My name is Patrick Arnold. I was born in Abbotskerswell, Devon, England, in May 1964. My family moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada when I was 2 months old. We returned to England in 1980, moving first to Ashburton, Devon, for a few years, and then to Frome, Somerset, where we all lived until quite recently. The rest of the family moved back to Canada in May 1998, and I stayed to finish off a project I was employed on, purchasing a house in Frome. Unfortunately, less than three months later I was made redundant upon the cancellation of the project. Very bad timing, I'm afraid!
You don't get a picture of me, something you should be grateful for.
I am in many respects a boring individual, as I don't smoke, drink (alcohol, coffee, tea, etc.) do drugs, fanatically follow team sports, or any of the other things that most people seem to find necessary. However, I may outlast many of these other people for exactly the same reasons, and on the whole, I find life rather fun.
My approach to life has tended to be one of extreme curiosity, coupled with a desire to take things apart and rebuild them. As a result, I have ended up with a number of skills, mostly self-taught, such as welding, electronics design, hydraulic systems design, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, PCB layout, carpentry, etc. I can also weave baskets.
By training and inclination I am an Electronics and Mechanical engineer, a field I have been working in commercially since 1983, and as a hobby since about 1972. I am currently technically unemployed, but will be becoming self-employed once more quite soonwork. My personal interests include:
This is a fascinating subject. I have successfully built CO2, argon, and nitrogen lasers, and have partially completed copper vapour and mercury vapour ones. Most of these are based on plans from Scientific American magazines from the 60's and early 70's, but usually modified to make construction easier with modern materials. The nitrogen laser, for example, was eventually made almost entirely from PVC plumbing supplies.
I was the nearly proud owner of a BBV1S racing hovercraft for a number of years. This is a quite good design of single/dual seat light racing hovercraft, manufactured by Bill Baker Vehicles, of Banbury, Oxon, England. The one I had was secondhand, with a strange history. It had been used for a British Airways TV commercial, and painted with a very odd colour scheme. I bought the bare hull, and build my own engine system for it. This was not entirely successful, having a nasty habit of snapping the drive belt in the middle of rivers, etc. I once spent an exciting 4 hours floating gently down the Teign river in Devon with a friend, because of this. It took us some time to flag down a boat going in the opposite direction that was willing and capable of towing us back. Of course, by the time we got back to our landing point, the tide had gone out (the Teign being a tidal estuary where we were), and we had to pull the damn thing across 250 metres of very deep, very soft, very sticky mud. The local fishermen, watching this, were in absolute hysterics. None of them offered to help, either, the sods.
I sold that machine about four years ago, due to lack of opportunity to use it. I am currently in the process of designing (and hopefully building) a somewhat larger cruising hovercraft, capable of seating about 3-4 people.
I have spent quite a number of years building, and subsequently crashing, fixed wing radio-controlled aircraft. I finally managed to get a model to stay in the air for more than a few seconds, and land successfully, when I switched to helicopters. This is totally weird, because helicopters are supposed to be much more difficult to fly than fixed wing aircraft. Unfortunately, I have not had the time for the last couple of years to practice much, so I have never gotten very good at flying one. However, I can hover quite competently (the helicopter, that is, not me personally), and fly rather bad circuits given a few tries. I haven't crashed it yet, either!
This is also a fascinating subject. See my turbine page for more details.
I like just playing around with mechanical and electronics devices, and building strange machines for fun. Especially if someone utters the magic words "It will never work". This is the ultimate challenge, and usually results in something that does work, albeit sometimes not necessarily in quite the way originally intended. Things like Tesla coils, Van de Graff generators, slow-scan image intensifiers, pulsejets, and so on. And of course, turbines (see above). My garage is full of the remains of peculiar gadgets that seemed like a good idea at the time, and I tend to spend quite a lot of time in scrapyards looking for interesting devices to fiddle with.
My SF collection is currently about 4200 books, and growing. It is my only real vice, if you define a vice as something that silly amounts of money is spent on simply because it's fun. If, of course, you define a vice as a thing for clamping objects together, I have several of them.
Over the last 18 years, I have used, programmed, repaired, designed, and sworn at a large number of different computer systems. I grew up on CP/M and BBC micro systems, with a certain amount of UNIX, Alpha Micro AMOS, Prime PRIMOS, and early DOS type systems. Nowadays I use Sun UNIX, Alpha and Intel flavours of LINUX, MS-DOS, Windows 95 and NT (shudder!) and Acorn Risc-OS on a regular basis.
I spent quite a lot of time designing hardware for Acorn machines, and I still prefer to use my Arm based RPC600 over a DOS/Windows/95/NT system, even though I have a PC (four of them, in fact) sitting right next to it. I suppose it's a matter of personal choice, but I find the Risc-OS desktop to be much more useable than any of the other GUI's available on the other machines I have. If you want more info on Acorn machines, look here.
I can program quite well in C, several varieties of assembler, BASIC, Pascal, and know a bit about Forth, Prolog, Lisp, etc. I tend to write device drivers and similar low-level control applications, rather than high level user-interfacing stuff.
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