Hypnos was a Greek...

...he could take your brain and hang it on the end of an iron chain. As can this mesmeric gif, just another manifestation of my chain obsession. MP

Chain male

I know it plays on your mind every single day: Why, oh why, do the Cradley Heathens speedway team have a hammer as their emblem? Easy. Cradley is in the heart of the English Black Country and from the early days of the industrial revolution metalworking, especially casting and forging, and in particular chain and nail making, played a big part in the local economy.

In fact, just up the road at Netherton was Noah Hingley's foundry where, incidentally, they made the chains and anchors for the Titanic. This film shows the men at Hingley's smashing the daylights out of hot metal with slick, almost choreographed precision. And remember, every one of those links has been manhandled and hammered.

If you really can't hack the full eight minutes (though you'd be mad to miss it) skip to 7m 30s to see some synchronised rivet hammering. No really, it's... riveting. Ommer it, me babbies! MP

Meccano treasure trove

Meccano Magazine was started in 1916 by Frank Hornby, inventor of the Meccano hobby engineering sets (and later Hornby model railways and Dinky toys, some hat-trick) that did a brilliant job of keeping the minds of millions of teenage boys off their own nuts, for a while at least.

A bunch of insanely dedicate people have scanned and made available pretty much every copy of the magazine, which ran until 1981. There's even a searchable index. If you go in there, don't expect to emerge in less than an hour. The bikes, by the way, are from August and October 1929. Many thanks to Brownhills Bob for the tip-off. MP

Mott Green

Nothing to do with bikes, everything to do with something ever close to Sideburn thinking - good people who get good stuff done.

The other day, listening to BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, I was introduced to this bloke from the States, Mott Green, who'd fallen in love with Grenada in the southern Caribbean. He ended up living there and managed, against all odds - heat, humidity, lack of infrastructure and the rest of it - to set up a small factory, a co-operative, making high-quality organic chocolate, at the same time ensuring a very short chain between farmer and consumer, giving the farmers the best deal possible.

As a talented engineer, he got his hands dirty, inventing, installing and maintaining much of the plant necessary to make the venture work. Blimey, he even got an old-time sail-ship to take tens of thousands of bars of his award-winning chocolate across the Atlantic to Holland, where it was distributed by volunteers on bicycles.

Mott Green was killed in June just gone, electrocuted while repairing machinery at his factory. His energy lives on in the inspiration he's given to others. MP