Hello Im Keith and have just joined

[keith]

I am 53 years of age and live in Chatham kent England and trained as a Lift instalation engineer and also went on to be a electrical maintanance electrical engineer with british telecom working on lighting ,heating ,ventilation and a range of electrical equipment .
Although I have been out of this line of work for the last 20 years I love any industrial history and anything to do with lifts especialy Marryat and Scott ones as I did my apprentiship with them .
Lifts are sadly so overlooked in preservation circles and I would love to see more of the heritige of them preserved.

[Lucien Nunes]

Hi Keith
Welcome to the forum...

I am totally with you on the lack of preservation of lift machinery. I think it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind' because very few people have ever seen inside a motor room so they don't know what they're missing. Also there's the difficulty of recovering the plant etc. There's still time for us to put this to rights. One day I hope to find a nice Otis gearless install being scrapped with a 6850 pie plate selector and relay controller - perhaps you'll be there on the recovery??

In the meantime there's restoration to do, see the pic below of one of the resistance controllers from the passenger lifts of St. Pancras Chambers. This is sort-of-working although we haven't tested the traction hoist yet. Stay in touch, come and get greasy, and if you want a real jigsaw puzzle try putting the St.Pancras all-wooden cars back together!

Lucien

[keith]

Yes would love to get involved with reasembling the lift cars , and what ever else .
I was most dismade after my last visit to the sciance museam to find the old attendant driven lift with its round guides in the main stairwell is no longer there ,in a reply I recived from them they informed me it had become an eye sore and had been scrapped and not worthy of saveing ,utter sacralige I think ,proberly not in keeping with there new posey modern image and so short sighted.
Have you seen the "beno" website dedicated to lifts it is brilliant and if you tap in marryat and scott lifts on u tube it takes you into a load of historic lift videos ,its lovely to see people care about our lift heritage.
Surely if you got in contact with some of the smaller lift companys they could donate some equipment they may be about to remove in contracts they are modeniseing.
So let me know what your up to and I can meet up with you.