Tanks for the memory...

The overriding remit of pretty well everyone who reads CMM is, in my humble op, that we would rather spend a day-and-a-half creating a tool, bracket, tester, whatever, than go to the shop for a proprietary device that fills that particular void simply by buying a thing with a lump of hard-earned cash.

- Pip Higham

Sure it’s ok to buy screwdrivers and pliers (lots of them in reality), but occasionally the task is a bit obscure, or maybe nobody thought along with the same, possibly slightly obtuse lines as yourself. Nowt wrong with that. I myself have been accused of having some strange ideas on occasion: humph, what do they know? A case in point concerns brother Bill and his enthusiasm for perfectly clean fuel tanks on his flock of bikes; this is, as I’m sure you’re all only too aware, a thorny and ever-increasing problem. Bill attacked it in his own inimitable fashion by building a device that would gently rotate his tank whilst the contents, a mixture of screws, washers, and a carrier solution whittled away at the usually rusty but invariably mucky surface within.

Sound pretty normal so far? Sure it does, but then he realised that the process, tidy as it was, left much to be desired. Bill’s answer was to take the fix into another dimension by turning the tank through not one, but two axes whilst it was gently rotating... have you got that? It’s a tricky concept, but the net result is that the tank innards get molested from every direction, all while you are eating your lunch or waxing your moustache.