What we do ........

( This is quite a long page : business comes first, but for those of you who believe that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" , we desperately try to avoid this! - It's down at the bottom of this page, as are the EXTERNAL LINKS ).

Statuary, ornament etc.

click on one of the jobs below to see photographs, details etc.

In the workshop | 1998 projects | Fountains | Hyde Park Urn | Fireplaces| Statue of Edward The Confessor| The Royal Exchange | Stowe Landscape Gardens | Talbot hound | Gloucester Cathedral | Llandaff Cathedral | Others | Woburn Abbey | Coats of Arms/crests | Obelisks

The search engine below this text is an EXPERIMENTat the moment. It should allow you to search for anything (carving, gyrocopters, animals etc.) that you may be interested in on our entire site, or by clicking on the 'web' button - do an ordinary Internet search too. It may only be temporary!! We would appreciate any comments on it's usefulness. I suspect that the existing hypertext links may be simpler!

Affordable replicas of our original carvings

It may take a while for the photos on the 2 pages below to appear, but there is plenty of interesting text to read while you wait !

* * (click on a photo to see a more detailed photo, history of the urns, prices etc.) * *

After work - beasts of the field and fowls of the air

* * ( click on one of these photos to see more ... ) * *

return to homepage

Mel N Morris Jones, Architectural Carvers,

* * please phone us after U.K. working hours unless directly concerned with work - otherwise we have to put the chisels down!! * *

LINKS to other sites of interest to us - and hopefully to you !

---

Carving / work sites

• The City&Guilds of London Art School . . . . . best serious training for prospective carvers, see our Woburn Abbey page. This City&Guilds link will take you to their homepage, from their you should search for carving. This will display both stonecarving, sculpture and woodcarving - read it all!
• Nick Fairplay's website . . . . . . . Nick and I first worked together at Westminster Abbey in the '70s and have remained good friends since then. These days he lives and works in the USA.
• Walter S Arnold's website . . . . . rare to find a US carver who knows which way round to hold the chisels (only joking all you US carvers!). Walter has created his own extremely professional and well constructed website - puts mine to shame!
• Hestercombe Formal and Landscape Gardens . . . . . Go there to see in situ the natural stone Pope's Urn, Friendship Urn and others that we carved - fantastic gardens, and an excellent website.

Creature sites

• The Exmoor Pony Society . . . . . find out more about these very rare, great little characters.
• Cotswold Farm Park . . . . . . . . . The backbone of the UK's rare breeds. A mine of information and it is well worth visiting the actual farm park as well as their website.

Flying sites

• return to 'MEL'S GYRO PAGE' . . . . or use your browser's 'back' button to return to the last page viewed.
• The British Rotorcraft Association (BRA) . . . THE gyro organisation for the U.K. Excellent magazine free to members. Contact them and get yourself a new comprehensive information pack about gyros and The BRA - includes a copy of the magazine.
• Hayward Aviation Ltd. were appointed the BRA official Insurance brokers in 1994. They offer the best value that we were able to obtain. I (and the BRA) strongly advise ALL gyro pilots to get Third Party cover. Who can be absolutely certain what will be underneath them on the day that the engine quits!!??
  
• Fly Gyro! magazine . . . this is the printed international gyro magazine which I started partly as a result of the popularity of "Mel's Gyro Page". Published every 2 months. If you have enjoyed browsing through "Mel's Gyro Page" but would like a more 'international' coverage of interesting gyro projects and people - then subscribe online now! Check out the website please, and don't forget to look at the LINKS page, which is almost certainly the biggest collection of gyro-related links on the Internet, and the FORUMS for discussions, Events, Gyros For Sale etc.
• Waypoint Databank . . . . . . . Leigh Caudwell's excellent Databank page has all the UK microlight strips and close-up maps showing their location - plenty that I didn't know of. PPR is required at ALL these strips, and don't forget to be a good ambassador for gyros!!
• Crop Circle Connector . . . . . website showing aerial photos and masses of other information on all of the latest crop circles in the U.K., especially for gyro pilots to visit! It is best visited before harvest time for obvious reasons!
• Brett Paulin (Australia) on gyros . . . interesting reading found through the web. Transcription from a forum 'dialogue' '94. I suggest you 'bookmark' / 'add to favorites' and read it offline - there is a lot to read.
• Popular Flying Association . . . . . 99% of all U.K. gyro building and flying takes place through the PFA. Visit the site!
• Jukka Tervamaki's homepage . . . a great gyro designer who I would seriously class alongside Wallis and Bensen. I would kill to fly one of his gyros!! A man ahead of his time. Download his excellent Gyro Performance Calculations program. Important tip though: make sure that you use the AEORODYNAMIC PITCH value, and not the GEOMETRIC PITCH for your rotor - or the result curves will not be correct!
• OakieMike's page . Some really worthwhile brief explanations about gyros and their flight characteristics - easily understood by the non-technical!
• North West Gyroplane Club . UK Club based in beautiful Cumbria. The site has all sorts of information including weather, NOTAMs, events etc. These lucky folk operate from 2 airfields - one of which they own!
• Dave DeWinter's gyro site . . . . . long established U.S. site with loads of pages / photos to interest everyone.
• Popular Rotorcraft Association . . . the BIG one. The world's largest rotorcraft organization - US based.
• PRA Chapter 13 . . . . . . . . . some excellent content here. Looks like they have a lot of fun.
• PRA Chapter 9 . . . . . . . . . browsing through their site you can even get yourself a CD-ROM which includes 1 hour of video clips (including sound) amongst other things.
• ASRA . . . . . . . . . . The Australian Sport Rotorcraft Association - some good, basic rotor theory explained here too.
• Club Autogyre St Ciers . . . . . the French connection. Lots of other interesting European gyro news too.
• U-boat Net . . . . . see and read all about this fascinating forerunner of our modern sport gyros - towed behind a U-Boat!
• Aviators Network . . . . . our ISP - not just for pilots, as they point out. One of the things that I like about them is that they have human beings who will answer technical problems - without forcing you to trawl through some vast impersonal forum where after hours/days online you may possibly come across what you want, but more likely you will have gone round and round in circles succeeding only in pulling most of your hair out! Compuserve and others take note!
• Willem Bogaerts Homepage . . . . In English and Dutch. "The Book of the Autogyro" is very good - and looks as if it is going to get bigger too!
• The Wobbly Flyer UK Gyro Page . . A gyroglider website. Good, engineering stuff with drawings and instructions to download.
• The Mining Company - Aviation . . . this takes you straight into their rotorcraft links section. From there try their 'features' page for more gyro content.
• Helicopteros - "The Page" . . . . . predominantly a helicopter site from Argentina - (select English or Spanish). I e-mailed Gustavo "if you had as much detail on gyros as the excellent and very thorough helicopter section, then your site would be the ultimate gyro database!" He is now trying to get more gyro details to achieve this!
• Charlie Alpha's Aviation Page . . . . well worth a visit. More aviation links than I can count - even includes my site!
• Pilot magazine . . . . . one of Europe's largest aviation magazines. Recently awakened to the joys of flight in autorotation!
• Flyer magazine . . . . . U.K. magazine which tends to profile the less heavyweight aircraft. 4 'free landings' vouchers each month at different airfields around the country - well worth buying for this alone!
• Pegasus Flight Training (Oxford) . . . why a microlight site? 1) it's a good site. 2) Geoff has 5day U.K. weather, by city, which usually seems surprisingly accurate. 3) The qualifying cross-country flight for my gyro pilot's licence was to Enstone Airfield - nostalgia !
• Ultralight on Line . . . English version of the Italian site. Gyros are classed as ultralights in Italy - see the review on the VPM M16 2seater gyro.
• Jerry Plottner's homepage . . . . . . Jerry appreciates autorotation and will e-mail you (free) a zip file containing his plans for a hand held mini rotor.
• Gyros! Gyros! Gyros! . . . . . includes ' Why We Love Gyros ' and a short essay entitled ' A Meditation on Gyros '. - Nothing whatsoever to do with aviation, but this site may just enrich your worldly knowledge. Apparently gyros are a delicious type of Greek sandwich ! (mmmmm crunchy!).So if anyone has tried them and they taste good ... maybe we will put gyros on the menu at our next fly-in, proving the old saying ' if you can't fly 'em, eat 'em !'

Gyro builders sites

• Sparrow Dayton . . . . . . . Sparrow's well illustrated log of his gyro building experience makes good reading - the sort of thing that would encourage others to try their hand at building a gyro too.
• Ken Rehler . . . . . . . . . . . Here's a really well thought out gyro. Ken knows exactly what he wants from a gyro and so designs and builds exactly that! Again, lots of photos. (Too much stick shake on your animated gif though, Ken!)
• Philip MacCabe . . . . . . . . Watch the progress on building what is probably my all time favourite single seat gyro - the Tervamaki JT-5
• Jamie Bodie . . . . . . . . . Jamie has made a very comprehensive log of the building of his Mad Max II gyro which culminated in his winning the 'Best Machine' award at Bensen Days 2000. Lots of 'thumbnail' photos which enable you to click on them and see the full sized photos.

AvStop , Clean, fresh looking new online aviation magazine and news - very promising!

Aeropages , South African website with plenty of interesting and unusual aviation content. Interesting way of presenting their information too.

AVweb , Internet aviation magazine and news service.