Finished reading "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch. Rather good. Found on the "fantasy" shelves (where almost all of my reading material comes from), it's about a long con expert grifting in a city almost indistinguishable from early Renaissance Venice. With a revenge plot thrown in.
Though I bet my "summon author" spell fails miserably :)
http://myelvesaredifferent.blogspot.com/2007/02/summon-author-is-good-term-for-common.html
Right now I've got a big pile of books to get through.
I read George R R Martin's "A Feast For Crows" at the start of the month; at the second attempt. I don't know why I never managed to get into it when I first got the book, as this volume is as good as the rest of the series so far. However, there is a definate "slowing down", both in terms of the pacing of the story and the appearance of the actual books themselves. Hopefully he's not coming over all "Jordan" on us. Though I still hold the Wheel of Time series in high regard, I just hope that RJ manages to get the epic finished.
Just finishing the Jasper Fforde Thursday Next sequence. Silly stuff. And a return to the sort of exchanges that opened the series, after all the BookWorld stuff in the previous two volumes. Not a series that I will feel compelled to re-read in the future, though.
After that, well I'm waiting on the first two books by Joe Abercrombie to arrive from Amazon (who are currently reporting a 4-6 week delivery window, unfortunately). If they don't turn up on time, then it might be K J Parker's previous paperback that gets read next. I really enjoyed her first trilogy and the second was also very good - but she does lose a few points as a result of my suspicion that she might be married to Tom Holt. Not so much because I don't like his books (I don't, but can't hold that against anyone), but because I didn't like him - or his views about my field of work - very much when I met him a few years ago.
I have some Games Workshop "Warhammer 40k" books to read at some point. Bought on a whim because from time to time, their background material could be quite readable - nonsense, but readable (and certainly better than most of their games). They are probably just the thing to read post-lobotomy.
And finally there's Understanding Exposure, by Bryan Peterson, which I am getting through at a rate of a few pages every few days. Highly recommended to all budding photographers who want to move the dial on their camera away from the "auto" setting once in a while. I'd recommend his "Understanding Digital Photography" over this one, though. There's enough repetition of material between the two books to make reading both unnecessary, but either gives a very good grounding in some of the technical aspects of photography using SLR-type cameras. It certainly helped me to understand what I was trying to do with my moon shots the other week.
I don't know if I mentioned at the time, but I was using an old 300mm telephoto lens. This meant that not only did I have to focus manually, I had to shoot in manual mode - setting an appropriate aperture and shutter speed, without the benefit of in-camera metering. Knowing not only what all those settings meant, but how to actually manipulate them to get the image I wanted, was pretty important.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Lunar Eclipse
OK, forgive the broken links of a couple of days ago. I wanted to get something posted quick, and always planned to come back and do a proper job.
We had a lunar eclipse last weekend. The Moon was full, totality was between 10.45pm and 11.45pm, and for once the skies stayed clear. It wasn't even that cold. It doesn't get much better than that.
I stepped outside with the Nikon D40, a 300mm manual focus lens, and the world's worst tripod. I got some nice, sharp pictures at high shutter speed, but as the light from the Moon dimmed I had to use longer and longer exposures - at which point, a thumping heavy lens without a tripod collar on top of Jessop's finest £20 tripod was *never* in any danger of producing good images. Ah well. I clearly need a better tripod and some more lenses. Obviously.
During the longer exposures I was getting a few dots on the screen. I had written them off as some sort of stuck pixel fault with the camera - they were in the same position vis a vis the Moon in each shot. Then I noticed they were in DIFFERENT positions on the actual image. Hmm, not a camera problem then. Turns out that the one nearest the moon is actually Saturn. Neat, huh?
Oh, and I've just realised that I've missed tonight's episode of Life On Mars :(
Oh, and I've just realised that I've missed tonight's episode of Life On Mars :(
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Snow!
Ha - bet you don't get THIS in New Zealand! (Actually, I think that they probably do - in fact, it'll be cleaner, drier, and possibly ski-able. But I bet that they don't make really tall snowmen).
Sorry about the hopeless pic - new camera, left it on ISO1600 by mistake. (GRR - either use MANUAL mode and THINK about what you're doing, or leave it on AUTO. Mucking about in P mode without checking stuff like this leads to hopeless snaps. Ah well.)
Back garden before we started:
Sorry about the hopeless pic - new camera, left it on ISO1600 by mistake. (GRR - either use MANUAL mode and THINK about what you're doing, or leave it on AUTO. Mucking about in P mode without checking stuff like this leads to hopeless snaps. Ah well.)
Back garden before we started:
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Dice Tower Construction.
First of all I started with an outline plan. I wanted something that was at least bigger and sturdier than the first dice towers I had made. I liked the arrangement of rods placed horizontally across the tower instead of the usual fixed slopes, but the original design only worked well with one size of dice and would "trap" larger dice within.
Those early efforts were 3mm thick acrylic - on the limit of what can be scored and snapped by hand. Going up to 4mm thick meant that everything was going to have to be cut with a jigsaw - no worse than score & snap, but still a pain.
While looking at materials on the supplier's website, I noticed that they did a laser cutting service. Not cheap by any means, but it would eliminate the need to lots of tedious sawing. And the laser cutter could pre-form the holes for me, so no drilling either. Of course, to keep the price as low as possible, they needed a CAD file (to send them hand-drawn plans would have pushed the cost sky-high).
So, the next task was to learn how to use some CAD software. While honing the design - both were worked on in parallel. There were wrong steps along the way with both. For example, I wanted a wider tower, but the rod placement got complicated. Too wide, and you could only fit the outline of one tower on a sheet of plastic - I needed to get two out of each cut sheet.
Finally I had a design that looked fine. It would clearly handle a range of dice sizes and it had a fold-out tray at the bottom. There was no chance to "prototype" it - either the design was right, would work, and I'd be happy, or I would be spending almost £200 on plastic fit for the landfill. The designs were sent off, credit card handed over, and fingers firmly crossed.
Disaster In The Making
The courier arrived with a big package a few days later. In it were 4 sheets of immaculately-cut 4mm acrylic, and enough 4mm diameter acrylic rod to make up 8 towers. Time to assemble the first one.
I had used a glue called Tensol-something-or-other for the earlier towers. Superglue is right out - it leaves a nasty "misting" effect around the join. Tensol is a thick solvent that "welds" two pieces of plastic together, taking about ten minutes to set, and over the course of about 24 hours creates an insanely strong bond. How strong? Well, I tried to snap the ramp out of the tatty test-piece I'd done some time before, and the plastic broke down the middle - and not along the weld joint as I had expected.
The drawbacks are that it has to be applied by brush, and then the pieces held together precisely while the joint set. This was OK for the joins of my 3mm towers - none of the edges were truly square anyway - but it wasn't going to be good enough for towers that I wanted to sell. The other problem is that it was very difficult brushing the glue onto exactly the right places - any excess etches the plastic surface. The benefit of using Tensol is that the joint is nice and clear, though.
The solution lay in using the same solvent in a much thinner consistency. The solvent is sold in the UK under the name "Fusion", and has the same viscosity as water. So if you have two closely-matched components, as my laser-cut pieces were, you can just introduce the solvent to the edge of the join and capillary action causes it to wick into the whole joint. As a result, the tower sides can be clamped together and squared up before the glue is introduced, so the finished towers are less likely to wobble! It's also easier to use the right amount of the solvent (though spills have to be wiped up in a split-second, or they will mark the surface of the plastic. Downside is that the joint isn't quite as clear as with Tensol - but it's still very acceptable.
The first tower of the batch was assembled by hand, with Tensol, while I learned what order things had to be assembled in. I wouldn't perfect the process until tower 7 or 8, but that first tower taught me a few things - ditch the Tensol, and use the "clamp & wick" principle; clean all the parts of fingerprints before you glue them together, because it's well nigh impossible afterwards; and also that I'd made a mistake on the plans.
This was a big set-back. Not a total disaster - the first assembled tower would indeed function with various different dice, and the "ramp" made from a row of rods worked well. But I had got the size of the tray wrong - it was 8mm too narrow, and couldn't be assembled as designed. I tried a bodged solution, but it looked like a bodge. There was no alternative - another £80-odd to get a sheet of replacement parts cut.
Unfortunately the Christmas holidays intervened. Instead of having a few leisurely days to assemble the towers during the break, the request for more plastic languished in someone's in-tray until their return to work after the New Year. Ah well. It was all sorted by the end of the first week of January, the replacement parts had arrived, I'd tracked down a supplier for Fusion (and the necessary syringes to apply it - despite the relative ease that addicts seem to have when it comes to sourcing their syringes, a hobbyist faces a much more protracted search, aided by an overly-aggressive spam filter on my email account).
The most tedious part of the assembly process is cutting the 4mm dowels to the right length. It took over two feature films to get them all done (using a simple "measure, score and snap" process). The New Year television schedule wasn't a total waste of time, then.
The only really tricky part is clamping the pieces together prior to introducing the solvent. I tried a couple of different clamps before hitting on a style, and method, that worked. The tray needs careful handling to get the sides on square (and the tiny G-clamps I had were only just big enough to do the job); the tower itself was easier, but had a nasty habit of collapsing suddenly as I made fine adjustments or tightened the clamps up too much.
Once everything is clamped up, actually injecting the solvent is pretty easy. Almost entertaining, even, watching it wick along the length of the join. This is where having the pieces laser-cut would really score heavily - it made straight, square joins much easier to achieve, and the finished edges were straight without being sharp (on the 3mm thick acrylic, some of the edges were very sharp).
15 minutes later, release the clamps. Glue the base onto the tower, slide the rods into place, and use a bit of solvent on both sides of each rod to fix them permanently in place. The folding tray hinges on the bottom rod of the ramp, and was the only really tricky join - it's important to get enough glue in to fix the rod to the tray, but a tiny bit too much and it will start to wick along the side of the tower, and weld the hinge so it won't work. Thankfully this didn't happen to any of the 8 (one got a tiny bit of solvent in somewhere it shouldn't, and the hinge squeaks a bit as a result, but this will ease with some use).
There we are. Job done. Each tower probably took about 2 hours to prepare and assemble, although having got the technique sorted now I reckon I could probably do a tower in about 45 minutes.
By making 8 of them, I had made 7 "good" ones and one that might be described as a prototype. Although it probably had a value (it's mostly square, reasonably tidy, and works fine) I destroyed what worth it had when I attempted to learn some polishing skills to remove some noticeable blemishes. As a result of the disaster that unfolded, leaving deep scuff marks on the back of the tower, I elected not to try to polish out any of the much less noticeable scratches and marks on the "good" towers. Hey, they're plastic. Although acrylic is pretty tough and hard-wearing, they will inevitably pick up a few marks along the way. Mine just come with a few built-in.
Actually, I think I'm over-stating the problem. You'll not notice any blemishes on the finished towers apart from on the test piece. I am, by nature, something of a perfectionist, though. For the same reason, I'm still not completely happy with the joins. Using Tensol did provide an almost invisible bond between pieces; the Fusion bond is good, but visible. I suspect that the solution may lie in controlling the atmosphere in which the bond is made, using applicators which are perfectly clean and unaffected by the solvent itself - a solution that lies way outside my means.
If one day someone wants to order several hundred of my dice towers, the answer will be to out-source production to somewhere that they perfect the assembly. And flame-polish the finished item. Does the world need several hundred deluxe acrylic dice towers, though?
Those early efforts were 3mm thick acrylic - on the limit of what can be scored and snapped by hand. Going up to 4mm thick meant that everything was going to have to be cut with a jigsaw - no worse than score & snap, but still a pain.
While looking at materials on the supplier's website, I noticed that they did a laser cutting service. Not cheap by any means, but it would eliminate the need to lots of tedious sawing. And the laser cutter could pre-form the holes for me, so no drilling either. Of course, to keep the price as low as possible, they needed a CAD file (to send them hand-drawn plans would have pushed the cost sky-high).
So, the next task was to learn how to use some CAD software. While honing the design - both were worked on in parallel. There were wrong steps along the way with both. For example, I wanted a wider tower, but the rod placement got complicated. Too wide, and you could only fit the outline of one tower on a sheet of plastic - I needed to get two out of each cut sheet.
Finally I had a design that looked fine. It would clearly handle a range of dice sizes and it had a fold-out tray at the bottom. There was no chance to "prototype" it - either the design was right, would work, and I'd be happy, or I would be spending almost £200 on plastic fit for the landfill. The designs were sent off, credit card handed over, and fingers firmly crossed.
Disaster In The Making
The courier arrived with a big package a few days later. In it were 4 sheets of immaculately-cut 4mm acrylic, and enough 4mm diameter acrylic rod to make up 8 towers. Time to assemble the first one.
I had used a glue called Tensol-something-or-other for the earlier towers. Superglue is right out - it leaves a nasty "misting" effect around the join. Tensol is a thick solvent that "welds" two pieces of plastic together, taking about ten minutes to set, and over the course of about 24 hours creates an insanely strong bond. How strong? Well, I tried to snap the ramp out of the tatty test-piece I'd done some time before, and the plastic broke down the middle - and not along the weld joint as I had expected.
The drawbacks are that it has to be applied by brush, and then the pieces held together precisely while the joint set. This was OK for the joins of my 3mm towers - none of the edges were truly square anyway - but it wasn't going to be good enough for towers that I wanted to sell. The other problem is that it was very difficult brushing the glue onto exactly the right places - any excess etches the plastic surface. The benefit of using Tensol is that the joint is nice and clear, though.
The solution lay in using the same solvent in a much thinner consistency. The solvent is sold in the UK under the name "Fusion", and has the same viscosity as water. So if you have two closely-matched components, as my laser-cut pieces were, you can just introduce the solvent to the edge of the join and capillary action causes it to wick into the whole joint. As a result, the tower sides can be clamped together and squared up before the glue is introduced, so the finished towers are less likely to wobble! It's also easier to use the right amount of the solvent (though spills have to be wiped up in a split-second, or they will mark the surface of the plastic. Downside is that the joint isn't quite as clear as with Tensol - but it's still very acceptable.
The first tower of the batch was assembled by hand, with Tensol, while I learned what order things had to be assembled in. I wouldn't perfect the process until tower 7 or 8, but that first tower taught me a few things - ditch the Tensol, and use the "clamp & wick" principle; clean all the parts of fingerprints before you glue them together, because it's well nigh impossible afterwards; and also that I'd made a mistake on the plans.
This was a big set-back. Not a total disaster - the first assembled tower would indeed function with various different dice, and the "ramp" made from a row of rods worked well. But I had got the size of the tray wrong - it was 8mm too narrow, and couldn't be assembled as designed. I tried a bodged solution, but it looked like a bodge. There was no alternative - another £80-odd to get a sheet of replacement parts cut.
Unfortunately the Christmas holidays intervened. Instead of having a few leisurely days to assemble the towers during the break, the request for more plastic languished in someone's in-tray until their return to work after the New Year. Ah well. It was all sorted by the end of the first week of January, the replacement parts had arrived, I'd tracked down a supplier for Fusion (and the necessary syringes to apply it - despite the relative ease that addicts seem to have when it comes to sourcing their syringes, a hobbyist faces a much more protracted search, aided by an overly-aggressive spam filter on my email account).
The most tedious part of the assembly process is cutting the 4mm dowels to the right length. It took over two feature films to get them all done (using a simple "measure, score and snap" process). The New Year television schedule wasn't a total waste of time, then.
The only really tricky part is clamping the pieces together prior to introducing the solvent. I tried a couple of different clamps before hitting on a style, and method, that worked. The tray needs careful handling to get the sides on square (and the tiny G-clamps I had were only just big enough to do the job); the tower itself was easier, but had a nasty habit of collapsing suddenly as I made fine adjustments or tightened the clamps up too much.
Once everything is clamped up, actually injecting the solvent is pretty easy. Almost entertaining, even, watching it wick along the length of the join. This is where having the pieces laser-cut would really score heavily - it made straight, square joins much easier to achieve, and the finished edges were straight without being sharp (on the 3mm thick acrylic, some of the edges were very sharp).
15 minutes later, release the clamps. Glue the base onto the tower, slide the rods into place, and use a bit of solvent on both sides of each rod to fix them permanently in place. The folding tray hinges on the bottom rod of the ramp, and was the only really tricky join - it's important to get enough glue in to fix the rod to the tray, but a tiny bit too much and it will start to wick along the side of the tower, and weld the hinge so it won't work. Thankfully this didn't happen to any of the 8 (one got a tiny bit of solvent in somewhere it shouldn't, and the hinge squeaks a bit as a result, but this will ease with some use).
There we are. Job done. Each tower probably took about 2 hours to prepare and assemble, although having got the technique sorted now I reckon I could probably do a tower in about 45 minutes.
By making 8 of them, I had made 7 "good" ones and one that might be described as a prototype. Although it probably had a value (it's mostly square, reasonably tidy, and works fine) I destroyed what worth it had when I attempted to learn some polishing skills to remove some noticeable blemishes. As a result of the disaster that unfolded, leaving deep scuff marks on the back of the tower, I elected not to try to polish out any of the much less noticeable scratches and marks on the "good" towers. Hey, they're plastic. Although acrylic is pretty tough and hard-wearing, they will inevitably pick up a few marks along the way. Mine just come with a few built-in.
Actually, I think I'm over-stating the problem. You'll not notice any blemishes on the finished towers apart from on the test piece. I am, by nature, something of a perfectionist, though. For the same reason, I'm still not completely happy with the joins. Using Tensol did provide an almost invisible bond between pieces; the Fusion bond is good, but visible. I suspect that the solution may lie in controlling the atmosphere in which the bond is made, using applicators which are perfectly clean and unaffected by the solvent itself - a solution that lies way outside my means.
If one day someone wants to order several hundred of my dice towers, the answer will be to out-source production to somewhere that they perfect the assembly. And flame-polish the finished item. Does the world need several hundred deluxe acrylic dice towers, though?
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Dice Towers Done!
I'll do a full post tomorrow, but I just wanted to say YES! I've finished all eight of the dice towers.
Now it's a matter of finding homes for 6 or 7 of them. I wonder what people will think they are worth?
True cost - in terms of materials and tools, but allowing nothing for labour - probably amounts to about £45 each. Labour-wise, each one probably took about 2-3 hours (including the design work - by the end, I'd got assembly down to under an hour).
One of them squeaks a bit when folding up the dice tray (I'm guessing some glue got into the hinge part), and another just looks a bit scruffy around the joins (better than all my previous dice towers, but not as good as it's 7 siblings - I'll sell it half-price as a "factory second").
But overall I'm very happy with the results.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
A week speeds by ...
Was it really a week since my last post?
Seems like 3 days at the absolute most. Weird.
OK, work was pretty busy this week, and gaming was limited to giving my father a brief kicking at Battlelore, but still - a whole week? Are you sure? Wow.
I'm hoping that tomorrow will remain dry (somewhat optimistically, given the way it's been tipping it down ever since Christmas) so I can take Lauren to Sutton Park. As a thinly-veiled excuse to take some outdoor pictures, obviously. If it manages to stay dry for the requisite amount of time then I'll be back on here sometime later with the results; and I'll also put up a few shots of the finished dice towers (boy will I be glad to see the back of them).
Does anyone know if I can post movie clips here? I'm just thinking that one of the tower "at work" might be a good idea.
Seems like 3 days at the absolute most. Weird.
OK, work was pretty busy this week, and gaming was limited to giving my father a brief kicking at Battlelore, but still - a whole week? Are you sure? Wow.
I'm hoping that tomorrow will remain dry (somewhat optimistically, given the way it's been tipping it down ever since Christmas) so I can take Lauren to Sutton Park. As a thinly-veiled excuse to take some outdoor pictures, obviously. If it manages to stay dry for the requisite amount of time then I'll be back on here sometime later with the results; and I'll also put up a few shots of the finished dice towers (boy will I be glad to see the back of them).
Does anyone know if I can post movie clips here? I'm just thinking that one of the tower "at work" might be a good idea.
No photos today - I've been staring at transparent plastic for hours, and can't face getting the camera out.
The good news is that I have managed to assemble five out of the eight dice towers, and should get the rest done tomorrow - then I need to work out what people will actually pay for these little beauties.
The first one was a little ropey, thanks to poor preparation (fingerprints on the insides) and learning what order, and with what glues, they need assembling (I'll keep it as my "spare"). But I'm very happy with the other four (none of them have been flawless, flawless being defined as "Kohinohr diamond" standard).
I'll take a "family photo" of all eight tomorrow :)
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