than the other, hence "feather board"), a few nails or wood screws, a couple of brass hinges, a hammer, and a bottle of "Curses, invective, loud and vile" 😆
As to the monitor, well, is going to be a pain in the backside, and likely involve traipsing down to Curry's, Argos (Sainsbury's), or using some other online supplier, such as Amazon, and will no doubt cost over a ton, dammit 😠At least I can get by for the moment with the laptop monitor, even if it does result in more eyestrain due to resolution limitations.
Oh well. At least it's a long weekend, with reasonably fair weather forecast 🙂
OK, I may have the settings for comments sorted on here, now; seems I missed an aspect of commentary on here which may save me a lot of time in the future. If you want to comment, you should now be able to create an account. This provides a level of safety; I still have the blog on 100% moderation (and apols for the historical comments that just got approved, there was a shedton of spam I had to wade through, most of it Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese, that had to be deleted one item at a time, dammit), but I hope to be able to reduce that in time :)
Happy New Year!
I've not posted here in a l o n g time, so it's high time I restarted posting again.
So. New Year's Resolution: Post at least once a month on here, if not more regularly.
I'll also be looking at possibly moving this blog somewhere else, where I can vet who can post comments prior to those comments being moderated.
In the past, I've had to remove spam and other, more objectionable commentaries, and I'd like to be able to do that before it can be seen by others.
In the mean time, Happy New Year, and let's hope 2022 is a damn sight better for everyone than last year was!
All the best,
R.
I just spend the last four days in some considerable pain (occasionally fold-up wish the world would bugger off type pain) from toothache.
Thanks to anti-covid measures, my dentist wasn't able to take me as an emergency examination until earlier today; no other dentists, private or NHS, could help, they're all in the same damn boat, and that ruddy Rib (Rigid Inflatable Boat) is just about swamped in the wake of Covid.
By the grace of whatever your Deity might be, I got seen earlier (thanks to a short-notice early morning cancellation), and I'm now on antibiotics (ruddy great horse pills of 500mg Amoxicillin, 3 times per day for five days), which have made a MASSIVE improvement in things already.
The pain was a result of an abscess, of course. The resulting infection-caused swelling in my face was not at all nice, but is going down nicely, even now, just over twelve hours post-exam.
I've got to make return visits for longer-lasting and more permanent treatment (which is going to cost a packet, as there aren't any NHS dentists available around here), but I have the satisfaction of knowing that my gnasher-basher centre is now part of the Portman Group (https://www.portmandentalcare.com/), and has a wide range of resources available to it without need for referral to other firms/practices.
I still don't like the idea of going to a Dentist (I'm sure Torquemada was a trainee gnasher-smasher), but at least I know the one I see is a respected one.
Once again, the current US President (No 45, in this case) is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Just, in this case, not much of one, and for one of the small number of instances in his tenure as El Prez, he's actually hitting on a genuine (NOT FAKE! WOW!) issue.
A Judge in the USA has issued a 'stay' order, preventing the US Government (USG) from denying US internet users the ability to download certain Social Media (SM) platforms, these being of Chinese origin - in this case, specifically WeChat.
Boiled down, the USG has said that the Chinese-operated SM platform, which also routinely censors information that the Chinese Government does not like (such as information on SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19), threatens US National Security through its "malicious" behaviour of seeking out and downloading user data of many forms, such as network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories.
OK, then can we expect bans for FB, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other SM platforms that apparently regularly dive into user data with apparent freedom?! No? Quelle surprise, mon ami.
Many applications (and there's another misuse of language that I'll get into in another post before long! Watch this space 😉 ) note user data, and it's not just limited to network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories; they'll look for telephone logs, activities, who you're talking to that very moment, your contact lists, and so much more besides.
For YEARS, security analysts and companies have advised users of these packages that they MUST examine the 'permissions' that these things demand access to, in order to allow users to actually use the packages, and deny those that try to overreach the amount of permission that actually need in order to operate. You really should be asking why they need access to all this information, folks. Taking a photo should not generally need, for example, access to your contact listings. Point made?
Now, while acknowledging that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (a.k.a. "TANSTAAFL"), these 'apps' also often allow 'in-app purchases', sometimes only offering the use of a credit/debit card payment system, instead of, for example, GooglePay, or PayPal, or similar (which omission also tends to breach their agreements with the major operator platforms such as Apple and Google, but that's another story).
So, by allowing these prying 'apps' access to your inside leg measurement, you're also giving them the keys to your bank as well. Really smart. Not. Remember, there have been documented cases of peoples bank accounts being plundered by rogue 'apps' (do a search on your preferred internet search engine if you want to see examples of this). Always check those permissions, people. If they are asking for odd and extensive 'permissions', you really MUST be asking "WHY?".
From a National Security angle (and I've been both a Reservist and a Civil Servant in the employ of Her Majesty's Government, so I know whereof I speak), government employees should be required to adhere to a kind of SM limitation agreement, in the form of either requirements under primary law (which we have in the UK with the Official Secrets Act), or Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) (which is the only option in the USA, due to the 1st amendment rights to freedom of speech). The idea that users personal data being used by the Chinese is some form of national security issue is not much of a stretch of credulity, but it is a stretch, none the less.
A more realistic threat to US National Security would be those SM users with access to classified information. Far better, I think, to require people with clearances that the USG is concerned about, to restrict them from using SM as much as they do. Enforceable Usage Policies (and specific NDAs for those forms of access) in return for clearances seems to be the best way to approach this: The willing surrender of certain privileges/speech rights in return for access seems to be a fair deal, to me.
So, while the USG and El Prez are doing a Chicken Little, and it actually is an issue, it's just not much of a National Security issue comparatively speaking, and a wholly preventable one if people use a little common sense, by having SM users engaging a few brain cells and asking if an 'app' actually needs those odd and extensive permissions.
Of course, that's another issue too: Common Sense.
Yeeeaaaah. Let's not go there today, eh? 😉
It's a crying shame that the first post on here in a long time is going to have to be on this topic, but they forced it on us, so they can reap this blant as a direct result.
Facebook, the social media platform, is rolling out a "new and improved" web-based interface, which will replace the "Classic" interface we've been using on desktop machines for a few years now.
They are now apparently calling desktop machines words akin to 'primitive' and 'outdated', which is quite obvious rot and nonsense.
The new interface is designed to work on tablets and mobile devices in general, not desktops (which have much larger monitor sizes and resolution capabilities).
As a result, it looks utterly horrendous on a desktop machine.
Further, in a process to wean us off the Classic interface, it would appear that they're throttling - necking down - the throughput to desktop machines (its an easy task to discover what kind of machine, what operating system, even what screen size a user is using; it's an HTML and CSS 'feature').
How did I discover this? Easy. I was in an IM chat with a mate from the USA, when all of a sudden, facebook got horrendously slow, with server lag much in evidence. No other site I tried when this was happening suffered any form of lag or slowdown, just facebook.
I tried accessing the same facebook IM chat on my smartphone, and lo and behold, through the SAME ISP (WiFi connection), the link to Facebook was at full speed. Just not on my desktop machine. This has been happening a LOT since they said that Classic was going the way of the Dodo, by the way.
This is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the thin end of the wedge; they're levering you all into using their privacy-invading smartphone app. An App that I will NEVER use.
So, I'm suddenly and massively reducing my presence on Facebook as a direct result of this attempt at privacy invasion and user manipulation.
I will find another social media app to use eventually, but in the mean time, I'm minimising Facebook, and will be using this outlet more.
Good luck, people. Don't be sheep, vote with your feet.
Well, THAT was a whole lot easier than I was expecting!
If you've been keeping up, I laid my mitts on some polystyrene sheeting (2mm thick) to replace the loose fascia panels that came with the instrument case that's forming the body of the Dash Box. These are slide-in panels that are nominally held in place by the frame of the box at each end, in grooves moulded into the case for that purpose. Problem is that the panels supplied were slightly shorter (by roughly 1mm in length), and a bit thinner than the (2mm wide) grooves. In use, this would cause all manner of rattling when in the car, and that's unacceptable. So, panels that fit more snugly were required. Since these aren't sold, I had to make them. After getting the polystyrene sheeting from Amazon, I had to cut it to size, something I've not done before with polystyrene.
Turns out it was dead easy.
All I had to do was measure, mark, and scribe the size required onto the replacement sheet (roughly A4 in size), and then cut out (with the aid of a steel rule, a steady hand, and extreme care not to slip up) the required shapes of polystyrene from the sheets to form the replacement panels, using a sharp hobby knife.
Sorted.
Now to mark out the holes to be cut.
Now, cutting those out is gonna be... interesting...
Arrived yesterday through Amazon, a 2mm thick plastic (polystyrene) sheet for use as the front (and possibly rear as well) panel of the dash top box, and a tool I should have had when I drilled the Meccano girder, a deburring tool. This WILL come in useful for tidying up the panel cut outs I do this weekend, and will save a mahoosive amount of grief by not having to use the Clarke Rotary tool to do that particular task.
