Not sure what happened. Chris as well as having his very good website also ran two advert pages, on on astronomy subjects and one on Model Engineering.
He started to lapse on the ME list and posted he was having server / web hosting problems and asked for help. Mark Rand offered him unlimited bandwidth for free, no strings attached and I offered help in running the site.
neither of us received any replies ?
At this point I didn't know about the astronomy site but it turned out that he asked for help on this site and handed it over to other users. He then again asked for help on the ME forum but asked if people would reply via the advert site. I sent an advert in, then immediately sent in a genuine advert and then Charles Ping also offered help via an advert.
Neither Charles or myself received a reply to our offers but the advert did appear so mail was getting thru.
Charles and myself got to talking to see if there was a way to start a new advert site until Chris came back on the scene.
We setup the Home Workshop site in 2003
http://www.homeworkshop.org.uk/and it's run smoothly since then.
It's geared for home shop users, not just in the UK but it that is where most users are. All adverts are free, no costs involved for either buyers or sellers. Charles and I fund the site totally.
As to what happened to Chris I have no idea, I gather his web page just ran out because the fees also ran out ?
JS.