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‘Unrolled’ 360° shot.

As the world around us grinds to a halt, amidst Covid-19 craziness, I’m enjoying spendibg time on the man-cave/shed that is ‘Ye Olde Workshoppe’.

The fairly recent acquisition of a Triton Mk3 workbench – with built in circular table saw and the doings for mounting a router – has entailed some serious rearranging.

I destroyed an old chest/cupboard that I inherited from the previous owner, which up until fairly recently had been home to a lot of power tools and assorted bric-a-brac. It was horrid, lacked a back (and consequently became a dust/debris trap), and old and knackered.

I’ve still got all the timber from dismantling it. I intend to use the Triton table-saw to cut it all up for kindling. The contents are now either up on the tool wall, which I’ve been reworking, temporarily of no fixed abode, or migrated to another smaller chest of drawers.

Viewed from the bandsaw.

We’ve accumulated several doors: one purportedly to replace our current front door, another for the greenhouse, and two or three others intended for outbuildings. The largest of these I’ve now moved out of the workshop, to free up space. The others have been moved over to where our still as yet unused kiln is secreted.

I’ve moved the bandsaw over to where the doors were previously. And the Triton is now kind of between where the bandsaw was, and the vacated spot where the dismantled chest was. I’ve relocated the (also as yet unused!) Kity planer/thicknesser to a position atop two storage chests, on the left of the room, by the bookshelves (the latter containing more paints and other sundries than books). This has freed up the aforementioned smaller chest, which I’ve moved over to the area under the main window, that looks down the garden.

 

I might put the drill-press on this unit. I did think about having the planer/thicknesser there, but as I recently located a load of tool storage racks along the bottom of the window, and they’d be inaccessible behind the pretty chunky Kity unit, I decided not to. The view from the window is, for the most part, blocked by the timber storage racks I put up, and all the timber I’ve accumulated.

There’s still an awful lot of stuff without a proper home. But it’s a lot better than it was, and even a little more spacious. even though it’s now late March,  I’ve found the concrete floor is like a huge slab of ice. Working in the shed for extended periods has been numbing/swelling my feet. So I put down some cardboard, as an insulating carpet type layer, and brought in a couple of heaters.

Viewed from the ‘kiln’ end.

I also painted some areas of the back/tool-wall, which hadn’t been painted before (having been hidden behind stuff),  the internal side of the door, and my DIY window frames. The roof needs replacing altogether. And I’ve a mind to clad the internal framework, and paint the resulting inner walls in a white, or off-white. If I fill the cavities with insulating materials, and replace some rotten/broken boards, along with a new roof, it might even be possible to keep it warm!

Rearranging the larger ‘static’ power-tools and some of the furniture, and losing the ugly old chest, also lead to rearranging and further developing tool storage on the tool-wall and elsewhere. I always seem to rather enjoy working on this particular aspect of the workshop. The idea is, however, that I’ll soon stop with the rearranging, etc, and actually start using the workshop for more creative things!

I’ve been taking a few pics as I go along with the funky 360° camera I have. I’ll post some here in due course, hopefully. But I need to work out how to embed them as scrollable 360° images. Otherwise it’ll just be screenshots of them flattened out…

Teresa asked me to make a towel rail or shelf, for the bathroom. So I knocked this together. I’m definitely getting better and quicker at stuff like this. Plus my newly reorganised workshop is way more ergonomic and productive.

New bathroom shelf…

Ar the time of posting the second coat of paint is still drying. I may go over the upper shelf edging, as bandsaw striations are still visible. I may even route a little ogee type edge… hmm!?

… with towel rails.

Even though I masked around the shelves, I need to go back and touch up some of the surrounding areas. But, all told, I’m very happy with this. And I knocked it out double quick, which was satisfying.

I actually finished this a while back. See pics!

The finished table, laid out for a game.

Well, in true Sebulous-stylee, I say finished, but… Well, I still need to mark the baulk-line, D and colour spots. And I haven’t done the base/legs. Although I may not do the latter at all. I may just leave as is, and place it on other supports when playing. As indeed I already have done.

And from another angle.

The biggest issue is space, in our tiny and very narrow home, which is also chock-full of stuff, such as the recently acquired upright piano, dining table and chairs, an armchair, the hard-top for my MX5, and my modelling area (a table, sideboard, and a lorra, lorra model-making bits’n’pieces).

In the long run I hope this will be in an outbuilding games-room. But for now it’s in the lounge, or rather dining room. It was a fun project. And for something around £50-75 in expenditure, plus my time restoring it, we have a fun little snooker/pool table.

‘It’s not a philosophy, it’s not a religion; it’s just lessons learned from cancer.’*

*Espinosa on his ideas in general, and his concept of ‘Yellows’ in particular, p.173.

Espinosa survived childhood cancer, spending a lot of time between the ages of 14-24 in hospital, losing a lung, a leg, and more – including many fellow patients, or ‘eggheads’, as he calls them (from the baldness caused by chemo’) – to the disease. This book is one of the things to come out of his experience.

Surviving cancer is a great/amazing and, thankfully, ever more common thing. And not to be sniffed at. However, as a generator of self-help literature it has, in my limited experience, a chequered past. I was once gifted a book by Louise Hay, who survived cervical cancer, which shared the positivity aspect that is the chief strength of this book, but then went seriously bonkers in ‘diagnosing’ the supposed causes of disease.

Fortunately Espinosa seems more rationally tethered to reality than Hay. Although that said, whilst I like many aspects of it, I don’t buy fully into either his core ‘yellow’ idea, or even less so his (to me) arbitrary choice of 23 ‘yellows’ in your life. His concept of a ‘yellow’ is essentially someone more than a friend but less than (or different to) a lover. If you’re keen to understand his ideas, read the book. I’m not going to synopsise them any further here.

Chapters are on the whole plentiful but very short, which, together with the informal writing style, make this is an easy if rather whimsical read. It’s certainly more poetic and thoughtful than scientific or intellectual. Like me, the author likes lists. But, and again like me, despite his penchant for lists the overall feel of the book is somewhat loose and random feeling. One little unexpected nugget; I like that there’s a very positive and somewhat surprising chapter on ‘wanking’!

For those affected by cancer, whether personally or indirectly (and in many ways most of us are), this may well be worth a read. Beyond that rather particular aspect, the primary and more general thing I take from this book is that it’s best to reframe potentially negative events in as positive a light as one can. A stunningly obvious ‘lesson’, in all honesty. But nevertheless one a great many of us find hard to put into practice.

Three stars seems mean, and four stars generous, for so slight and whimsical a book. So I’ll give it three and a half.

* Here’s a link to an article on the design of this book-cover: https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/may-2012/book-designer-jon-gray-on-creating-the-yellow-world/

My pal Patrick just gave me an EHX Lumberjack Log’ OD pedal that he fried by connecting to 48v, instead of 9v. I may have to give up on it. But I’m going to try and repair it.

Here are a few pictures of the guts. I can see no obviously fried components. It also looks very complex: lots and lots of components… gulp!

Fried Lumberjack

Fried Lumberjack

I’m hoping that in time I’ll be able to locate and replace any ‘fried’ components. But what do I do? Can I simply test either side of each component, for example, and thereby determine where the signal path breaks down? Initial responses to a post I made on the EHX forum are a bit scary, suggesting the whole kit caboodle might well be jiggered.

Here’s the link to the EHX forum: https://www.ehx.com/forums/viewthread/9922/

Some while ago I got a pool table off Freecycle, with a view to restoring it. I then bought some green felt. Since dismantling the table, which I did very soon after getting it, the project stalled.

The old felt, ready to come off.

Today I finally got the table top out of the shed (acquisition of a Triton Mk3 workbench required a rearrangement of the contents of the shed, to get the workbench in!). I removed the felt, and then laboriously removed all the tiny little staples with which it had been fixed to the table-top.

Felt and ten-zillion staples removed.

The table top surface then required some cleaning and sanding. Then it was time to find the new felt, and iron the creases out of it. This took a good while longer than anticipated. Partly, perhaps, due to ironing the felt under a protective layer of old towel.

Ironing creases out of the felt.

In the pic above you can really see where I’ve ironed sufficiently, and where there’s more to be done.

Getting the creases out took quite a while!

Annoyingly, whilst I took two pics during ironing, I didn’t take any during the attaching of the new felt. Having watched several YouTube vids on pool/snooker table re-covering, I’d learned that you work from the middle of the longer sides, pulling in two directions, to stretch the cloth out taught and flat. I had a few woodworking crocodile type clamps to help in this process. The fixing was done with a staple gun.

Whereas the original cloth was stapled to the very edges of the top, I had sufficient material on hand to staple around the sides, into which my cheap staple gun could easily punch. I then had enough left over to further secure the cloth to the undersides.

Time to stop… finish tacking tomorrow!

I tried the first shorter side with the staple-gun. But, as I’d feared, it wasn’t man enough to penetrate the tougher top/bottom surfaces (the whole table top seems to be a big laminated block made up of compressed layers). So I did the opposite end with small sharp tacks. It was about midnight by this time. So I had to stop banging the tacks in with a hammer!  I’ll finish that job off tomorrow, or rather, later today.

I also ordered a set of 1 & 7/8″ snooker balls, and six pockets, off Amazon. The old net bags were shot, the leather was gone, and the metal parts were rusty. So it’ll be nice to have shiny new pockets along with the pristine new felts. Sadly I don’t have enough felt left from the re-covering of the table to do the rails. So it’s another trip to Boyes or elsewhere for more felt tomorrow as well. I hope they have enough of the right shade of green!

I’m planning to rebuild the pool table without the collapsible frame or legs that it came with. We can just pop it over our gate-leg table when we want to play. This makes the re-build that bit less involved. All that then remains is to get a cue or two and start playing… can’t wait

Saving Private Ryan has an excellent if weird premise at its heart. It’s excellent for it’s plausibility and humanity, and yet weird for how the desire to save one life, amidst so much wasteful and indiscriminate death, and at the cost of yet more lives, makes war itself and our relationship with it seem very paradoxical.

That premise is that the US military, upon learning that three of fours brothers Ryan, all enlisted in the US armed forces, have been killed, decide that the fourth and final surviving brother, the titular Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon) must be found, saved, and sent home to his grieving but hopefully grateful family.

A stirring quote from an American master of stirring quotes, Abe Lincoln, is used to bookend the movie, as are more contemporary scenes of the elderly Ryan visiting a US armed forces cemetery. I won’t say more than that regarding the plot, as I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone coming to it fresh. Suffice it to say that from the opening scene of the WWII action, as US troops land on Omaha beach, on D-Day, the film grips the viewer and takes them on an intense and thrilling journey.

Everything about this film is extremely well done, from the meticulous attention to detail in terms of settings and uniforms, equipment, etc, to the superb direction and acting – Tom Hanks is particularly brilliant – making for a film that combines a serious-minded depiction of both the excitement and horrors of war with a sense of respect for history and an adroit gift for moving and exciting strorytelling.

In a word, brilliant!

Copeland with world’s oldest known musical instrument, a bone flute.

Finally got around to watching Stewart Copeland’s Adventures in Music today.

I’d had lunch with my mum, and she mentioned watching it. Had I? She and husband Malcolm said they’d liked it, but not been blown away by it. They’d liked each episode more; sceptical about the first, etc. And a pal, John Morgan, was raving – or should I say singing it’s praises? – about it on Facebook.

So I binge watched all three episodes today. First off, as a drummer who loved and was influenced by Copeland as a teenager, I just enjoyed watching him enthuse about music, a subject I share his fascination for.

Structurally, I seem to have had the reverse experience to my mum and her husband. I liked episode one enormously, and two built on that. But three – as good as it still was – lost me a little, as it seemed to become less analytical, in particular in relation to the religious connections he was exploring, and the (for me, at least) vexed subject of ‘spirituality’.

Funnily enough, earlier in the day I’d been listening to Frank Zappa, and one song that came on and really struck a chord with me was Cosmick Debris, in which the singer takes to task a new age type bullshit peddler. In the final episode of Copeland’s series, when gospel star CeCe Winan says ‘music was created by God… I don’t know if any of us can really articulate how this [the ‘transcendent’ effect] happens, except that God made it happen’, I’m thinking, er… no… that’s a typical religious explanation: you can’t explain something, and so, for you, God fills in those gaps. Like Zappa, I’m not buying that junk.

That I don’t agree with what I deem to be simple-minded religious zealotry is no surprise for me. But someone else who kind of came a bit of a surprise cropper was Stephen Pinker, with his ‘cheesecake’ angle. As a rationalist/humanist, I believe I share certain many aspects of Pinker’s approach/worldview. But, like Stewart, I’m kind of nonplussed by this. Maybe Pinker’s just got a tin ear? Or is otherwise missing something?

Plenty of other scientists, numerous even in similar areas to Pinker’s own field of expertise, including some who appeared here (Dr Nicholas Connard, Daniel Levitin, and others), think otherwise. Some, for example, and I can tell Copeland likes this idea (as do I), believe that music predates and maybe even helped create language. From this perspective it cannot be dismissed as mere cheesecake.

The series is overwhelmingly positive in tone, which is no bad thing. But it does mean that some areas, areas that might’ve benefitted from deeper exploration – had this been commissioned in the Attenborough at the helm era of BBC2, it might have been a 13 part sledgehammer! – are glossed over way too briefly and simplistically.

One of these relates to how as we grow in age and experience, our identification with certain types of music evolves. Hearing simply that we love music, and we especially love it in groups (not an exact quote, but a simplification of a recurrent theme) left me wondering why for me this is not really the case. Certain kinds of music are anathema to me, frankly. And I know it has a lot to do with what they signify to me regarding belonging (or not) to certain groups.

Still, all in all, this was a good series. Too short, perhaps, and maybe even a little too personality driven [1] and ‘lite’. But very good nonetheless. Lots in there to enjoy. Lots to think on.

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NOTES:

[1] Copeland nearly always seems borderline manic, and his effervescent energy bubbles away throughout the series. At times you can see him consciously reining it in. Whilst occasionally it bubbles over in a less controlled manner. Sometimes this is great. But occasionally one senses it masks or precludes other possibilities… if you know what I mean?

 

Some years ago I built a set of four sound treatment panels, all like the one pictured above. They were up in the walls of my music/drum studio, when we lived in Cambourne. We’ve been in our home in March three years now. And I’m finally getting around to feeling I must have a working studio space again.

The small box room, which is a library-cum-office at present, and now has my Mapex kit set up in it, is going to be the only place I can realistically have a studio immediately. I could use our guest room, perhaps? But we want to be free to let that out if need be. And I don’t want all my music gear in a room that’s got virtual strangers passing through.

The box room is tiny, and full of bookshelves and books. Indeed, it was full of sundry other stuff as well, until very recently. I had a clear out, and these treatment panels were in there. Rather than try and find somewhere else to store them, I thought why not cover them in a nicer looking material, and use them in the box room?

Amazon wound up being the cheapest place I could source the hessian sacking type material I’ve opted to use. The coarse weave allows sound through, but breaks it up. Plus it looks quite nice! And I love the colour. There’s no wall space empty, so they’ll be going up on the hideously textured artex ceiling. Yay! The less of that visible the better.

Two panels are done so far. The first came out very nicely. I’m using a staple gun to fasten the hessian. The second, whilst an improvement in some ways, has creases still visible in the cloth on the front. Which is annoying. How many of the four I’ll be able to get on the ceiling, I don’t know. And whether there’s room to suspend any of them, as is often advised with such sound treatment panels, I very much doubt.

But as ever, making stuff oneself is fun and satisfying.

I bought a Mapex Meridian kit a few years back, with a 24″ bass drum (woah!), for gigs where I needed kick to cut through even if un-amplified. I’ve hardly ever gigged it, truth be told. In part because the snare had no snare beds, and sounded terrible as a result. It had a kind of sandpapery asthmatic wheeze on every hit; no real definition.

Marking out and filing down the snare beds.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to cut snare beds myself, or find someone to do it for me. In the end, as usual, I watched a load of YouTube vids, and did nothing. Until now, that is. I finally sorted it out, and it was a piece of cake. And it’s totally sorted the snare out.

Pics show the stages, from masking the shell and drawing where the beds go, to filing them down (by hand), and then examining them on a flat slab (marble) with a light inside the drum.

Checking the beds on a marble slab, with a light.

Must admit, I’m dead chuffed…

PS – Anyone else ever bought off the shelf drums that don’t have snare beds but really ought to? I actually got this kit second hand. It seems the previous owner never noticed or was bothered by the issue (they said they’d had and regularly played it for a couple of years!).