A horrible way to go?
 

Saw this at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park:

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Reminds me of this (pic)

At least they don't seem to have been hacked up!

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Very good Ben ;D :thumbsup:

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I'm hoping they're by different artists, as i detect excess ego in one of them, and subtlety in the other.

Quote from BBC Filthy Rich & Catflap- 'Of course! Flatulence! The only truly disposable art form! Can I buy one as well?'

Dave

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Well, I like both of those installations, but the sheep one has the edge (who ewe calling?). :)

Any fool can wreck a decent old telephone by sticking a lampholder on it; it's not big and it's not clever. But these are fine - and salvageable!

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

There's a garment shop in an arcade in central Manchester with a similar art installation in the window, this time of vintage Singer sewing machines. They do however appear to be unmolested (as do these phones) so can be considered to be in storage.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

When my office had a new internal phone system installed in the mid-1980's with push-button phones, the engineers simply put the old dial phones in people's waste paper bins. I kept a couple for the kids to play with and used one at home for an extension .

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I must have been about ten when the GPO man called and swapped our pair of 300 series phones for modern 706 instruments.

He left the old phones by the front door while he finished the installation, and I hoped he would forget about them, I think I may have even pushed them slightly out of sight...

...sadly to no avail, he took them away.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

We have one of those in Gloucester Quays shopping quarter.
There must be at least 50 or 60 unmolested Vintage Singer and Jones sewing machines in their windows, im guessing it must be the same retail group.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I mentioned the Arcade in Manchester to someone only recently Graham but didn't realise it was still there. I suppose the good thing about these installations [as said] is the preservation and relative lack of damage. It could be worse. Even Huniken set fire to a huge pile of TV's8-o.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a good place to visit even when there are no technical exhibits. It's now part of a triangle that includes the Museum in Leeds centre and the New Hepworth Museum which I've not got to yet.
There is also a Coal Mine Museum relatively close, near Wakefield I think!

Dave W

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

The coal mining museum is the old Shuttle Eye colliery on the A642 Huddersfield-Wakefield road, about a mile East of the Grange Moor roundabout. The sculpture park is beside the road running SE from the Grange Moor roundabout, through the narrows of Flockton, joining the M1 at junction 38. Quite close to the motorway.

David

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Yes that's the one I meant David. The Henry Moor Sculptures look particularly striking in the wide open spaces of the Park!

Dave W

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Coal Mining museum is actually the old Caphouse Colliery and still goes by that name. There is also some telecoms interest there.

They have the original PMBX switchboard still in situ but only a display item. But the internal automatic telephone is still used with extensions both above and below ground.
Officially it is still classified as a 'working' mine so system has to work. The system is a Plessey 50/400 PAX - the then National Coal Board had 50/400's fitted in many mines back in the early 1970's. Caphouse colliery was on strike for most of the 1984 Miners Strike and then was closed the following year. Three years later, it opened as a museum and the phone system worked without any maintenance until it failed about six years ago. Not bad running for about thirty years with no maintenance!

I answered a call for help as they had no information/circuits etc. Luckily I had looked after several 50/400's including the last two mines in North Wales until they closed. I was able to source a complete set of documents for them plus get the system up and running and find a local ex-BT engineer to look after it.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Caller, Please hang up your phone and try again later.. J.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Caphouse, ah, the next one along Wakefield Road, the shuttle eye is the one nearer the roundabout.

Thanks,

David

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Bah, bah. Bah bah.Was that the phone ringing? I hadn't herd that.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I have posted these art installations in the past and a quick google search reveals many (Elephants seem to crop up a lot) however as this one was new to me I thought I would post a link, would have preferred a picture but that might run into copyright issues.

https://www.alamy.com/the-famous-scu...356925069.html

And I never tire of try to spot sets in this video of another thread on the wireless tower (Babel) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QmpkMMFCPv8

Cheers

Mike T

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

Charging £12 for an image (for personal use) doesn't sit well in a world where huge reams of content is available on youtube free of charge. Videos can reasonably be described as an artform after all.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I've seen those Singer sewing machines at Manchester's Arndale Centre a few times.

Re: A horrible way to go?
 

I have an unusual empathy with handset cords and fear these have been stretched to a point where they cannot recover.
I my days on Subs App & Line, I would often let a handset dangle and spin to untwist itself while the customer explained what problems they were experiencing with the phone. My other OCD was to remove kinks in the handset cord where the spiral continuity was lost.
I sometimes worried about this fixation until I actually had a service call to a lady who reported the kink in her cord.
I suppose I should have married her!