[Radio Wrangler]

Re the screw holes for the mumetal screen...

The mumetal screens were brought in from the US. The bent aluminium parts of the chassis will have been made downstairs in phase-1, the only building of the time, in Jim Peachey's machine shop. I expect the parts would have been pressed on hard tooling made locally in the toolroom, to drawings from the US.

It might be a local error, or sometimes we ran into drawing errors where two parts were supposed to match/mate but didn't and an informal fix in the US was discovered not to have caused a proper fix of the wrong drawing.

On mentioning the toolroom, there is a very long article on the HP memories site by John Wastle which starts with his education, a period at Ferranti and then his move to HP's tool room and his progress up the firm. It makes fascinating reading, dishes some dirt on several managers at all sorts of levels (names changed to protect the guilty...). It's compelling reading for anyone with knowledge of the firm. Those incidents and individuals in it where I've got direct knowledge match his descriptions. The HP memories custodians didn't dare edit it! It tells the tale of sub-empires battling each other within the empire of a fortune 500 company, of personal fiefdoms. It gets messy. John wasn't 100% innocent, he was fighting for his empire, too. We in R&D/manufacturing of a division just wanted to get products designed and selling. It felt like we were fighting procurement sometimes in the later years.

I'm inclined to believe John, and I can decode plenty of the changed names.

David