Month: November 2006

Saw 3

I went to the cinema on Monday to watch Saw III with a *special* friend from work.

I’m not very good at writing reviews, as I tend to just say “It was alright!”

What I will say about Saw 3, is that is was not as scary as I thought it would be. There are some gruesome moments, the one that particularly got me was where this man had all of his limbs twisted.

Overall, the plot wasn’t particularly confusing, there was a few flash back moments to scenes from the previous two movies. Even though this was the first Saw movie I have watched, I didn’t feel lost, like I had to have watched the first two, just to “get with it” and know what was happening.

Most of the loose ends are brought together quite neatly at the end, and questions like “Why were those people picked?” and “Who is playing the Game?” is answered at the end.
The only question left unanswered is “What about the daughter?”. There is a hint as to what has happened to her, but otherwise it is left up to the watcher to answer that one!

Who knows, maybe there might be a Saw 4 after all!

My verdict, if you are squeamish take a bucket and sit next to the exit, other than that its an interesting, but a gory and scary, film to watch!

Wheres the photos?

Where are the photos?

I am working on it!

The photos are not as good quality as I had hoped they would be, as I was taking the pictures through a metal fence, the camera was focusing on the wires and not what was behind it.

So by resizing the photos, not only will the file size decrease, but hopefully the quality of the photos should improve a little.
I have 72 photos to resize. Then I have to pick the best ones.

And I have to do that between working, and sleeping! Not an easy task!

Off to work now, bye

Truck Racing @ Brands Hatch

You ain’t seen racing ’til you’ve seen trucks racing!

Took my car. Left home about 7:20am. Started off doing 70, which increased to 80 when we still had two hours to get to Brands Hatch, and we were still about 100 miles away.
Dad drove on the way down there. The journey to Brands Hatch used just under half a tank of petrol.

We arrived just at 10am. The racing had already started, but the truck racing was not on until after lunch.

The first race of the day was Legends racing, you may remember that from the last time.

Pickup racing was on after that, then Formula Renault, and then another Legends race.
With a slight change to the timetable the first Truck race started just after 12noon, after the second Legends race.

After lunch, 1pm, the Touring cars race started. After that the final Lengends race was ran.
The Pickups then ran again. And the final race of the day was the final Truck race.

This race was closer than the first race, with more contact. One of the trucks lost a part of its body work, and the other trucks was running over it.

At one point there was three trucks abreast going up the hill, one of them was partly on the grass and he must of been very close to the barriers because he suddenly backed off.

Towards the end of the race one of the trucks came out of the straight sideways and went into the wall. At that time I was taking a photo of some other trucks, but you can see it sliding across the gravel at the top of the photo.

The trucks weren’t as tall as I expected them to be, they were a bit shorter than “normal” road going trucks.
At the end of the day most of the trucks that was parked along the track were allowed onto the track and did two circuits. They weren’t racing, it was a truck parade! But there must of been at least 50 trucks on the circuit.

It wasn’t just the tractor units, there was several box lorries, two flat bed lorries, one of them with a load of blocks on the back, and a transit van! There was also a couple of the racing trucks on the circuit at the same time.

I took about 70 photos.

I drove some of the way home to Bagshot where we stopped at a harvester for dinner.

I was feeling tired so dad took over the driving. Which was lucky because towards the end of the journey I was begining to fall asleep.

On the way back dad stuck to 60 because there was this squeaking noise coming from somewhere and dad thought it could be the wheel bearing.

We left the harvester about 8:15pm, and we got home at 10:30pm

Poor old car! She did 320 miles in a day. And there is still a quarter of a tank of petrol left!

Well, that was my day at Brands hatch.

I will upload the photos tomorrow (Tuesday), and link to them.

If you notice any spelling mistakes, I’m sorry, the dictionary sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. At the moment it is saying it is not compatible with Firefox 2!

Final Day of Forklift Training

That is it.
After about five hours of training on the counterbalance I was tested on it.

I passed.

I did it in 25 minutes with 13 points, the lowest number of points, again!

I picked up the points up because I kept touching the course, or I picked the pallet up incorrectly, i.e. at an angle, or not with the forks fully inserted.

I had thought I wouldn’t do that well on this test, as I wasn’t that confident with the steering.

The steering on the counterbalance is similar to a car, that you turn the wheel to the left, and you go left. With the counterbalance the steering wheels are at the back, so, you turn the wheel to the left, the wheels turn to the right, the back swings to the right, and you go left.
I had to think about it.

The other two passed the test as well.

On to what we practiced.

The truck wasn’t ready for us until about 9am-ish.

At first we just went around the same course that was set up the previous evening. That is four barriers set up in a line, and we had to weave in and out of them.
Forwards and backwards.

Then we had the chicane, this time it was the proper one!

The chicane was more of a zigzag shape. You drive forwards a little way, tun to the left and drive forwards, then turn to the right and drive forwards.
Easy you might say. Straight forward it was not.

The width of the gap between the pallets was about half the trucks length, and at the corners you had to tuck right up to the inside so as you can get far enough around it to swing the back out.

I managed it. In the test I didn’t hit any of the walls.

Then we had a practice at turning to face a row of pallets. Then once we had practiced that a couple of times we had to pick up and put down pallets on the stacks of pallets.

It was the same layout as for the reach truck, with two different heights of stacks of pallets, and a spot on the floor!

We also practiced the emergency stop. We had three pallets on the forks, and then drove forwards and then back. When we had to stop going forwards, the pallets started to slide off the forks.

The test for the counterbalance was much the same as for the reach truck. The only difference being that the chicane was a different layout, and it was right next to the stacks of pallets.

We all started at the start of the chicane.
So we had to drive up to the first corner in the chicane, pick up three pallets, and then drive the rest of the way through the chicane. Place them on a specified stack, and then stack and un-stack a couple more times.
Then we had to reverse through the chicane with three pallets on the front, and then back out again.
The we did some more stuff with stacking and un-stacking three pallets.
Then we had to reverse back through the chicane, dropping the load in the middle of it, then reverse to the start of the chicane.

That’s it.
The first person started their test at 2:15pm, and I finished my test at about 3:30pm. Then we had to demolish the course and stack the pallets up, and there was some paper work to do. I finished at 4pm.

I think I had either seven or eight cups of tea.

Luckily I have tomorrow off (Saturday)
And on Sunday me and dad go off to Brands Hatch.

Bye for now.

Forklift Training Day 4

I passed!
Woohoo! I can now drive a reach truck!
It was pretty easy really.

In the theory test I got 96%
There was five sets of “open questions” each worth four points each. Then there was two groups of 10 multiple choice questions, and each of these was also worth four points each.
One of the sets of multiple choice questions was on safety, and the other was on the operation of a forklift truck.
That means I only got one question wrong, it was one of the multiple choice questions.

Straight after the theory we went down into the yard to start practicing for the test.

We started off moving two stacks of three pallets between three different heights of stacked pallets.

Then we each had a go through the chicane both with, and without a load on the front.

After lunch, about 1pm, we went back out in the yard to start the dummy test.

On my first go through the chicane I did it in four minutes, with three points. At my second try I done it in six minutes with three points.

I opted to use my first try, to give me more time to do the next part of the test in.

As a side note, the three points that I gained we both to do with observation.
In my first run, my observation dried up towards the end. And in my second run I started off with poor observation but improved as I continued.

The next part of the test was to do with stacking and unstacking two piles of three pallets from three differently stacked heights of pallets.

I did that part of the test in 17 minutes with a total of 12 points.

I got the points because I hit the course a couple of times. I used the wrong control when I didn’t need it, I wanted to raise the forks a little bit, but instead I moved the leaver to extend the forks, I retracted the forks as soon as I had realised I had hit the wrong control. I believe the rest of the points were picked up from not doing enough observations.

I sat in the truck while the instructor counted up my points. When he told me how long I had taken, and the number of points I had, I chose against trying again.

He shook my hand and said “Well done. You have passed.”

Phew!

Both of the other people taking the course with me also passed the test.

In the evening, about 4pm, we had a little go on the counterbalance.

We just drove up and down the yard, forwards and backwards, getting used to the steering, and the fact that the way you turned the steering wheel was the direction you went in.

It got too dark and cold for us to continue much past half five, so we called it a day and left.

Other news:
I’ve got a new bulb for the courtesy light in my car. The new bulb is 10W, the bulb it replaces was only 7W.

Today I had six cups of tea.

I’m sure I had more news than that! Oh well.

Bye for now.

Forklift Training Day 3

The big test is tomorrow!

How did I do?

Not bad. But I do need to improve my 90 degree turn.

Today we were mainly practicing the 90 degree turn, and stacking pallets.
We had to take the top three pallets off the top of one of two stacks, the high stack and the medium stack.
We then had to place the pallets on the floor for the next person.

The next person then pick up those pallets and returned them to the top of one of the stacks.

From about 4pm the chicane was set up again, and we had two goes each, both forwards and backwards, and with and without a load.

It was cold this morning, especially in the shade. So we moved even further down to the bottom corner of the yard where we had sun all day, apart from early evening onwards.

For the last half hour we watched another video, and then answered some questions we might get on the test.

Some of you may have noticed that my Halloween header was up for longer than a day. Thats because I forgot to change the images around. Oops, Its all fixed now.

Ive had seven cups of tea today (like you really wanted to know that!)

That is it for this post. I have now got to read the fork lift truck safety book, and revise for tomorrow.

Bye