May 2017 update

Well, as usual, there have been a whole bunch of things going on in these here parts, so roughly in date order, here we go.

Automatic mechanical for Jon

I was busy with watches again at the end of last year and the beginning of this - an automatic mechanical one for Jon;  a quartz one that Owen helped to make, and which he took back to Oz with him; and a very challenging one for The Boss.

... and the 'exhibition back' window

The mechanical one was easier than I thought it would be, the usual agonising over measurements and tolerances, but it went together well and looked pretty good - I especially like the window in the back which shows all the oily bits whizzing round inside. This one, and Owen's, both used a new idea for the dial - a printed water-slide transfer on a plain light coloured background. 

Both turned out fine, although the transfer material is not completely clear so it gives a slightly mottled look to the dial which I quite like.  I have also played around with using a transfer like this on a light silver background, and then spraying over with a coloured transparent 'candy' paint, which looks very good (the colour conceals the mottling) but you have to be very careful when spraying as the thinners eats the transfer if it is laid on too thick.  How did I find this out, I hear you wonder.

Owen's watch was a similar case style, but with a different dial setup, different hands, and a quartz movement.  Not much point in an exhibition back, as there are no oily bits or whizzy things to watch. I cunningly left the difficult part of putting the whole thing together for Owen to finish off, and last time I saw them both it was working like a charm.

Owen's watch

Decorative back, but no window

Orange or what?

The third watch was anything but easy.  This was a completely different style to the other two, very modern and bright, and almost everything that could go wrong, did. We started with a long process of deciding what colour to paint the dial: it was destined to be a bright colour, using candy paint - transparent colour over a silver base coat - which gives a brilliance and depth to the paint.  We must have tried 15 different colours before deciding on a bright pink/purple, only to find that it looked rubbish when actually in the watch, so a late switch to a bright burnt orange candy which looked great.  In the process of making the case, I managed to strip the thread on the back three times, each time requiring a new back to be made, but finally got the watch assembled.  Left it on the kitchen table while looking for a suitable strap, and a few days later noticed that the hour hand had somehow picked up some of the paint off the dial, and smeared it all round.  Ah, I thought, I'll just make a new dial and all will be fine.  Except that when I took the back off to take it apart, the thread in the case stripped, so we ended up with a new case, and a new back, and a replacement dial and re-painted dial ring.  

Finally got it finished a couple of weeks ago, made a cream leather strap to go with it, and it looks pretty good - very noticeable and striking, though I guess not to everyone's taste. 
Its quite hard to capture the colour in a picture, if the light is too bright the colour just glares, and if its too dark it looks flat and washed out. Trust me, though, it is very definitely ORANGE!.

On the subject of devices to tell the time, I mentioned in my last blog that I was building a Arduino-based clock.  This now finished, and it does exactly what I wanted it to do - it tells the time in large, bright numbers, so that my dodgy eyes can see the time from across the room; it automatically dims the display after dark; and best of all, it takes power failures (we get probably two or three every month) and spits them out because it has a battery powered module on board that will remember the time for around ten years of no power.  As soon as the power comes back on, the time automatically shows correctly. Oh, and it automatically deals with the annual silliness of moving the clocks forward and backwards for reasons that probably made some sense in 1503 but is just a nonsensical waste of time and money now.

Now, some more Arduino fun stuff.  I have an amplifier attached to the main PC in the house, and to play music I have to lean over and switch it on - nothing too difficult about this, except that it often gets forgotten about after the PC is shut down, and ends up sitting there warming the room and doing nothing until someone notices and switches it off. This needs automating, without a doubt, so a cheap Arduino Nano and some programming produced a pretty respectable result.  The Arduino monitors the incoming audio line, and if it detects a signal it switches a relay to turn the amp on. It keeps monitoring the audio signal, and if it stops for more than a couple of minutes, it switches the amplifier off. A couple of extral LEDs on the front of the amp tell everyone what is going on, and with very few tweaks it works perfectly.  Hooray!

A bit less of that hooray! malarkey when I tried to apply the same treatment to the amp in the kitchen. This has two possible inputs, one from an iPod and the other from a Chromecast Audio jobbie, so the Arduino needs to monitor two different audio inputs and decide which one is live and switch the amp input accordingly.  This all worked perfectly on the bench, so with great ceremony I re-installed it in the kitchen and waited for the applause. Still waiting......  It turns out that I tested it using the iPod running on its internal battery, which worked fine, but I have discovered that the same iPod makes a very faint signal on the audio line every time the power supply.charger kicks in - about every five minutes - and although the noise is inaudible, its enough to switch the amp on.  Disconnect the power, and its fine. I have changed the power supply at least four times, tried different cables, added a ground loop isolator, and altered the Arduino audio threshold and the best result I can get is that it now only does the phantom switch-on around twice a day. Unfortunately, this does not impress The Boss too much.

She's also not too gruntled over my current Arduino project, which is an automatic watering system for a planter box that I recently built.  She was even less gruntled when I told her it was called "Watermation". I thought that this would be an easy project, but it turned out to be more complex that that.  It has a pair of moisture sensors that monitor the dampness in a couple of the plant pots, and when one or other of them decides its too dry, a pump switches on for a short period and pumps water from a reservoir onto the plants. I was a bit paranoid about leaks on my solid wood floor, so I installed another moisture sensor in the bottom of the box to act as a leak detector, flashing a LED and sounding an alarm it it detects water.  Then of course its necessary to monitor the water level in the reservoir, so a cheap ultrasonic module watches that and another LED turns on if it drops too far.  The pump came out of an ancient Toyota screen washer, but the Arduino can't handle the juice it needs on its own, so there's a relay module to do the switching, and another module that allows the pump speed to be controlled by twiddling a knob. Most excellent.  I still need to finish off the pipework to each of the plants, and a bit of trial and error is needed to ensure an adequate supply of wet stuff to each one without having so many holes in the pipes that there is not enough pressure left to feed the ones at the far end.

Ultrasonic level sensor

 The reservoir is a 5 litre screenwash bottle, salvaged from the bin

All the 'lectrics strapped to the water reservoir

Next time:  a report back on the kart, with a new steering wheel and angled boss, and a new footrest - lets see if that makes it any faster, plus another watch or two no doubt. And here's Jacob, playing with the most expensive toys in the house: a box of clothes pegs :-)

December update

No idea where the year has gone, but it seems to have rushed off into the distance at great speed, so time to catch up on a few things that have been happenning since we got back from Oz in April.
 First thing to report, and the most important, is the arrival of young Jacob, our latest grandson who arrived at around the same time as the EU referendum (no idea if there is any connection, but there is some family precedent - I was born in 1945 and the war stopped abruptly not long after, just sayin'). He's a really good baby, almost as good looking as his grandad and we love him to bits.

 Despite all this domestic jollity, I have spent a good deal of time in the workshop. The thing that has taken the most time has been the Beast - the two cylinder 2 stroke superchaged engine that I seem to have been building for the last 99 years.

My last bit of testing managed to shear the fabricated crankshaft in half, so I set about making another one from a solid steel bar around 35mm diameter. It certainly gives a very straight and strong crank, but a real pig to machine - each journal has to be spun between centres, and because the journals are very narrow (6mm) the only tool that works is a narrow parting tool. This can only tolerate a very light feed, and gets blunt very quickly, so the whole process is sloooowww.  As the eccentric bar hits the cutter, there's a fairly loud 'thump' as well, which gets transmitted throughout the frame of the house, making this a very unpopular process with 'er indoors.

Despite the struggling with the crank, I've managed to finish the engine off, hooray!

Complete engine - front

Note the pile of clean-up rags in the pictures. I was never sure that the oil pump was going to work properly, so a) I made it a bit on the big size, and b) left the side covers off to make sure the whirly bits were going round properly. I needn't have worried about the pump, though: it works so well that everything within a 5 metre radius ended up with an oily coat after about five minutes of spinning the engine.

Does it run? I hear you cry. Well, no, not quite.  Lots of spinning with electric drills, much adjustment of timing and fuel supply, and the net result was that yes, it fires consistently with some very satisfying flames out of the exhaust.  However, it won't run on its own, and I'm not sure why. I suspect that its not getting enough fuel, as the carburettor is quite a small diameter and although this gives plenty of airspeed through it I suspect it can't deliver enough wind for the engine to fill the cylinders properly.  The other possibility is that the supercharger can't pump enough mixture to fill the cylinders, but making a new one is no small task so I plan to try other stuff first. I have made a new carburettor with a bore around double the original, but havn't yet tested it.

Complete engine - side

Why not test it?  Well, at the last attempt to start it one of the rocker arms that link the pistons to the crankshaft managed to peel itself open like a banana - I under-estimated the load on these arms (obviously) and should have made them a bit beefier.  I need to make a new one, which will need some more material, some welding, and a lot of machining. On my list for after Xmas, so watch this space..

In between covering the workshop with oil and filling it with clouds of smoke, I have made another watch. This one builds on the things that I learned from the first two, and has ended up pretty good though I say so meself.

It uses a basic quartz movement by that nice Mr Seiko, and the dial is marked using a static cutter in the mill spindle, dragged across the dial face to make shallow grooves.  After polishing, the dial is sprayed with several thin coats of car paint and contrasting colour acrylic paint dragged into the grooves with a bit of an old cornflake packet.  Then the whole dial is sprayed with clear laquer. The orange ring above the dial is sprayed with candy orange over a silver base, gives a very nice effect but spraying it with the airbrush is a major pain - it needs literally dozens of thin coats, and after each one the airbrush needs to be completely stripped and  cleaned with thinners. The thinners also seem to be eating the rubber seals in the 'brush as well.

The back of the watch is screwed on, a very fiddly job to cut the threads, but it does give a good finish to the watch. I also used a steel bracelet instead of a leather strap, not only makes it look better, its also a lot easier to put on and take off. I'm so pleased with this watch that I find that I wear it most of the time.

The dial is the hardest part of these watches, everything else is just engineering - although a bit challenging because everything is so small and my fingers are not. I would like to put some proper printing on the dial as well, but I can't see a way to achieve this  - I'm pleased to report that The Pilot can't do it either, in spite of making watches for a lot longer than me.

I have just started experimenting with waterslide transfers. I can buy A4 sheets of the blank paper, print it on the laser printer and just soak it and slide it on to a pre-painted dial.  Its early days yet, but its showing some promise.  The only issue is that the transfer material is lightly cloudy in colour, so it does affect the colour of the paint that its applied to. A couple of new watches are in the design works at present, so we'll see how they turn out.

I like to alternate between bashing metal and hacking up wood, so for a break from engineering I made a pen box for Sean. It uses a design that I have been thinking about for some time, with a contrasting gloss and satin black paint finish and a highlight strip set into the surface.

Making the box is easy, although modifying my home-brew hinges for a smaller box proved to be a bit fiddly.  Painting it to get the right finish took literally weeks, with every coat the target of stray bits of fluff or marauding insects. The highlight strips are painted in the same candy orange which I used for the dial ring on the watch, see the notes above on what a pain that is with the airbrush - I can buy the same paint in an aerosol can, and although the cans contain much more paint than I will ever need, and are much more expensive, I think its well worth it.



Its not very clear in the pictures, but the box is finished in a satin black all over, with the strip to the right of the orange accent finished in high gloss black.

Anyway, the box was finished and the last coats of paint dried while the flies were still circling for their final bombing run, and it looks great.  Carefully packed and shipped off to Oz, where it apparently arrived intact.  Hooray!
 
And last but not least, some electronics.  I have been interested in the whole 'internet of things' for some time, although it seems to be a solution desperately looking for a market - there's a very limited number of people who want their fridge connected to the 'web, after all.

In spite of all the hype, though, the real interesting thing to me is the availability of very small, very cheap, microprocessors with built-in wi-fi communications, which are easy to program. I've got a few of these and have been playing with them, thought the only 'product' that I've finished so far is a simple clock, behind which lies a story.... 

For many years, we had a clock in the bedroom which had a little projector to shine the time on to the ceiling, it worked just fine but eventually died of old age.  The only replacement that I could source on Ebay seemed ok, but it turned out that it had a couple of design flaws.  First, it has an alarm.  Not in itself a problem, but the second flaw is that  - despite having batteries to provide backup - the clock won't survive a power cut without re-setting to 00:00.  The alarm is automatically set when the clock powers up to go off at midnight - you can see where this is going. Power cut at, say, 2am, clock resets to midnight, alarm auto-activates and warbles like a demented warbling thing. Stumble across bedroom in the dark, hit the 'kill' button, fall back into bed.  Except that the 'kill' button is actually 'snooze'.  Attempts to stop the insane warbling by unplugging the mains lead finally exposes the reason for the batteries - they keep the warbler warbling even without any power, and the only way to stop the bloody thing is to tear the back off and rip the batteries out.

Note to self: make a box for this

So the replacement is a simple clock with no alarm, but which remembers the time even after prolonged periods with no power.  Total cost around a tenner, it uses one of these little internet of things things, so it can also update its time from the 'web if I want to write the code for it, or it can beam the time around the house to other similar devices so that they all share a common time.  I have no idea why that seems a good idea, but give me time and I'll think of something.

Next time:  a couple of new watches, and hopefully a running engine to report on, plus who knows what new stuff. Stay tuned.

Ah yes, about those frequent updates....

Oops.  I was supposed to be posting more often this year, and here we are in May with nothing done.  I do have some excuses, though, having spent around 6 weeks on the other side of the globe visiting the gang in Oz, and stopping off at Singapore on the way there and back.

It was great to see the gang again, we went to some amazing places, saw some great stuff, ate and drank all sorts - but most of all, we had some great laughs.  First, a few pictures of Singapore:-

Central area at night

A small part of Chinatown

A posh restaurant

The real Jackie Chan in the hotel bar

We loved every bit of Singapore, what a shame that its 14 hours away or we'd be back there next week. Its probably the only place I've been in the world where I felt completely safe, day and night.

View from our hotel room window

The electronics bargains that everyone talks about were pretty much non-existent, and although we had been told how expensive it was, I would say it was about on a part with the UK, so not that bad. Although a Tiger beer was around $12/£6 a bottle which seemed a bit steep considering they brew it just around the corner.

Favourites for me? Undoubtedly the Metro, the cleanest and slickest mass transit system in the world. Trains are all bang on time, and stop exactly at the marks on the platform; the track is hidden by walls and sliding doors which keeps noise out and stops that whoosh! of smelly air as the train arrives; most of the trains are driverless, I could bang on and on. The last time I went on the London underground I swear we rode on the same train that I remember going on back in 1966, and as far as I can tell, we were breathing the same air still.

Wings bar, and Brother's Cider, makes even forks funny

Other goodies:  the hotel (Grand Park City Hall), a four star great hotel for only about £65 a night; the food - every flavour under the sun, and all of it good (though I'm not sure I want to know what some of it was); and best of all, the people - all smiling and polite, a little bow when greeting you, all seemed genuinely pleased that you were there. Even the Thai waitress, who spoke almost no english, when we asked what something on the menu was, she trotted off to the kitchen and took a photo of it and brought it back to show us - we still didn't know what it was, so we ordered it anyway, only to find that it was chock-full of rocket fuel: when she saw that we hadn't eaten it, she offered to make another one without the chillis.
Did I mention that I liked Singapore?

Then on to Oz, with an overnight 8 hour red-eye flight to Sydney, followed by around a three hour road trip to Canberra - with the combination of the travel sick pills and the lack of sleep it was a couple of days before we were functioning properly.

We had been told that Canberra was a boring little town in the middle of nowhere, but how wrong that was.  It sits wrapped around a big lake, and its big, spacious and clean, wide roads, loads of parks and gardens, big shopping centres, you name it. Oh, and Ikea as well.

What did we see? Kangeroos and koalas, of course, plus one solitary snake crossing the road in front of the truck, loads of birds - all more or less different flavours of parrot - and a bunch of lizards, big and small. We met a couple of policemen, who's job it is to fly drones in support of real coppers in dangerous situations - however, they're not allowed to fly at night, or more than 500 feet high, and they can't fly within a few miles of the airport, which effectively means around half of the city is out of bounds. What a great job.

We met a very helpful wine salesman who described one of his products as being 'as dry as an arab's sandal', which I assumed was not a recommendation, and another bloke who talked about someone 'jumping around like a frog in a sock'. Its almost poetic, ain't it?

Sean drove us up a monster mountain in the new Zombie Killer 2, fantastic views from the top - just mountains and forests all the way to the horizon, fantastic. 

Canberra was pretty damn hot, in the 30's most of the time, with the occasional spectacular thunderstorm to clear the air a bit.

To give the gang a break, we zipped up the road to Sydney for a few days. Stopped along the way in a wild west town called Gouldburn where its still 1956, and also on the outskirts of Sydney at a rather nice Japanese garden. Sydney was not as spectacular as I thought it would be - very much like a hot London in many ways, crowded and loads of traffic, not enough parking - but we tramped around Circular Quay, the opera house; the bridge, and along various waterfront places.  Went to Bondi (not too impressed), though Coogee Beach was better and less crowded, and took a drive north of the city up the coast where there are some truly stunning beaches with not a soul to be seen on them. Magic

Sunset over Bonner

Then back down the coast to Jervis Bay to meet up with the gang again for a weekend in a very nice shack which was right on the lagoon.  Lots of lazing about; sat on the beach with the whitest sand in the world (some of which we brought back with us in a bag), one of my famous black barbeque servings, and back to Canberra.

Huge wompster bloke in a health cafe. Surreal

Eventually, of course, we had to leave, so off we drive to Sydney airport, pouring rain most of the way, then off on the midday flight back to Singapore. One more full day there, and back on the plane again at the crack of dawn for the 14 hour flight home.


And what has been happening since we got back, I hear you cry? Well a few new things, mostly centred on the making of watches.

I've rather fancied making a watch ever since I discovered that a chap round the corner (known to everyone in the village as 'The Pilot') makes them. A bit of rummaging on the web to find out where I could get the various bits and we were off, and I have to say it was a bit easier than I had expected.

The first prototype ended up a bit small, with a slightly lopsided case.  The movement is a simple Seiko quartz job, the face is painted metallic silver/anthracite, and I made the back to be fixed with tiny screws - this worked well but ended up making the whole watch much thicker than I would like.

Encouraged by this, I set to work on a Mk 2 version.  This one also has a painted dial, but I foolishly chose a Seiko mechanism that has full chronograph capability, including 1/10 second stopwatching. It looks pretty good, but making the small dials and fitting the tiny hands took me around two days, so I don't think we'll be doing another one of those. The whole watch is a bit thinner, in spite of the extra depth required for all the whirly bits, because I threaded the back and screwed it on.  I also cheated a bit and used an off-the-shelf crown because making one of these would probably have sent me bonkers (they have two separate water seals inside a hole that is only 2mm diameter, and a thread that is 0.9mm in diameter).

Can't wait to make another one, but there's a lot of house related stuff to be done first, so watch this space.

Talking to The Pilot also prompted me to have a go at making a small engraving machine for the markings on watch dials - he had made himself a small pantograph to do this, so I thought I could do the same.  Made entirely from bits from my junk box (the main bar is part of an old TV aerial, and the bearings came out of a long line of old photocopiers) it works pretty well.  The dimensions are absolutely critical to ensure that the scaled down image is exactly correct.  I tried to use my little Dremel drill for the cutter, but it was too big and wobbled under its own weight, so I replaced it with the handpiece from my old glass engraver which is rock solid.  I need to experiment with different types of cutter, the best design seems to be with a 30 degree point ground into a pyramid shape, but more testing is needed.  Still not sure if its going to be precise enough for a watch dial, but we'll see.

Before we set off for OZ, I made a determined effort to finish the engine, and actually got it to the point where I could test run it.  It doesn't have any drive belts for the supercharger, so I had to spin that with one electric drill while spinning the crankshaft with the other - it looks mental, but it did actually start and run for a few seconds, wouldn't run very well as I suspect the 'charger was not able to keep up with the demand for air and fuel, but it does run. Check out the sparks and smoke coming out of the exhaust on the vid clip.  Unfortunately, it ain't running no more because my fabricated crankshaft has sheared off at the front, so I have to strip the whole thing down and make a new crank. Not a small task, so it will take some time.



A few other things in progress to report.  One is the installation of a Chromecast Audio widget on the music player in the kitchen, which when driven by Plex on a tablet or phone will play music streamed from my server. It just works, excellent.

I've also started playing with some tiny electronics 'internet of things' modules, more on that later but so far I have a module that can turn on a light by pressing a button on my phone.  I know, that's about as much use as a cheese handbag, but its a start.

More next time!

Last posting from 2015

Right.  This is the last post from this year, together with a resolution to post more frequently next year.

The big event of the year was the Somerset Arts Weeks malarkey.  Yours truly and an artist (Simon) from the village set up shop in the church and waited for the punters to arrive, which they duly did - not in huge numbers, but we saw around 150 over the two weeks, not bad considering we were only there 4 days of each week.  Various items of interest to note:-

- Churches, especially old ones, are cold with a capital F. Sitting around waiting for the crowds was not much fun, even with several layers of fluff to keep me warm.  Unfortunately, Simon had hung all of his pictures off the radiant heaters in the church using nylon fishing line (heat and nylon don't work well together) so we only managed to reorganise things to get them working at the end of the last week.

- We managed to blag a climb up the tower on to the roof, some spectacular views from there if you like heights and very narrow and dark spiral staircases.  On the way up, we had a look at the church clock, which dates back to the 1700s and which can still be persuaded to work - the main reason it doesn't run is because it has to be wound up every day, and nobody wants to climb the stairs every day.  An ideal opportunity to install a Grizzly automatic winder.....

- Most of the people who turned up were other artists who are not interested in buying stuff, only seeing what everyone else is doing.  This is not a Bad Thing, met some really interesting people but unfortunately none of the interesting ones spent any money.

- Met some nutters as well.  The arts festival covers around 200 different locations, all spread across the county, and a printed brochure means that you can choose the particular artistic medium that interests you.  One elderly gent proudly told me that he had already beaten his previous record and was well on the way to seeing the best part of 100 different sites.  He showed no interest in any of the stuff on display, just wanted to tell me how many places he'd been.  Another lady appeared, walked briskly around the church, and whisked out again, all in the space of 30 seconds, so she was really interested in our stuff.  Not.  And finally, my favourite, a very truculent old trout who was determined to have a full-on loudhailer argument with me about whether my copper 'Bird on a Wire' sculpture was a kingfisher, when I said it was a hummingbird.  It matters not that I designed it and made it, it would seem : "I know a kingfisher when I see one, young man" she hooted.  Best part? She wanted to buy it, but I had sold it only about half an hour beforehand.  Hur, hur.

Blue Bamboo box with copper foil feature on front

 A last minute addition to the exhibits was another jewellery box.  All of my previous boxes have been solid wood, but I have wanted to do a painted one for some time and this is the result.  Its called 'Blue Bamboo', painted in a deep blue metallic colour, with bamboo leaves airbrushed on the lid in several different overlaid colours. The box has three lift-out trays and is lined inside with a deep pink silky material. It didn't sell at the show, and I've since replaced the copper foil bamboo leaf motif  on the front which (was prone to getting knocked about) with a more robust etched copper plate arrangement. I'm really pleased with the end result, so much so that I plan to do more stuff in paint in the future.

Bamboo feature replaced with etched plate

Inside the Blue Bamboo

 All in all, the show was OK, sold some stuff and got back around double what it cost.  However, it seems to have taken over the entire year, and  doubt that I shall do it again. My feet are only now starting to thaw out as it is.

With all this excitement, progress on the engine has been a bit patchy this year, but I have finished the supercharger, which was one of the parts I was concerned about.  I'm not sure how much blowing it will actually do, but when I spin it at around 2000 rpm with the electric drill you can feel a fairly brisk breeze blowing out of the ports so that's a good sign.  It will be geared up to run at 3 times engine speed, so it should be spinning at maybe 10 000rpm when the engine is running.

Dummy assembly of the engine so far

The body is bored from a solid chunk of alloy, and the rotor is also alloy with slots cut with a milling saw and carrying four Tufnol sliding blades. I had to construct a board to fit on the milling table so that I had enough room to cut the slots, a bit tedious as I had to take hundreds of very fine cuts because the whole setup wasn't very rigid - not helped by the chinese cutter going dull after the first slot had been cut.  Grump, grump.

The blades are supposed to be flung outwards under centripetal force to contact the bore, but I don't think it will manage that reliably, so I fitted some slim leaf springs  underneath each blade and that seems to work.  More recycling, the springs are cut from the old broken mainspring from my Omega watch.


The last parts to be made are the pistons and rings, and the last set of small connecting rods.  Once New Year is over, I plan to order the materials for these and make a determined push to finish the beast.  Stand by with the ear defenders.

I also recently finished what has to be one of the best projects ever when it comes to that elusive WAF (wife acceptance factor).  Its a shoe cabinet, made to match the existing chest of drawers in the main bedroom, so its made in MDF and veneered in a wood called Wenge which I've never used before. The front of the top drawer is airbrushed to match the cherry blossom on the wall in that room, and the drawer is lined with rectangular patches of brocade, all offcuts from the ring boxes that I have made.

Shoe rack with tip-out bins

The shoes are held in tip-up bins, three rows per bin, and the cabinet will hold around 30 pairs of shoes when full.  None of the shoes will be mine, as I only have one pair and I'm wearing them.

Drawer lined with offcuts

The veneering was a nightmare - the grain of the wood is very coarse, and runs in all directions at once, so trimming it is tricky to say the least.  It also splits every time the wind changes, and because its so coarse it is really difficult to get a smooth finish. Shan't be using that again, even though it has a very nice warm dark chocolate colour when finished.  To add to the fun, I used iron-on adhesive the same as the stuff I successfully used on the grandfather clock re-build of a few years ago.  Unfortunately the latest batch of adhesive is half the thickness of the stuff I used before, and has about ten percent of the stickiness, so this made a tricky job about twenty times more difficult.  Shan't be using that again either, and shan't be buying from that supplier again either.  I find myself getting more and more cross about not being able to buy stuff that is properly fit for purpose - whether its screws, glue, paper, or whatever, the only emphasis seems to be making it as cheaply as possible rather than making it to do its job properly. I'd rather pay double and get something that works. oops, sorry, rant over.

Despite the problems, its turned out fine and the proud owner loves it.  Hooray, brownie points all round.

And the last news is that we are booked to go visit Sean and the gang in Oz in late February.  We are stopping off for 4 days in Singapore on the way out, and again for a day on the way back, just to break up the tedium of the flights. Lots to do before we go, but we are both really looking forward to seeing them all again.  Whoop, whoop!

I will try to get the engine finished before we go, can't take it with us but a vid of it running would be good to bore people with, no?

August madness part 2

Ah.  Failure to engage brain before pressing button means that by now you will all have around 95 copies of Part 1.  oops.

Right, part 2.  More stuff for the arts week involves me trying to come up with some completely new ideas.  

I originally planned to etch a deep and meaningful text on to a sheet of glass, using a hand-cut stencil made from the thin plastic adhesive film that I use for airbrushing.  However, my early experiments proved that a) cutting a complex stencil in situ was a nightmare, causing my index finger to be numb for several days due to the pressure on top of the scalpel, and b) the etching fluid creeps under the adhesive, giving a slightly fuzzy edge.  I had planned for around 10 lines of text, and realised that it was probably going to end up being a lot of hard work with a poor result.

As you all know, I have played with the airbrush a number of times with varying degrees of success - its is both the most intriguing and the most difficult device I have ever played with.

So instead of etching the glass, I used the same process but used Tibetan writing rather than English (it looks so much better) and airbrushed it instead with a base colour of blue and a subtle shading of black.  The Tibetan is a famous buddhist mantra which translates as 'om mani padme hom'.

I was going to frame it, but this presents problems getting light to shine through,so it ended up free standing in a wooden base. The picture doesn't do it justice, it looks great and has already been claimed by 'er indoors.

This inspired me to do some similar airbrushing, but on card instead of glass.  By now I had discovered that if I wrapped the handle of the scalpel with gaffer tape I didn't end up with Artist's Numb Finger Syndrome, and cutting the stencil on card requires a lot less pressure than on glass.  A new blade in the scalpel didn't hurt either, although I had only had the old one for around 20 years and it should have lasted better.

I wanted to write a word in several 'pictorial' languages, and decided on the word 'compassion' simply because I came across it while rummaging through the buddhist stuff for the glass plate above.  I ended up with three of these in tibetan, japanese, and arabic.

The first two were easy to find the word for 'compassion', but I struggled to find the word in arabic - found sympathy and pity, but not compassion - so I ended up using a script which means 'compassionate', usually in relation to Allah, I believe. I also thought that I would try to portray the contradiction between the idea of religious compassion and Islamic fundamentalism by having the shadowy sinister figure in the background.

While I like the first two, I'm less happy with the last one.  The script has ended up a bit clumsy, and the shadowy figure is not as shadowy as I wanted so this one may finish up in the bin.

On a bit of a roll here, both the workshop and me splattered with paint but all fired up.  Took a day off and went to Wells, and in a shop discovered a water colour sketch that took my eye - this is it on the right.


I've never been much of a painter, but I can sketch a bit, so I thought I would have a go.  This picture is of buildings in Havana, so I started digging through my holiday pictures to see if I had anything similar.  I finished up with a wad of pictures, mostly of places in Spain, but nothing that took my eye, so I decided to get that nice Mr Google to take a look at Havana.

A couple of things emerged from this search.  First, Havana has tons of ornate old buildings from the days when the country was relatively rich on earnings from sugar cane, but while a few of these grand buildings are well preserved and looked after, most are a mess of broken windows and no paint.  A great shame, but given that they have been shut off from the world since the early sixties, hardly surprising. 

The second thing is the cars.  Car imports completely stopped in around 1962, and most of the cars that were on the roads then are still running today. With the recent re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the US (I guess the White House must have finally run out of cigars) the classic car boys in America are rubbing their hands in anticipation of getting their hands on a few pristine 1950s Chevrolets, Cadillacs, Fords and all the rest, and picking them up for next to no money.  I thought I would paint a couple of these old cars against the contrasting backdrop of the old dilapidated buildings.

It was while looking for suitable pictures that I realised that, although a few of these grand old cars are in almost perfect condition, most have survived the past 50 odd years being run into each other and the surrounding scenery; breaking down and being fixed with whatever parts could be scratched together, and going steadily more rusty and worn out.  Cuba is a small island, so high mileage is not a problem, but large numbers of bodies climbing in and out over the years have pretty much shredded the interiors as well.

As a result, the Cuban classic car is pretty much a bodged together piece of junk, only kept running by the ingenuity of the people and the fact that if the car breaks there is never going to be a replacement.  The pictures that I painted are therefore an attempt to try to portray these cars as they really are, rather than how we would all like them to be.

The fourth picture is of one of the few buildings that have been preserved better than most, in a street called the Paseo de Marti.  I spent too much time on the detail of this one, and it has ended up looking like a blueprint instead of a picture.  Oh, and yes, the buildings really are painted that colour.  I'm not much of an artist, but they havn't turned out too badly.


Other things this month include my new phone.  "Ooooooh," I hear you say " He's gotta new phone, one a they OiPhones or some such".  Don't know me very well, do you ? :-)

I'm sad to say that my old phone, which I inherited from Owen, finally gave up the battery ghost at least partly because the USB plug 'ole had gone wonky and wouldn't make proper contact with the charging cable.  A phone that won't charge is as much use as a useless thing, so it was time for a replacement.  Remember, dear readers, that the last phone that I actually bought was probably in around 1995 and all of my phones since then have been donated by Sean (thanks mate!).

I scanned the mighty ebay for a while looking for a slightly used brand name phone but soon realised that anything half decent went for a big wedge - in my retirement I don't use the phone much, so no point in spending loads on it.  Instead I started looking at new non-branded phones, and finished up with a Chinese Cubot S200 - full 1080p 5 inch screen; 13MP camera and various other goodies for around 70 quid.  Bit nervous in case it turned out to be a dog, but it is excellent with a capital X - the screen is great, its fast and so far glitch-free, and the only downside is that its BIIIIIG. 

And last, the 'Harmony' jewellery box that I made some time ago has finally been sold, hooray!  This means that I will not be able to show it at the Arts week, so boooo.  However, I had previously partly finished a new box which was destined to be spray painted, so I've dug that out and am planning to finish it over the next couple of weeks, hooray!  The only problem is what colour to paint it, and what kind of 'theme' to give it - suggestions on a postcard please.

Next update will be after the arts week when things should be returning to normal and I can hopefully re-start work on the engine and other stuff that's been put on hold for most of this year.  As always, I can't wait.