What makes you, you?

I like to have things done properly.  If it needs building – I’ll build it. If it’s broken – I’ll fix it.  If it needs organising…  you get the idea.  To achieve all this, I have gained various skills throughout my past jobs (I’m 64 now so there have been a few) which, with a dash of determination and a splash of humour it keeps you going as I can’t imagine retiring and sitting around doing nothing.

What has been your journey to get you to where you are now?

I ended up in the small northwestern town of Dalton-in-Furness where most of the technically minded lads from my school went in the shipyard at Barrow. This wasn’t for me, so I looked at alternatives: The Army was a bit ‘shouty’ and you could get

hurt and the Navy, whilst allowing me to see the world, involved floating around in a big grey war canoe target and so I joined the Royal Air Force as a Radar Electronics Technician.

After a 3-year course condensed into 18 months I was let loose on the world posted to all manner of places in the UK and Germany with a quick 4-month trip to the Falklands. Eventually I ended up as computer manager on the stations admin/engineering systems.

On leaving, I tried various things and ended up working for Sky for 15 years culminating in a 2-man specialist team which involved the more technical aspects of installations and fault rectification plus special heights / rope access which we started in Edinburgh which led to these teams being set up throughout the country. My colleague and I were also involved in projects such as the development of what is known today as Sky Q. Eventually, I was getting a bit old for running around the Edinburgh tenement roofs so Lynne and I took the chance and moved to Gibraltar (where she grew up) and unfortunately the jobs we had lined up fell through so back to Scotland we came!

What made you choose Edinburgh instruments? And how long have you been here?

 Literally on the drive back up to Livingston I was offered a job with Virgin which was mostly cold, wet and miserable throughout the winter and in some cases I was driving 1-2 hours to jobs and back, so I looked for something indoors in the warm and local (9 minutes’ drive on a bad day).

A quick internet search and there was this local company doing Spectroscopy.  That can’t be much different from Radar can it – transmitting a signal and processing the results into useful data / displays?  Luckily, five years ago, I got the job starting on development cabling and sub assembly jobs which has led to full system builds and introduction to production with authoring of the associated cabling / work instructions. One of the first rules in the military is don’t volunteer for anything – so how did I end up being a First Aider, Fire Marshal, building facility manager and the designated person who can order good stuff off Amazon (That coffee doesn’t buy itself).

What’s your favourite project you have worked on here?

 I was taken on specifically to work with the Raman design engineers for RM5 and RMS1000 although in the early days I was involved in other projects.  Of the two systems the RM5 (first into production) was ‘my baby’ but RMS1000 is the more interesting of the two mostly due to its capabilities / flexibility which means that it is still evolving to meet the different needs of the customer.

What do you do in your spare time?

I do like a bit of Sci-Fi and whilst not a complete ‘Trekkie’ it was in a scene which had Scotty sitting, reading a star ship tech manual, and being ordered to relax. “But Captain, I am relaxing!

When Mrs Shaw is watching something on TV (she’s presently watching some subtitled Korean film) I’m not interested in I’ll pop up to my office and crack on with a work instruction (especially the SolidWorks Composer aspect of manipulating the CAD models to generate the graphics I need), with Classic Rock, Reggae or Ska on the speakers interspersed with a quick wander around YouTube. Any other time is taken up with the Grand kids and my somewhat energetic labrador retriever Decker (Strangely enough there was a Captain Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a Commodore Decker in the original series).

Do you have any fun facts about yourself?

Not that I can reiterate in this blog so here’s a fun ‘fact’:  The town of Linlithgow is 20 minutes north of Livingston: