Any question answered...

Going direct through LNER is another £20.

Admittedly I used to travel further afield a lot more. It seems to have gone up by at least 1/3 in the last few months!

Have a look at first class too - I did the same journey recently and it was only about 10% more but I got dinner + wine on the way up and a bacon sandwich on the way back.

Spa and SJS have a similar chainring options if you are reluctant to spend ££ at Wiggle.

You don't get food on first class at weekends though.

Slightly missing the days when I'd do London-Edinburgh 1st class during the week, paid for by employer, get delayed then (entirely within policy) claim back to my personal account. Made £300 one quarter.

SJS and Spa have both had big chunks of my cash on this build so I’m leaning towards looking after my wallet at this point.
What’s the problem with wiggle? Haven’t used them for years.

What’s the problem with wiggle?

According to LFGSS, they're nobs

Consider Gebhardt from Sonic
https://www.soniccycles.co.uk/products.php?id=192&cat=2

I'm thinking about using a pair of springs to counterbalance a fold down desktop in a bureau I'm designing. Is the force required to extend a spring, generally speaking, linear? Obviously the table is going from vertical to horizontal so I imagine the ideal counterbalance force would ramp up quite considerably at the end of its extension. Table will be about 18kg. Any other systems I should be looking at (pulleys and balances etc.)?

Gas springs.

This is in Google Photos.
What’s the difference between the circled options?
I ask because as an experiment I did the left delete and it also deleted the original from my iPad.

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Delete removes it from your device and the online version (via the bin for a while). That frees up space on both and also allows you to erase the evidence.

Delete device original keeps the online copy so only frees up space on your device.

(AIUI)

Cash is king and the gebhardt is cheaper!
Thanks.

Gas struts. There is loads of stuff about them if you look at caravan/campervans.

Any other systems I should be looking at (pulleys and balances etc.)

Jurek has pointed out what normal people use, and he's basically right - a gas spring inherently has a rising rate which you can use to your advantage when laying out the geometry of the system. Also, they're relatively cheap, widely available in a range of sizes and weights, many have damping built in, and if they have an accessible fill valve you can even tune them after you finish the build to get the feel you want.

If course, this all sounds too easy, so if you want to go mad with a Heath Robinson assembly of cams, gears, linkages, suspension chains and springs, don't let us stop you.

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Following a recommendation, I've just used SGS Engineering for caravan roof light struts - £54 inc. p&p for a pair compared with £179 for 'genuine' Heki parts or £11 for Chinese-made eBay. It turns out that SGS also have a design service...
https://www.sgs-engineering.com/gas-struts/design-service

@nef bikepunx are my go to now for chainrings. They are only selling on eBay at the mo. Worth dropping them a message of they don't list the BCD/tooth/width combo you want.

Thanks and @JurekB

surprising how tough a little 15mm cylinder is, rated up to 400N apparently and I think with a little re-rig I should be able to tuck them out of sight.

Unless I've conpletely misjudged the forces at play here:

roughly 17kg of top = about 170N
3:7 lever ratio
= about 400N split between 2 pistons?

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Your geometry is all to fuck, the linkage as shown drops the effective spring rate almost to zero just where you need it maximised

fair point, I guess this is better? I'll have to concede to pistons above desk.

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I guess this is better?

Yes.

There are ways to hide the struts while keeping the rate curve reasonably matched to the load curve, but they involve linkages and therefore more cost and maths.

Should have known better than to send something with Evri (much less without insurance). Their courier has left a package behind a bin overnight, obviously not getting the signature that I paid for. It rained, package got soaked, electronics inside are no longer working. What are the chances I'll get my money back?

Now I have everybody's favourite scenario... two females. Two female S-Video connectors - one on the Hauppage thing and one on the handycam.

It has DV in/out in the form of an iLink (Sony's name for Firewire I now know) plug with an iLink to Firewire cable (I think) which appears to be of no use to me because neither the USB-Live2 thing nor my PC have Firewire connectors.

Going to scrounge through my boxes of cables to see if I can find something that will work...

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00028223

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00022459

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00022457

Found two cables that look like video cables... but with connectors I've never seen before - one is Nvidia video card adapter thing which looks like S-Video but isn't and the other one looks very much like the small iLink connector... but also isn't. Idiots and their stupid connector 'standards'.

Missed this, thanks. I will email them once I've fiddled with the design a bit more.

Going to scrounge through my boxes of cables

The male to male S-Video cable is <£3 including postage on the Bezos empire, I wouldn't even bother to dig the mystery cable box out from under all the other shit 🙂

Too late. "Found two cables that look like video cables... but with connectors I've never seen before - one is Nvidia video card adapter thing which looks like S-Video but isn't and the other one looks very much like the small iLink connector... but also isn't. Idiots and their stupid connector 'standards'."

Bezos gets some more of my money...