The birth of the Big Cat

Back in 1976 when I returned to the UK after working in Zambia for ten years on the Hell Run *, I got a Job as Technical Sales Manager for a Perkins Diesel Engine Distributer. This went well for two years and I enjoyed planning and specifying engines for many different companies. I sold a lot of engines but after two years, the share holders closed the company and I was redundant.

I walked across the industrial Estate to one of my best customers and told the buyer the bad news. His immediate response way Strewth, where will I get engines from now?

Thats when I formed my first company Dervomotors and I bought up surplus engines from my old customer and sold them on to new customers.

Dealing with engines I needed various bits of hardware and I found a catalogue which was full of useful stuff. The catalogue was called the Whiston Cat**

Fast forward to 1993 I founded PVL Ltd and I needed a catalogue. I imported a copy of Adobe PageMaker from the USA, bought a copy of Classic Bike Magazine and spent a week copying the pages of the magazine to learn about fonts, spacing, kerning, leading, orphans and widows. Luckily I had a head start as I did all the type setting and printing when I was at school.

The first BIG CAT was published in 1994 and to date, with various updates, over fifty thousand have been posted to engineers in many industries.

We now have Issue eleven, with sixty four pages full of switches, sensors, meters and valves from many manufacturers from the USA, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Turkey, Australia & South Korea.