Thank you all for your comments. Father was not only a senior consultant anesthesiologist in the North of England but he also inherited his father’s talents.
Hoisting the enlarger for increasing the enlargement was not easy or smooth but it worked. It was designed for 6x9 but when I bought my Hasselblad when 23 years old, no small investment back then, he made two plates out of brass for me to mount my 6x6 negatives in the holder.
When I was a child Sir Winston Churchill died in 1968, I was seven at the time and my parents went down to pay their respect by standing in line for some hours, to the walk by him as he lay in state in Westminster Hall. Having both survived the terrible war, it was a duty for them to pay their respects to this great man, who had saved my country and indeed the world from that dreadful man Hitler, along with FDR.
Like all children I asked for a present from their London trip. It was something called an “Action Man” a doll for boys with an army uniform. Once bought you could buy different uniforms for it, it cost if I am correct in memory five shillings back then. It was beautifully made with rivets at the bone joints. Well somehow after a time of abuse by me a leg joint broke, heartbroken he decided to attempt a repair. He went up into his workshop where there was a lathe and other tools and incidentally the darkroom adjoined and set about a repair. I awaited with baited breath for one evening with no result, he returned from his day at the Hospital the day after and immediately went up again to tackle the problem. The leg joint had a piece of plastic that was pushed into the plastic leg, it had a circular connecter that was drilled and had a small rivet that went through the two joints connecting the upper and lower leg parts, this was a rather small part to replicate.
Well he came down later in the evening and presented me with my newly repaired Action Man......father had turned on his lathe, a toothbrush handle and replicated the original part that had broken.
Even at that young age I understood the difficulty of the repair, the fact that the red coloured toothbrush used for the repair did not bother me in the least.
So you can understand now that he had not only the ability but the tools to design and manufacture his own enlarger.
Another small tale of his skill, we had a small budgie that was kept in a cage, mother used to let it out so that it could fly in the kitchen, well one day it got caught in the clothesline pulley and broke its leg. Father made a splint out of matchsticks and a small coating of plaster of Paris for it. Within a couple of weeks he removed the cast and the little one was as good as new again.
These are true stories and I could share more but they are not all photographically related, so I would be punished by the moderators.
8C73B0E0-2865-4175-98D6-34253930BF25 by james purves, on Flickr
