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Reviews (3)
13 October 2016
New cover, same old book
Being keen to learn more about drawing caricatures I bought this Martin Pope book. Martin Pope has a good style and his information is really good. I had previously bought Drawing Caricatures by Martin Pope, which was good. I later added another of his titles Drawing Celebrity Caricatures ........ it was pretty much an identical book with a few new Celebs added but the content was identical. So, I bought this, his latest book, "How to draw Caricatures" ..... guess what?! Yep, same book again but with some colour versions of the same drawings. If you have either of the first two, then I would recommend giving this book a miss and buying a copy of the following.
Three books I would definitely recommend if you want to learn how to draw caricatures is "Face Off" by Harry Hamernik , "The Mad Art of Caricature" by Tom Richmond and "How to Draw Caricatures" by Lenn Redman.
I've several other titles in my ever growing library on the subject but these three are excellent and stand head and shoulders above the rest.
26 April 2016
Great little vac pump
I bought this to form the heart of a vacuum bagging system. The system involves a primary reservoir and secondary reservoirs with a one way valve, a pressure switch and a dump valve. Sounds complicated but isn't really. I needed a vacuum pump that could draw the system down to 15"Hg (inches mercury). This little pump more than does that, in fact I've drawn it down to 29"Hg which it does easily.
The motor is reasonably quiet. Certainly quieter than I was lead to believe from other reviewers.
With my system the pump runs until the vacuum goes down to 16"Hg which only takes about 30 seconds then shuts off the pump. Once the pressure drops to 15" the pump kicks in and brings it back up to 16", which takes about 5 - 10 seconds. This cycles about once every 40 minutes. The system is normally left running for anything between 12 and 24 hours. The pump has never let me down once and I wouldn't hesitate recommending it for this application.
I don't know how the pump would cope with continuous running. I use it a bit like a compressor with reservoirs tanks but the reverse, sort of.
The brass threaded inlet I didn't managed to figure out what thread it is. It isn't 1/4" BSP (UK), neither is it 1/4" NPT (USA). I just push fitted a piece of 8mm silicone tubing over it and it works and seals perfectly.
All in all I've found this pump to be a great little piece of equipment and very well priced. Yep, I'd give it 5* easily.
15 June 2017
Does the job but far too expensive
I was needing a rear brake calliper,cable, lever etc for a folding 20" wheel bike. I eventually settled on this brake set. At £60 it sounded a bit steep, but I thought at that price, it must be good quality, as a Clarke full setup for cantilevered brakes was a little over £20. The Dia-Compe set look cheap and nasty, especially the brake levers.
In hindsight, another £20 would have bought me a cheap BMX bike from Halfords, which I could have robbed the brakes off of plus had spare wheels, tyres, saddle etc.
So, in conclusion, not a very good deal and pretty unimpressed.