Observations from a Hill

Having spent the meat of the day at Jane's aunt's in Saltney, Chester - installing a towel rail rail or two in the bathroom, and not installing the bathroom cabinet we'd bought for her as there was one panel missing from the flatpack; I'm just going to make a diary post tonight and defer my overdue Deck of the Week posts (last week was a no-show, too) until tomorrow. When I was looking through stuff and generally messing about beim Wintergarten after we'd gotten back from up the coast, I heard a familiar bird call: the peee-uu of a common buzzard, but much louder than normal - at which point the bird flew low right in front of my window and only just above our garden from the direction of the Ffridd; then wheeled up and into the thermal he/she was looking for to join their partner: both soon high above us in the familiar paired circle, calling all the while. Common might be it's appellation, but they're uncommonly beautiful to me. I love 'em...

Still trial & erroring the main drive train for the lathe. I've got what I think might be the final geometry of the thing sorted and have moved the main vee-belt inboard of the bearing on the driveshaft - I didn't like the amount of out of line leverage the original outboard mounting was exerting on the rest of the affair. I did manage to find a slightly longer belt, which gave me some slack to play with without resorting to re-drilling the old frame, so I think I'll fabricate an idler wheel to tension the belt and keep it out of the way of the frame where it passes over it. The other thing I've definitely decided on is to remove the rubber mounts and bolt the motor rigidly to the bracket, having already decided that I'm going to mount the whole thing vertically behind the lathe (there's not a lot of bench real-estate to play with). With everything aligned and properly (lightly) tensioned, the amount of vibration should be minimal: I'll probably use the ...

Well, the Hatt Mancock debacle has certainly thrown two things into focus: one, Boris Johnson's complete denial of the fact that he actually is the place/person where the buck stops - it's in the job-brief, you idiot! But the concept of actually taking responsibility for one's actions seems to have been drummed out of him at Eton and replaced with the Übermensch mentality that most alumni of that institution appear to espouse.  Secondly, the question of the covert surveillance that brought about the [probably temporary] fall of the [now departed, but not sadly missed] Health Secretary. The question remains - who put it in place, and to what end? Given that the kind of tech involved is available on EBay for a tenner, it could be anyone with a grudge against the said departed. Could be a very long queue - but given the extreme levels of security surrounding Government buildings, one can only assume someone on the inside thought it a good idea to pop a hidden camera into a smo...

Gillian Tett in this weekend's FT writes of her Great Aunt's fastidious habits in recycling as a matter of course, rather than ideology - an attitude ingrained in her generation's collective psyche through the privations of two World Wars and the Great Depression. I was talking to friends the other day of my memory of one of my maternal grandmother's regularly-used aphorisms: "Never cut string!" She used to keep a special, cylindrical tin on a shelf at the cellar-head, which had a hinged lid with a tiny aperture at its centre, finished with a minute, hollow spigot, and through which the loose end of the recycled skein of string held inside the tin would emerge. My Nan would religiously unpick all the knots from the string holding any parcel together to reclaim the fullest possible length of cord, which would then be knotted neatly to the end of the skein in the tin and its end pushed through the spigot for re-use as necessary. I'm pretty sure the tin was a...

Having bolted the old lathe to my [now metalworking] bench and checked the ways for true (as far as I can with the tools available to me), I've turned my attention to getting the thing powered up and rotating, so I can see how accurately it can turn actual metal stock! The motor and belt drive mounting arrangements Dad used are now forgotten to me, as the photographs I took of it's last resting place in his workshop disappeared with whatever phone I was using when I picked the lathe up - well pre-iPhone days. I've been playing around with some of the bits I have left and have decided to cobble together a combined motor-mount/belt feed affair from them. I found a couple of seriously butch springs (shown) in the back of the workshop, so I think I'll pivot the motor at the intermediate shaft side and suspend the other side on the springs, allowing the weight of the motor (not inconsiderable as it's a half-horsepower job) to tension the vee-belt feeding the intermediate...

We never really left the Art Room. And I cry for your Loss As the fifteen-year-old I once was:   I am old and you will not age more. And I cry for your Loss As the old man I now am. Kel, for John 25/06/21

Shown is a Tamron SP 500mm f8 mirror lens that I inherited when an uncle of mine died some years ago. It had a Praktica bayonet Adaptall 2 Tamron adapter, which is now of no use and can be seen in the background by the edge of my screen. I found an adapter on Ebay for a few quid so I can try it out on my old Canon F1 - the lens is pretty filthy, and I've cleaned the outer surfaces of the optics as best I can, but there appears to be evidence of grot and maybe fungus on the internals, although the main mirror appears to have only a couple of marks to the silvering. Working on the principle that optics can't focus on themselves, it might turn out to be usable, if a tad niche in its application: we'll see... I realise that I have not just a couple of projects to go at, but a whole raft of stuff which should keep me going into the foreseeable, which is good. I intend to have a crack at making the simplest 4"x5" field camera I can design, using the tools and materials ...

If I still have readers in Hong Kong, I wish you luck and good fortune - my stats from the Far East have gone down again following the latest events in HK - this has happened too many times to be pure coincidence: I hope that alternative channels to those already tried open up for you - Best wishes from a small Welsh village. 

Digging around the internet, the closest I can get to identifying the old man's lathe, is that it's a Myford ML4 dating to sometime in the 1930's. The clues I'm going on are the headstock design (Three-stud removable - not the very earliest type) and the centre-to-centre length of the thing, which all point to the ML4. I do know this was our second lathe at home (I can't remember much about the first) and so was purchased (very) used, by Dad in the 1960's (probably through the Birmingham Evening Mail Classifieds). There's lots missing from it and Dad never got the screw-cutting side of things going - I've got a set of change wheels for it, but the banjo is missing one of the two studs and I don't possess any Woodruff keys either, but the stud is a simple bit of turning and tapping and the keys can be purchased on the Net, so we'll see - to be honest, I don't have a screaming need to be able to cut threads, but it would be nice to get the thin...

The notion that we live in a meritocracy is self-evidently false. Greed, mendacity and good contacts are the true currency of success in twenty-first century Britain; just as might, birthright and strategic marriage were in Medieval times. An inability to perform at any level is no barrier to those whose lives are blessed by privilege and the ingrained belief that theirs is the right to that privilege. Ian Birrell in the i the other day wrote with some - justifiable - venom about '...the Rise of the Tory Chumocracy...' - in particular the putative elevation of Dido Harding from her frankly woeful role as the 'Track & Trace Tzar' to CEO of the NHS. Out of the ashes of Tory government policy failures surrounding a pandemic appears to be rising the Phoenix of Baroness Harding. These people show neither perspective nor shame over their abject and extremely well [publicly] remunerated failures, instead simply moving goalposts, massaging statistics and changing the rule...

OK - I was going to have a wild rant about the putative elevation of Dido-bloody-Harding to the role of CEO of the NHS: a prospect which renders me apoplectically speechless and foaming at the mouth: both at the incipient stupidity of the idea itself and at the culture of of Tory entitlement and duplicity that would enable such a gross folly. But I won't. Today. I'll leave that one for tomorrow. Instead I'll lead on my latest project: my Dad's old lathe. I took possession of this venerable old Myford 7" when Dad died in 2012, and it has languished unused in the small shed which was meant to be my workshop and which has served the past few years as a dumping ground for just about anything deemed useful but non-urgent, hence rendering its function as a usable workshop untenable. To reduce the lathe's not inconsiderable weight a little, I stripped it of it's tailstock, most of the tool-slide and it's chuck, saving I guess around 10-15 kilos. The move from ...

  Sheep may safely graze and pasture In a watchful Shepherd's sight. Those who rule with wisdom guiding Bring to hearts a peace abiding Bless a land with joy made bright.   By Salomon Franck,  from the original German    

Further to yesterday's post on house-name plaque stuff, I decided to put together a jury-rigged router table so I could edge the things in a slightly more fancy way - a re-used sheet of 1/4" ply, a random offcut of timber and a few other bits and pieces later, and the first result is there, under the push stick. I think this will suffice for the purpose and might just (as usual) lead to a more adaptable solution...keep you posted!

Pictured is a blank house-name plaque I've made from some of the salvaged pitch-pine that came from James' & Leo's chapel, as did Project Pew on which it rests. We've had some confusion over the identity of our car park, so I've decided a name plaque for the gate is the answer, so I made the blank for James to apply his calligraphic skills to, as he's already made a door plate for their house. I've offered to make blanks for any putative business he might have planned in this direction - I might even get a router table set up to achieve fancier edges than the half-mitres on this one: Ogee, Scotia, Bead etc., etc. Of course that leads to the next requirement: a decent bench sander setup. The question is, to buy or to build? The other thing I want to get sorted is making my table-saw fence not only adjustable for square and cut-width; but for height, so I can take off the zero-clearance ply top and use the mitre cut on the original saw table: shouldn't...

We said goodbye to John today at Lodge Hill, Birmingham: the remainder of John's family, The Lads that are left who could attend, and other friends of John's considerable orbit. After a bugger of a drive from home here in North Wales - temporary traffic lights, tailbacks around Shrewsbury and a bloody tractor for about five miles I picked up outside Bridgnorth, all conspired to turn a three hour drive into a three-and-a-half-hour drive, resulting in my reaching the door of the crematorium just as they were about to close the doors on the Covid-restricted throng. A very nice, humanist service accented by some beautifully curated favourite music of John's and personal observations from us Lads, a short period of private reflection: altogether a fitting tribute to my old mate. Afterwards at the Bell in Harborne, I had a chance to catch up with some very dear friends, some of whom I haven't seen in a very long time - Brooker, N take a bow as the person I haven't seen fo...

I just got back from my short break down Pen Lleyn and it looks like the first two of our Peonies had bloomed while I was away, with the rest looking not far to go: they're all a bit behind compared to last year, but given the difference in the weather patterns now to then, I'm not surprised. Behind you can see one of the Rosa Rugosa blooms: this old shrub was here when we moved in and requires absolutely no maintenance, giving us an annual show of beautiful old-school rose-blooms and in the latter part of the season, rose-hips. Tomorrow I'm off to John's funeral in Birmingham, so I'll post when I get back.

I was going to rant about the preposterously puffed-up Anglo-Australian trade deal that we have apparently (or at least BoJo has) signed. But I won't. Yet. Just a short drive away from where we're staying  at Porth Neigwl is the prettiest little village called Llangian, one-time holder of the Best Kept Village in Carnarvonshire [the county spelling is contemporary with the signage, not current orthographic practice, where the 'v' sound is written 'f', 'f' being rendered as 'ff': the modern usage is Caernarfon and their is no current county of Caernarfon(shire), nor would it be referred to in the English way]. At the centre of the village is the church dedicated to Saint Cian - Eglwys Llangian. Eglwys refers to the building itself and the 'Llan' in Llangian to the enclosed land surrounding it. The first recording of the church was made in the 'Valuation of Norwich' in 1254 and the nave dates to the time of that recording, although ...

  Evening walk along the coastal path the other night - to the right of this fence/gate is the path - to the right of that, the bit of coast that is slowly eroding/falling away to the beach below and thence to the sea: like so much of our coastline, some of it is a natural and inevitable process, and some of it is as a result of human activity, such as creating focussed national footpaths like this one. An interesting conundrum: the freedom to roam versus environmental impact. As a keen walker of such clearly marked and well-maintained byways, I sometimes wonder if we've done the right thing in making the countryside so easy to traverse: removing topographical challenge and necessary route-finding skills has encouraged more and more people onto these paths, very often those who would have hitherto not bothered to do. As I say: a conundrum...

Mor ddiderfyn ar môr, Mor nyth ol âr llanw     As endless as the ocean,   As timeless as the tides We went for a walk down to Porth Ceiriad this morning and I had to stop to tie my bootlaces at a viewpoint bench, where I found the inscription above carved into its seat. Along the beach I picked up a pebble and placed it on the rocks as the tide was coming in: a fleeting, evanescent memorial to my old friend: a casting back of the temporary into time itself.

The great beauty - and privilege of living here is the astonishing variety of scenery within easy reach of us. I took the pic above on arrival here just outside Llanengan on the Lleyn Peninsula, precisely one hour and and four minutes drive after picking up Jane from work in Bangor. The contrast between the mountain fastness of Rachub and the open expansiveness of the coastal landscape here is, well; marked, to say the least. I'm here until Thursday, when I'll head home to start prepping the cottage for Friday's visitors - Jane staying the extra night, as I've to drive to Birmingham for my old friend John Kyte's funeral on the Friday: a sad way to end the week.

  Although our gardens are awash with colour after the wet spring and the recent sunshine, sometimes it's best to see and feel the texture of life, so whilst I've been photographing some of the more strident blooms out there, I've also taken some in monochrome, using the iPhone app I've mentioned before: Provoke. It renders the world as if Ralph Gibson had decorated it: soot and whitewash contrast, extreme grain and red-filtered black where the blue sky should be. We're off down towards Abersoch for a break tomorrow: a couple of days stay down Pen Lleyn, at a place near Hell's Mouth. I'll be taking the newly gifted Rolleiflex SLX for medium format and a Canon EOS RT for 35mm, which has an interesting Cosina wide zoom on it: am intrigued as to the images it might produce. If anything of note transpires from the experiment, I'll post the results as and when I've got the negs developed and scanned. It will also give me a kick up the arse to get the dark...

The completed chair seat - not perfect, but OK for a first attempt at something completely new to me. I also didn't make my life any easier by opting for 8mm cording: by the time I got to the centre, it got a little cramped to say the least. In the end I used about 80m of poly sash and approx 22m of jute; so around 100m of cord to complete, not including the coarse twine used to splice the joints and hold down the initial side pieces. But the chair frame cost me nowt but the glue and the paint to renovate it and the poly cord was a hand-me-down at work before I retired. The only real cost was the jute: three 10m hanks, which cost just over eighteen quid: so about twenty quid all up. Not bad for a 'new' rocking chair. We'll see what it looks like after a good bit of use: as the cordage is probably about ten times stronger than the frame, it shouldn't fall apart, but it will be interesting to see if it stretches much with use. The next chair I tackle will definitely b...

Progress so far: I have covered approximately two-thirds of the seat in the poly sash line, and whilst I've not completely run out of the stuff, I don't have enough to complete it - and as that sash ain't cheap (50m = £41), I've decided to go for the contrasting cord I mentioned last, and I've settled on jute sash line of the same (8mm) thickness (a skein of which is pictured with my tools above. The look I'm aiming for is kind of Norfolk beachcomber-ish: a seaside, beach-huts and dinghies kind of thing. Another, more practical reason for finishing the centre cross in jute is that the poly sash is kernmantle-laid, which I won't be able to untwist or tighten to vary the thickness of a lay as I reach the centre of the weave and adjust the gaps that will inevitably appear at the frame edges. I'm hoping this project pans out for two reasons: one, we get a nice chair to use and two, I have a new string to my bow: I fancy getting hold of more junk chairs and r...

  Murphy's law, simply stated, is that anything can go wrong probably will. Not will, but probably. Therefore any simplistic reliance on one technological plank to underpin a complex system is, also quite simply, asking for trouble. And yet it would seem this is exactly what a significant number of corporate/government entities have been engaged in for some considerable time, and yesterday the chickens not only came home to roost, they crapped all over the coop and then trashed it. Amazon, Ebay, Boots and even the bloody UK government's web presences were caught with their collective trousers down by an outage in the cloud server platform they all appear to solely rely upon for their services to function. The outage was short admittedly, but it was absolute, and no backstop appeared to be in place. How on earth can these people employ critical systems so bereft of one of the most basic cornerstones of engineering: redundancy. Never, ever put all your eggs in one basket. Critica...

I was going to write about the necessity for hardware and software redundancy in complex systems, due to the latest news of strategic corporate and governmental failures to appreciate engineering 101, but I'll leave that for tomorrow. Just a quick update therefore on The Old Rocking Chair refurb. As I mentioned I might, I was going to get hold of some jute sash cord to give the seat-weaving a go, but me being me, I couldn't wait to have a crack at the rush-seat technique, so I dug out some rather chunky sash-line dating back to my BT days. I decided that the orange accents in the cord would look kind of good against the blue I'd painted the frame in - complimentary colours, should anyone remember their Johannes Itten. The start of the process can be seen in the picture - the front corners of the frame are bulked out until the width of the weave lines up with the narrower rear of the seat frame; then the weave continues across the whole of the chair, front to back, until com...

A bit more progress on the rocking chair refurb: I've filled and sanded the thing and have the first coat of paint on. Another coat tomorrow and I'm ready to start experimenting with the seat. I still haven't decided what form that will take, so I'm going to trawl YouTube and Pinterest for ideas and techniques I can try. I'm tempted to try using rough jute sash cording as a replacement for rush or paper rush, as it's cheap and if I cock it up I'm not losing much. We'll see: keep you posted on progress.

Further to yesterday's Death & Taxes post, it seems we can add doublethink to the corporate world's reality-distorting armoury of chicanery and deception, particularly when it comes to taxation. To quote Orwell's definition from his "1984": To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious o...

Two news items struck me today: the G7 agreement on tax abuse by multinationals which, with the grace of God and a following wind, should ensure that the wealthiest end of the business world pays its way, just like everybody else, by the mechanism of globally-enforced minimum corporation tax. The second was the ruling by a Federal judge in California overturning the state's 32-year-old embargo on the sale of assault weapons on the grounds of unconstitutionality, effectively allowing AR15s to be bought for 'home defense' [US spelling deliberate]. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away: on the one hand [on the face of it, at least - I'm a hardened old sceptic, after all] the first major progress in corporate oversight for a very, very long time [if ever] comes through multinational cooperation fuelled by the growing knowledge that economics is not a natural science or a series of mathematical truths that cannot be denied [the pandemic has proven thus] and can be as fl...

Well, I've got the 22 constituent parts of the rocking chair frame and rockers glued back together. To say it was a bit of a wrestle to get the last, completed side glued and mated up to the rest of the assembly is an understatement, to say the very least - a bit like wrangling a giant hedgehog with an attitude problem: and what with my back/sciatica/nascent arthritis and the heat in the studio this afternoon, I was glad to get it strapped up to dry. All that remains for the basic frame is some filling, sanding and a couple of coats of paint. Then I've got to decide what kind of seat to I put back on it. Do I opt for replacing the rush seat, which doesn't look easy but is doable with patience and much YouTubing for help. Or do I opt for something completely different? I'll keep you posted when I've decided and got it done...

In the absence of any real cogent thoughts about, well, just about anything today - which I still firmly believe to be a Saturday, despite all evidence to the contrary: a condition not ameliorated by the fact that Tesco had yesterday's " i "  stacked up where today's should have been. Of course, muggins here without his glasses on took it as read that it was the current issue and duly paid for it. So, a bit of a cognitive dissonance sort of day, then. Having cooked stir-fry this evening, I was mulling over two things: the fact that I couldn't get a bag of bean-sprouts for the wok-fest and the origin of my absolute love for the damn' things: the most unpromising-looking foodstuff one can imagine at face value. But I do love the crunchy little buggers, even if they do look like alien parasitic worms. Thinking aloud as to where I discovered them, I remembered: Wing Fat Chinese takeaway, on the Dudley Road in Winson Green - the very place I grew up. As I remember ...

My political party - Labour (lifelong and unswerving) - is in a tailspin that could result in its dilution, dissipation and ultimately its destruction, and the fault lies not with Jeremy Corbyn's brief tenure as leader, as so many misguided critics allege; but in its current denial of the core of its principles and a desire to please all of the people all of the time. After the party decided to go with the media flow and oust Corbyn (whose manifesto pledges have ironically, by and large, have been taken up by the Tory government!), I voted for the current leader as the best alternative available, having a good legal brain and a calm demeanour, in complete contrast to our frankly unhinged and dangerously feckless Prime Minister. I still believe Kier Starmer to be a potentially able leader and even a future Prime Minister, but he is missing the path that Labour currently needs to be following. The Tories have an unassailable majority: fact. They will not be removed any time soon: fac...

  Just a diary note tonight - I ricked my back earlier today, after completing some more work on the rocking chair project, so am a bit sore and circumspect of movement. Managed to barbecue some chicken souvlaki, though - see pic. Have had discussions with old friends concerning the arrangements for my late friend John's funeral, a sad time for all. I'll keep it short as I really want to rest up - I've loads to deal with tomorrow.