These are pattern/template boots for the Swedish army. The one on the left was an approved design for a cavalry boot in the 1690s, when Sweden was still an autocracy, so the final approval comes from the king who puts his seal on it. The letters CRS...
With innovative companies like Saab, Bofors, Volvo and Scania, the Swedes have come at engineering & design from a different angle to everybody else.
I love this quirky little French 6-wheeler from 1939. It’s a Laffly V15T with 4-wheel drive, plus an extra two wheels to get it over lumps & bumps! It had a top speed of 58 kph and was used primary by the French cavalry as an artillery...
Armémuseum , the Swedish Army Museum, is a traditional capital city style museum in an impressive historic building in the centre of Stockholm, but although there’s lots of interesting exhibits & displays, I found it a little disappointing. It’s a shame, because they really have gone to some...
With over 200 armoured vehicles on permanent display, and another 680 in its inventory, the Musée des Blindés Saumur, has the largest collection of armoured vehicles in the world*. It’s been on my list of museums to visit for some time and I wasn’t disappointed. Its roots...
On 14 May, a Grumman EA-6B Prowler was delivered to the Hickory Aviation Museum in North Carolina from the US Marines Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 1 (VMAQ-1). The Prowler is an amazing aircraft, but not perhaps the prettiest (!) and not one seen often exhibited in aviation...
This is a rather technically impressive 360-degree AR tour of submarine HMAS Onslow, moored at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney’s Darling Harbour. Onslow was one of six Oberon-class submarines operated by the Royal Australian Navy. She was built in Scotland and commissioned in 1968. The...
This Dreidecker (“triplane”) is a reproduction at the Luftwaffe Museum in Gatow. According to Wikipedia, 320 of these machines were built, but only three are thought to have survived WW1. Serial 528/17 was retained as a testbed by the Deutschen Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (German Aviation Research Institute)...
I’ve long meant to pay Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s maritime masterpiece a visit, and I wasn’t disappointed. The Potted History Brunel must have been a commandingly persuasive man because somehow he got the Great Western Steamship Company to approve two serious departures from normal shipbuilding techniques for their...
The Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor has started restoration work on one of the planes that attacked them on December 7, 1941. The Nakajima B5N Torpedo Bomber was the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy and was considered the most effective aircraft of its kind at the...
Five minutes into our day long ‘Mountains and Mines’ trip*, Paul Harris delivered the bad news – we wouldn’t be able to go down the coal mine today. Dang! It was to have been the highlight (well, lowlight technically) of the trip. I’d tried once before. A...
A small 400 sq metre museum is being added to the Thiepval Memorial Visitor Centre in Picardy, France. The opening will be a prelude to the Centenary commemorations of the Battle of the Somme, the iconic battle on the 1st July 1916 which was the bloodiest day for...
Given Berlin’s Cold War role as the “capital of spies”, it seems only fitting that it should now host the only museum in Germany dedicated to the dark world of espionage. The surprise is that it has taken this long. The Spy Museum, located in Potsdamer Platz,...
BF110F-2 Werknummer 5052 is on display in the Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin. This aircraft served with 13./Zerstörergruppe JG5 at KemiJarvi, Finland during 1943. On January 11, it was damaged by train-mounted flak while flying a four plane mission against railway lines between Murmansk and Leningrad. Pilot Helmut Ziegenhagen...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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