The Café (There is no Topic)

I'm old enough to remember them and Steam Rollers getting used by the "council". Also some farms using them not just for pulling stuff but using their Flywheel fitted with a belt power drive to power other equipment.

There was a farmer just the other side of the road from Barkston heath airfield that used the big steam traction engines right up into the 1960s to plough his fields, one each end of the field with a steel cable running in a continua's loop around flywheels under the boilers of the engines and a big plough connected to the cable

They were called "ploughing engines" and were specifically designed for the job. The big advantage was there was no soil compaction from the heavy engines actually running on the field surface yet they could pull a big plough.
Usually performed by dedicated teams that travelled from farm to farm who lived in caravan trailers towed by each engine. 

Henry Warner the farmer actually owned those engines and plough

What goes around comes around!
Just before British Leyland went bankrupt they sold the MG brand name to a Korean car company who manufactured sports cars with the classic MG logo.
After a few years General Motors bought out the Korean company as part of their policy to manufacture cars cheaply in the far east for sale in the US.
Not many years later with GM on the verge of bankruptcy did a 50/50 deal with China state owned SAIC for them to use GM brands for China manufactured cars.
Over the years GM virtually ceased US manufacturing but reaped profits from SAIC manufactured IC engined cars with GM badges sold in China. SAIC also benefited from GM technology transfer to the point that new SAIC cars were "improved" developments of existing GM cars. Particularly with electric very little profit ended up at GM. With the closure of Korean manufacturing the "unused" MG badge was transferred to SAIC
In 2024/5 sales of GM badged IC engined cars in China collapsed whereas SAIC electric car sales boomed under the MG badge becoming one of the biggest electric worldwide brands.
The original GM/SAIC 30 year deal expires in 2028 and the guess is GM once the biggest car manufacturer in the world will then only exist as a brand name for China manufactured electric cars!  

Thus the original 1920s Morris Garages "MG in an octagon" badge so beloved by UK sports car owners lives on!
      

I looked around for CNC and 'foam cutter' and did not find anything applicable so posting this here.  For CNC folk this might start an interesting chat....

I saw this on Hackaday - a CNC hot wire foam cutter made from the kind of parts one might get off of old 3D printers.  Used mostly to cut wings. Of note the left and right wire holders are independently controllable. Some chatter about whether one might call it a 4 axis CNC or not. It folds up which is kind of nice and also there was a BOM and some driver software developed for it. I have not noticed much about user cut foam wings on our forum. Perhaps I did not search far enough? hackaday.com/2026/07/12/building-a-bette...ot-wire-foam-cutter/ github.com/MichaelRechtin/CNC-Hotwire-Foam-Cutter The summary from the GitHub is:A foldable, low-cost CNC hot wire foam cutter you can build from readily available 3D-printer-style hardware. With all four axes working together, it slices precise airfoils and complex 3D shapes — wings with sweep, taper, twist, and dihedral included.

Russians repurposing a helicopter gun goes wrong!

www.youtube.com/shorts/o3xIV45us9U