What happened to jtilley ?

I'm here all right, out and about, as long-winded as ever, and I check the Forum at least once a day.  I've responded to several posts recently; I admit not as often as I used to.  That's due partly to the fact that I've said most of what I have to say about the general subject of ship modeling already - and I haven't had much to contribute to most of the recent discussions.  But I'm here all right.

And that's a good thing, John...

Al Ross

for the good professor!

Nice to hear from you, John.

Hi John

I was beginning to wonder what has happened to you as well. Please get back to me as soon as you can. I left my private email address for you in the FSM personal messages and have been checking my emails since. Have been doing a quite a bit of research on the Vasa recently, so it would be nice to correspond with you more directly. It seems no time at all since you were over here way back in the 80's and we went to look at the Victory together. There was a wonderful programme on BBC TV this week about the restoration of the Cutty Sark after the fire. The dry dock was in a state and had to be massively reinforced as the concrete was deteriorating. This was found out when they redesigned the dock to enable the whole ship to be raised by 3 metres (about 10 feet). The ship was resting on its keel and the hull was in danger of total collapse. Luckily when the fire happened much of the ship had been stripped and taken off site for restoration. The new dock design now supports the ship as though she would be in the water. The trust only owns the land that the dock is on and they wanted to build a new visitor centre. So now that the ship has been raised and the conservation work was able to proceed, there will be a glass roof extending from the waterline of the ship to the top edges of the dry dock. This has enabled the visitor centre that they had no extra land for to be built down inside the dry dock itself. As a retired engineer I was fascinated at seeing on TV about how the whole project was done. The ship is scheduled to be open again to the public during the Spring of 2012.