Yep, this is me with just a few of those things you love to play and I Iove to restore.
Everything here with the exception of the Corona was a major rebuild, the Lachenal was a pile of bits from Australia! and the German concertina a bag of dust off Ebay.
The Corona III just needed some TLC.

I've not always been a restorer of these things; I was once a Principal engineer for an automation company in Lancashire.
'Fiddling' about with all things mechanical and designing electrical control systems for various people for 20 years or so was on the whole a good experience, the 'Commander' manipulator on the right was the last project I was involved with as a full time employee and was responsible for the electronics. I became self employed in 1996 and between then and 2002 I basically traveled the UK and Europe doing similar work and ending up as far away as Korea at one stage.

Many moons ago, the robotic cell to the right became the first to go into the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria in order to decommission part of the plant.

Building B205 was the old pilot cell in which the process was first tried and this lot was required to remove it. I was the engineer responsible for the design and commissioning of the electrical control system.

Those were pretty stressful days that I'm glad are over.

To be honest, give me an old broken down Lachenal to sort out any day.