Introduction In our old flat, we had control over our heating from our phones: I’d reverse engineered the RF control protocol used by our Salus thermostat. I never got round to blogging about that, bu…
We had a smart meter installed last year. It’s kinda useful to observe long term power usage. However I really wanted to be able to see more detail; like turn off this device, what happens to the powe…
I bought a "luxury selection of exotic wood blanks" from ebay to try turning some bowls. Some of them worked! Bowl 1 + Bowl 2 These were a success, although I think bowl 2 is better from a shape and f…
A friend, Sandy, suggested trying laser cutting wood veneer (he has plans for a complex design). However, I’d not tried that before, and it sounded like an interesting idea. I’ve often watched people…
I was watching some of Uri Tuchman’s excellent videos, and he mentioned making his own tools; sounded fun, and I now have a garden I can safely try that sort of project in. Kinda fancied making some s…
One problem with the lathe is I now have a whole set of chisels lying around the place, which is kinda annoying. I spent yesterday designing a quick tool support to attach to the lathe bench in Fusion…
I've always wanted one of these. When I was wee, we went on tour round England visiting various relations, and I remember being very impressed with a lathe. I've no idea which relation it was, unfortu…
Nicola bought me a present for my birthday: a hammer making course at Athelstaneforge! I really enjoyed it! It was a pretty intense few hours though: hitting chunks of hot metal with a sledge hammer t…
I used a few offcuts to add some new woodworking tools: Plane Stop I bolted a length of the construction timber to my bench with some "star nuts" and spare M10 carriage bolts. The idea is you put one…
I've been watching a lot of restoration on Youtube recently: AT Restoration, Hand Tool Rescue to name a couple. I thought I'd give it a go: there's an old side table that's been in the family for ages…
