User:Linmhall

About me
I am a New Zealander by birth. I am currently living in Australia, just 50 km (30 miles) south of Brisbane in a rural-residential community called Cedar Grove.

I was born in Waitara and lived on a small farm about 5 km (3 miles) to the south on the west bank of the Waitara River. My greater family were largely dairy farmers and mostly bred and milked pedigree Ayrshire cattle. The deregulation and amalgamation of the dairy industry in New Zealand the 1970s saw most of my family sell-up move to other work.

I joined the RNZAF in 1955 and trained as an engine tradesman and worked on a range of, largely, old aircraft (P-51 Mustang, TBF Avenger, Dakota, Devon, Harvard, Hastings, Type 170 Freighter, Canberra B(I)12 and Vampire FB-series and T-11 until modernisation when the more common types became C-130H, P-3B, UH-1H, A-4K and Strikemaster Mk88 by the 1960s. I spent 5 years as a flight engineer on the Short Sunderland and P-3. During that time I progressed through most of the ranks from the bottom to retire as a Flight Lieutenant in the Engineer Branch.

Service in the RNZAF taught me to be an exacting and critical editor of many types of engineering documents, including engineering drawings, maintenance and operating manuals; and staff papers and orders.

After 31 years military service I joined the Civil Aviation Division of the New Zealand Ministry of Transport and worked there for 12 years, initially as an aircraft surveyor and personnel trainer, and then as a technical editor drafting, and publishing, legislation for the, then, CAA as part of the Ministry of Transport's Swedavia project (as it was called initially).

Since then I have been retired and doing a range of temporary jobs, boat-building and community work. Otherwise I am an active editor for local, and international, writers and I assist and advise those people in getting published in various media.

Articles I have worked on
There is a very large range of articles that I have done something to. Many of them just to alter punctuation a little (I am excessively critical of writers who use American punctuation in what are not American articles by nature or by authorship). You can get an idea of the difference by reading this.

I am interested in a very wide range of engineering subjects and have made some, to substantial, changes or contributions to articles about electrical power generation, steam turbines, gas turbine engines, piston engines and their components, aircraft and farm machinery. I have done the same to subjects relating to farming subjects that I know about, dairying and its offshoots.

Our farms used a lot of pre-tractor machinery, so I write or add to articles about that subject. Unfortunately I am now quite remote from that technology here in Australia and I have great difficulty in getting photographs of the equipment used for those times. My paternal grandfather was a great collector of farming machinery from the early 20th century but much of that was dumped by a family member when I was still in the air force. There are still some excellent museums of farm equipment in Taranaki.