NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

This is where I fall to my knees, raise my face and hands to the storm, and cry "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!" into the falling rain.

Fear not, trusty Transport Pod, I will avenge you! Or at least get you fixed up.

Some guy in a rubbish truck smashed into the back of my little car, parked in the CPIT parking lot. He did leave a note with his details though, so there will (fingers crossed) be no problems with my insurance company.

Now the whole back of the car is covered with semi-clear plastic to keep the water and nesting pigeons out until we can get it all sorted.

Textile stencilling for fun and probably not for profit

This is a fragment of a textile design I did a few years ago, that I found again while reorganising our Junk Room. It's printed on calico, using an acetate stencil and a foam roller, with standard acrylic textile inks.

There's nothing terribly exciting about this bit of material except for the way it was printed. Stencilling with a roller is surprisingly quick and easy, and because the acetate is transparent, you can achieve very high accuracy in registration quite easily (though that wasn't really important for this piece).

The inks are mixed exactly as they would be for screen printing. You can buy them pre-mixed, if you don't have access to colour concentrates and heat-set acrylic base.

This piece, to the right, is another done the same way — it's designed for use as a game mat, stencilled with 25mm (1") hexes in two colours, with a larger hex overlay drawn over top. I was able to register each colour against the other very simply and accurately because I could see through the stencil.

I created the hex-layout in CorelDraw (any vector-illustration app should do the trick) and printed it on acetate designed for laser-printing. This gave me a high degree of accuracy very easily. Then I just had to cut it out with a scalpel.

If you don't have access to a printer, you can draw directly on to the acetate with a Sharpie, or you can tape it over a drawing and use that as a cutting guide.

Things To Know

First, be aware that an acetate stencil is a little bit fragile. It won't fall to bits with a touch, but it won't bear rough handling for long.

You can use thicker acetates for greater strength, but if you go over about 0.25 mm you will start seeing a perceptible build-up of ink at the edges of each colour block. Also, thicker acetate is, of course, harder to cut.

The more detail you cut into the stencil, especially if there are any delicate sticky-outy bits, the harder it will be to handle and the more likely it is that it will tear or crease (or both). Tears can be mended with sticky tape, but a crease can't ever be fully un-creased.

Stencils are best used to render fairly simple shapes, but with care can be used for quite complex designs.

Second, acetate is slippery stuff. Left to itself, it will slip and slide around under the roller, so we need some way to keep it in position.

The best method I've found is to spray the BACK of the stencil (that is, the side that goes against the fabric) with spray-glue. Leave it to dry, and it creates a non-slip surface that will grab the fabric, while still staying translucent so that you can see through for registration.

Over time, the spray-glue surface will become less tacky. You can repeat it a couple of times before it builds up too much to see through; after that you will have to clean off the old glue with white spirit or something before reapplying it.

You may also find you need to clean ink off the face of the stencil periodically; a gentle wipe down with a wet cloth will generally do the trick.

Third, don't succumb to the temptation to apply too much ink at once. You'll get better results if you roll the ink lightly, several times, than if you smoosh a whole lot on at once. Excess ink will tend to bleed under the edges of the stencil, and it may also create a solid block of ink soaking into the fabric that, when dry, can crack and crumble off the textile matrix.

Fourth, while any paint roller will do, I've found that the best ones for this purpose are relatively cheap foam rollers, about 150mm (6") wide. A wider roller will cover a greater area faster of course, but will be harder to control when it comes to avoiding damage to the stencil. Don't load up the roller too heavily with ink — if it's dripping, there's way too much ink on there.

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Stencilling is one of the easiest ways to get into textile printing. It's cheap, it requires very little in the way of equipment, and it can be done in relatively limited space. The materials are non-toxic, and thus safe for children (though they'll need supervision with the scalpels — those things are SHARP!). The quality of the results are dependent solely on the effort you're willing to put in, and can be as simple or as complex as you like.

Goddamn boy-racers with their modified cars!

I'd like to see a Top Gear special on this sort of thing.
I'd really like to see Jeremy Clarkson try to drive it. He'd probably give himself an embolism.

Crafty Crockery Colouring

Apparently, you can write or doodle on dinnerware with a Sharpie marker and bake it at 350°F (180°C) for 30 minutes and the design will stay permanently.

Use white crockery. Make sure it is clean and absolutely grease-free. Remove any stickers.

Any colour Sharpie will do.

Don't know if the result is food-safe.

May not be permanent on some crockery; do a test first. Hasn't been tested in a dishwasher, but appears to be safely washable by hand.

I found it here, where you can see some examples. Cool idea; I must definitely try it.

In my dream home...

I want this. I NEED this.

Oldie but goodie

I bought myself this old beech rebate plane today, for about twenty-five bucks. I see them around in antique/junk shops a lot; they're not rare, but they're often in pretty sorry condition. This one is pretty good.

The blade needed a fair bit of attention; the back was pretty far from flat, and of course it was hopelessly blunt. Still, there wasn't too much rust or pitting, which is the main thing.

I'm not experienced with these old wooden planes, and I have to say that they're not easy to use — all your blade adjustment is by careful tippy-tappy on the tang of the blade, and it's just held in place by friction, so it's easy to get it out of whack again. I don't think it will be replacing my electric router, but it will probably be useful for touch-up work and the like.

My respect for Olden Tymes cabinetmakers increases every time I try to use the tools they used every day.

Don't they know that's bad for you?

Dinner knife

This is an old dinner knife I now use as a stiff palette knife, and for cutting putty and that sort of thing.

You may be wondering why I would want to display such a mundane, tatty old thing to the world at large.

Well, it's because I think it's pretty cool.

The handle is caseine, a plastic-like substance derived from milk. That suggests that the age of the knife is somewhere in the 80 to 120 years range; I suspect from the shape that it was probably manufactured in the 1920s or thereabouts, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Caseine doesn't respond well to being left wet, and that's probably what created the ulcer-like cavity in the handle. The length is ideal to sit comfortably against the heel of the hand, with the forefinger against the back of the blade to exert pressure and control.

The blade is stainless steel, which wasn't used for cutlery much before World War One (it was discovered in Sheffield in 1912), though by the twenties it was very common. It's an elegant shape, it cuts and spreads well, and it holds a modest edge and is both stiff and flexible. I haven't tried sharpening it, but I doubt that it would take or keep a real razor edge — though I might give it a go one of these days.

It's engraved on the blade:

SHEFFIELD

Bennett & Heron

ENGLAND

STAINLESS

DELUXE

HAND

GROUND

I really like the fluting around the collar of the blade, where it butts up against the shoulder of the handle. It catches the light nicely, and it provides a good, firm finger grip.

The weight and balance of the knife is very satisfying in the hand; not too heavy, nor yet too light. The slight curve of the blade allows one to maintain easy, close control over cutting. The thickness of the blade decreases toward the tip, so it cuts well and exerts considerable pressure without flexing over-much.

The forward three-fifths of the back of the blade is bevelled on the left; I don't know quite why. It does look nice, which may be the only real reason for doing it.

This simple thing, a mass-produced dinner knife, probably one of thousands, or even millions made, is a wonderful piece of aesthetic and functional design. I just love it for that, and also for the patina of wear that it has amassed over the decades.

After I kick off, it will probably just be thrown away. That's such a pity.

The Ascent of Man

I'm in the process of watching Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", originally broadcast in 1973 (which is about when I first saw it on TV at the ripe old age of 11 or 12). It's an interesting experience; it's much more measured and academic than modern documentaries of a similar ilk, and often requires much more close attention to follow.

Some of the information is outdated of course, owing to science not being immovably static like, say, religious dogma — he talks, for example, about the 92 elements of the Periodic table, and the planet Ceres. Some social and biological evolutionary theories have moved on a bit since then too. Overall though, it's still pretty informative as long as you know enough to know roughly what the current state of knowledge is.

The film-making is a sometimes unintentionally amusing mix of static talking-head shots and very groovy 60s-70s style arty-farty sound and vision... the first episode included Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine in the soundtrack :)

The main thing about it that really grates though is the omnipresent and quite unconscious sexism. Everything is "Man" and "he" and "him" and "his". Women might as well not exist at all, and although I keep telling myself that he was a product of his time and that we've progressed significantly since then, it's nevertheless getting on my tits a bit.

Still, interesting stuff.

Saw-stool of DOOOOOOM... and more booty

I bought a couple of cheap kitset saw-stools (you may know them as saw-horses) from Bunnings a while ago. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty crap, but they can still serve as trestles.

In the spirit of "if you want something done right, do it yourself", I went ahead and made this for myself. The top and legs are all 50mm pine, and the top is about 400mm wide and a metre long, so it can serve as an impromptu work bench, or I can set up my mitre saw on it and all that sort of thing.

Being so big and heavy, it's a bit of a pain to hump about, but I'll take that in exchange for having a good, solid, portable(ish) work surface available.

Sitting on top of it is my latest score: another Record woodworker's vice, from the same place as I got my other one. This one is a bit smaller, a No.52, but otherwise basically the same. It could do with a bit of cleaning up, but there's no rust that I can see, and it's all square and in pretty good nick. Having more than one vice on one's work bench comes in very handy all the time, so I'm glad to have found this one to act as my secondary emergency back-up thing-holder-and-squeezer.

Camping Trailer

This is kind of cool, in a dorky kind of way. I' want one.

Koch-ein-düdel-dü!

I'm pondering just what sort of stats to give this guy for use as a PC-chomper, and whether he would have any abilities beyond his ludicrous mandibles. I'm thinking smallish, maybe chicken-sized, and appearing in flocks of up to a couple of hundred.

More woodwork

I just made this little worktable for Annette, to replace the shitty bargain-warehouse piece of crap she's been using ever since the earthquakes forced us to rearrange our whole lives. It's radiata pine ( a much under-appreciated timber in this country, I feel), and it took me a couple of days of ambling, low-stress endeavour to machine and assemble. It still needs to be oiled up with three or four coats of linseed or tung-based finishing oil; that will take another couple of days at least.

It has a wide, shallow drawer in front for pens and pieces of paper and what-not. It's only 35mm deep, which hopefully will save it from the fate of most drawers, which is to become choked with so much useless crap that nothing can ever be found in them.

The drawer has a cove cut behind its lower edge, to get your fingers into to pull it open. That way it doesn't need any handle sticking out, and the front can stay flush and clean.

The top has a a deep (50mm) splay, leaving only a thin, delicate 8mm edge showing.

That could be a concern; pine being so soft, such a thin edge could be prone to damage. We'll see how it goes; if need be, I can always plane it back a bit.

Sin Was All I Knew

She doesn't seem to be particularly worried about that.

Booty

Today Annette and I went out for a picnic, at a little tarn out towards Arthur's Pass. It was bloody freezing, but nice.

On the way back we called in at a bric-a-brac shop at Darfield, where I found these.

The vice is a Record 52½, in very good nick, and it cost me $128 — about a third of what it would cost me to buy one new. I've been looking for a decent vice for ages, so this is an excellent score for me.

The brace is also in excellent nick. Because nobody much uses them any more, they're a lot more expensive to buy than they used to be... Bunnings has them for $175. This one cost me $24, and the lady threw in the bits for free.

All in all, a very productive picnic.

Blackboard

I just made this blackboard to replace the soulless (yet efficient) whiteboard that hung in our kitchen for writing grocery lists and what-not on.

The frame is pink birch, the little chalk shelves are made from beech. The blackboard itself is just 6mm MDF slathered with blackboard paint.

Aaaaaaand...... relax.

In spite of his many failings, and in spite of his inability to overcome a gigantic shitpile of obstruction from the lunatic fringe (big, big fringe... like Cousin It's fringe) of the Republicans in Congress (or the Senate? I'm a bit hazy about U.S. political systems), I'm profoundly relieved that Obama has managed to retain the presidency.

That Romney guy, there's something about him that just makes my skin crawl, and whenever he does his "sincere" face I throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Toilet humour

There's no way he'd fit in our think-plan chamber.
Imagine how much toilet paper he'd use.

Press Dream

This is a picture by Karl Larsen, from 1910, of his workshop. I'd really love to get back into intaglio printing, but I don't have anywhere I could keep a full-sized press. Something like that little one he has mounted on his table would be fantastic though; I've never been all that bothered about doing large images anyway.

There are people who make presses in that sort of size range, and from what I've seen of them, they look pretty good. However, even a weensy press like that costs two or three grand to buy brand new, and that's way more money than I could swing.

I do wonder if it would be possible to make one oneself. They're not mechanically complex, and the biggest issue would be cutting the heavy-gauge steel one would need for the frame. I suppose one might also need access to a lathe to smooth and polish the rollers, but maybe not.

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by not having a decent workshop space. Grr.

Lovely Emma

I've had the most massive crush on Emma Thomson ever since I saw her in The Balkans Trilogy on telly in the early 80s. Here she is reminiscing with and tormenting Stephen Fry on QI.

Chest

Behold, the mighty Games Chest! This is the most recent Thing I Made, and is now full of most of my board-games, dice and such-like.

The top is veneered in various woods — from centre outwards they're burr walnut, kahikatea, mahogany, kahikatea again, black walnut, and then more kahikatea. The little rectangular bits in the centre of each edge is silky oak I think, or possibly rewarewa — they look quite similar sometimes.

The framework is pink birch, and the panels are veneered in red oak.

The chest has a sliding till (the drawer-thing with the round tin in it) that slides from side to side on wooden runners. I'm keeping dice, pencils, erasers and what-not in there.

Want This

Excellent wood-carving skills

Excellent carved wood bat-vase by Michael Kehes

Who doesn't?

Tabletop

This is an old table top I painted black some years ago, having intended at the time to scribble all over it with pastels. Then I forgot about it, and it's been sitting out in the weather all this time. As you can see, the paint is mostly falling off — that's because I was too lazy to prep the surface properly before I painted on it. The paint would have fallen off even if it had been inside, in a relatively benign environment; it would just have happened a bit more slowly.

Reaper Bones - my first look

I'm a sucker for miniatures. I buy all sorts that I know that I will probably never actually use in a game. I'm also kind of a cheapskate — admittedly, a cheapskate with poor impulse-buying control, but nevertheless.

I suppose it's because when I first started buying gaming figurines, they tended to cost less than a buck apiece, and figures designed especially for wargaming were often as low as 20 cents. That makes modern metal figures seem very, very expensive to me, and when it comes to companies like Games Workshop, ludicrously expensive.

Reaper Miniatures have a very extensive range, mostly of pretty good quality, and for a 21st century company, their prices are fairly reasonable. You're still looking at six to ten yankee dollars for a 25-28mm metal figure though, which is a lot when you want to buy a whole horde of orcs or something.

They've recently started producing much cheaper plastic versions of some of their range. The plastic figure range is called Bones, and I decided to try them out. I bought 3 of the Great Worm (77006), Rats (77016 — you get 6 in a pack), and 5 packs of Kobolds (77010 — also 6 to a pack).

The figures are made of a white polymer of some kind, which is bloody hard to photograph effectively. The Rats and Kobolds, shown here, I eventually laid on the platen of my scanner to get an image that didn't blow out the highlights.

The detail appears a bit softer than I'd expect from metal figures, but to what extent that's due to the modelling, and how much to the nature of the medium I don't know. The detail on the Great Worm (below) looks a lot sharper, but then it's also a much larger figure.

The kobolds, by B. Siens, have been mastered in quite flat poses, which tends to be a feature of injection-moulded plastic figures due to the issues the process has with undercuts — attaining a well-rounded, dynamic figure often requires some pretty tricky multi-part mould-making, and that (of course) increases the production cost.

The Rats are by Sandra Garrity, and are pretty good; the proportions and the three poses provided are suitably ratty.

The Great Worm is decently monstrous, and it's with really large figures like this that you stand to save a LOT of money. It costs $US2.99 in plastic, and I doubt that you'd get much change from three or four times that amount if it were made in metal — plus it would weigh a ton, and that means paying extra freight as well.

Reaper say that you can slap paint straight on Bones figures without undercoating, and I certainly didn't have any trouble with the Vallejo acrylics that are my preferred paints these days.

Of the Bones figures I have thus far, I've only painted the Great Worm, shown here with an old WotC metal figure (circa 2001, I think) for scale. The Worm does stand on its own moulded base, but it's slightly out of balance, and I glued it to a honking great steel washer for the sake of stability.

---

I'm pretty happy with what I've seen of the Bones range so far. I don't think metal figures are going to disappear overnight, but I do think they're going to be reduced to more of a niche market within the next few years, if only because of their expense. A cheaper alternative like these allows me to buy more figures, which means I can throw larger hordes of mooks at my players, and that can't be a bad thing.

Yet another little table

 One of the things we're learning about a 'tech at the moment is veneering. It can be fiddly stuff to work with; the standard commercially available stuff is less than a millimetre thick, and some timbers (hardwoods, especially) tend to split very easily under the knife. It's not generally terrifically difficult though, as long as you take a bit of care and don't try to go too fast.

The timbers in this piece are cedar (I think), rimu, kauri, mahogany, black walnut, rewarewa, and the body of the table is made from pink birch.

And here's the veneer in all its mostly symmetrical glory.

Get Big Dick!

The Passing of an Era

I'm getting old and staid, and more concerned with comfort than cool, so the time has come for me to sell off my trusty steed. It's a 1994 Yamaha XJR1200 with only 77,147 km on the clock.

At the moment it's not warranted, and the registration is suspended. It will probably need a new back tyre for its next warrant, otherwise it's fine.

I'm looking for $3,500 for it, as is, where is. If I have to take care of the warrant and rego myself, I'll be adding another grand to that.

NOTE: Unless you're in Christchurch, NZ, this is probably going to be of little interest to you, since shipping it anywhere else is bound to bump the price up ridiculously.

Hitchins

Conehat

I painted this little acrylic (about 150 x 150 mm) for Annette back in '07. It has no hidden meaning.

Opus Completus

Observe the Coffee Table of DOOOOOOOOM!!!

Complete at last, and weighing in at about a gajillion kg. Observe also the Super-Secret Hidey-Hole that nobody would ever find in a million years (unless they looked at it).

The oak has been finished with three coats of Liberon Finishing Oil, which (though expensive) I really like, and a coat of wax on top. It took a great deal of rubbing and sanding and rubbing again, and then more work with steel wool and more oil, and so on and so on.

There's no real reason why this piece of furniture shouldn't last a thousand years and more. It bloody well better had.

Work In Progress

My latest opus is an oak coffee table with two push-through drawers and a central well in the top for putting stuff in, or for cats to climb into and have their photos taken and be splattered all over the internet for cat-lovers to go "Awwwwwwww!" over.

All that remains now, apart from a little bit of tidying up, is to attach the top (which is a very hefty lump of oak indeed), and to think about what I'm going to do for drawer handles.

It's been an interesting project, and I've learned lots of ways to make things much harder for myself than they really needed to be.

Tyres

I don't know who made this. If you know, please let me know. It's fantastic.




Edit: Thanks to the excellent search-and-find skills of  Annette (of Nut and Bee fame), it is revealed that it is by Stefano Bombardieri. Hoorah!

Doodleriffic!

Bah, Humbug

There is so a spoon, Neo

I forgot to take a spoon with me to 'tech today, to eat my lunch with.

So I made one.

It's oak, American White Oak to be precise.

Bookcase

My latest oeuvre, a little pine adjustable bookcase, seen here in the process of being oiled up with boiled linseed oil.

It almost certainly won't be used for storing books though. It's intended to accommodate some of Annette's knick-knack overflow, so that she has somewhere to keep the stuff she isn't displaying right at the moment.

I have still to install a catch for the cupboard door.

Recent scribbling

As you are probably aware by now, you can click on the pictures to see larger versions.

What could possibly go wrong?

That's just 80 kilos or so of mince in waiting. I don't really see this catching on.