I remember my dad instructing me how important it was to handle drill bits with care. “Very hard, but brittle – never leave them in the chuck or drop them on the floor – they break too easily”, I recall the warnings. I have since lost count of the number of drill bits I have snapped, most due to some less than perfect battery drill control, and the occasional clumsy ‘knocking the drill over on the bench over with the bit still chucked up’ antics (sorry dad), but I had never seen this before:

Sam went off with the super drill to the community farm to help …Continue reading »

If you have ever wanted to setup a business of any kind, even a social-enterprise like Flowering Elbow, you will no doubt be familiar with the stock advice to ‘create a brand for your enterprise’. You have to create a brand, so you can add value! You need a brand so people will remember you. Brand this, brand that, Brand, brand Brand… Could there be a more cringe-worthy way of advising people to be cool and memorable? In a perfect world people would judge you on what you do/make/teach/provide, but there must be something in this ‘branding’ business. Why else, for example, would people pay nearly 10 times more money for items or identical quality, that come from the same factory, who’s only difference is a small embroidered logo [ref name=”Tangential Rant”]Tangential rant:-  Fact is, people work off their emotional instincts a lot of the time. What we remember, the mental associations we build, are often primarily based on the immediate affect things have on us, before we get a chance to consciously think about their merits, or lack there of. The slightly sinister marketers have known this for a long time, and seek to utilise all our senses to get us buying. It’s why supermarkets spend millions meticulously planning every aspect of there store’s design, from the positioning of vents that pump out commercially formulated ‘bread’ smells, to the lighting level and temperature settings in specific zones of the store. Marketers play off our desires, and work with our smell, taste, and kinesthetic senses, which are not well equipped for logical reasoning. Even visual adversing is almost always designed to work this way, to make us imagine what it would be like to feel as good as their models look when they are wearing x, or driving y. [/ref]?

So anyway, good logos are simple, memorable and embody …Continue reading »

For over a year now I have been going to a ‘make and mend’ sewing sessions, run by the ever-inspiring Carys of Wench (a clothing label). Looking back, I can see that in this relatively short period I have learnt a great number of sewing techniques and completed many of my pet projects – some of which had been sitting in a dormant  pile for years.

One of the most important things I have learnt …Continue reading »

We are well please with the stand, so here we go with the drum itself… To begin with I spent a good long time umming and arring about the dimensions I wanted, and researching how the different proportions would likely affect the sound. I ended up designing it to be …Continue reading »

I have been meaning to post a few photos of this little capoeira drum (or atabaque) project for a while now. This is the first part, about the drum’s stand. The stand is a good place to start, as many of the same techniques are used in making the actual drum, but it is smaller and simpler than the drum itself. Traditionally the drum is made from Brazilian Jacaranda wood or Brazilian Rosewood, but as this is effectively impossible to get hold of here in Wales (due to the dwindling numbers of these trees in the tropics) that was out! What we wanted was a locally grown alternative. Ash, seemed to …Continue reading »

So in true amateur styleee, here is a first video of the Dust Sniper. Hope you enjoy. The full instructable is can be seen here and plans and a build guide for the cyclone filtration units is on our project pages here.

After a long spell of inactivity on the Dust Sniper front, I finally got going on the write up again. The full ‘Dust Sniper (quiet extractor system)‘ is now live on instructables. It is sturdy, quiet and very deadly to dust ;)

If you find it useful please be sure to vote for it because it is in a little competition. You have to be signed in to instructables to vote – you are already a member of instructables right ??  (If somehow you are not, don’t worry it is free to register). Update: We won a $50 voucher, a t-shirt and a bunch of other little bits in this competition so thanks to everyone who voted!

Here is a little ‘handmade Christmas present idea’ for people that are keen on cooking, but get nervous when the recipe book is out of sight (or just want to avoid getting raw egg or flour all over the pages!). The ‘recipe book sanctuary’, tirelessly holds the book open in the right place, can be angled to suit working preferences, and folds flat for convenient storage – not that we would want to hide away such a lovely thing…

It is not the most challenging woodworking project, but as always the trick is in …Continue reading »

Update: you can now check out a video of my 10 year quest for a better bandsaw here: https://youtu.be/WmfpUttxdL8 

Why want an especially quiet bandsaw? To start with, it’s just more human friendly to use a machine that is not screaming away while you are trying to focus on doing good work.  We might also want to consider neighbourly angst levels – if, like me, your paranoid you are annoying everyone in a mile radius, and making the dogs howl with displeasure, you will not be getting good bandsaw using vibes.

“Noise causes stress: the onset of …Continue reading »