Popham 2010

'Schmitts at Popham: Under a heavy sky!

opham was fun, but perishing cold! Edward and I rolled up somewhat late at around 11am to find a huge number of cars (visitors as opposed to exhibitors) parked up.

Peter Darby had let us have a couple of exhibitors passes having agreed that we'd help out at his and Joyce's stall, so at least we were able to use the tradesman's entrance and park up not too far from the gate. The marshals were all very freindly, but locating Peter and Joyce took quite a while, and obviously there were plenty of interesting vehicles to be distracted by. It's a big site and we trekked around for some time before finally spotting them just in time to avoid the first rain shower of the afternoon.

Leaving Edward happily shop-keeping with the Darbys I worked my way round the site. There were plenty of stalls with a mixture of aero and car related stuff (lots of model kits — Edward most impressed) and the usual assortment of bits and bobs that are useful when working on any classic car. These sort of stalls reminded me of the electrical market in Akihabara in Tokyo — essentially a fruit and veg market but with transistors and LEDs replacing the farm produce. Here there was a selection of nuts and bolts, grease nipples, springs, O rings etc. and everyone seemed to have a ton of taps and dies. I wonder how many actually got sold? This activity was cut short by a brief but exciting hail storm!

The microcar turn out was, as far as I could tell, entirely 'schmitt based, with half a dozen KR200s and a couple of TGs lined up.

Apart from the amusements of old cars to look at and stalls to rummage through there was plenty of coming and going on the airfield with a variety of light aircraft to be watched in the process of take-off and landing. The final take-off that we watched was a blue autogyro, a machine that strikes me as something of an aero cousin to the microcar. This was the first time I'd seen one in the wild, and the most impressive thing about it was the speed at which it climbed. After sitting at the end of the airfield while the main rotor spun up and a not overly fast run across the grass to get airborn the pilot executed what seemed from the ground like a near vertical climb and 180° turn putting him way over our heads in just a couple of seconds without leaving the confines of the airfield perimeter.

Impressive — but you'll not be getting me into one!