29 August 2026
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Design and Print… with a time limit

This morning we were helping with a work party at church and one of the tasks was cleaning all of the children’s toys. One was a toy kitchen and I spotted that the latch for one of the doors had broken, meaning the door wouldn’t stay shut and making the edge of the door into a hazard as it projected out. Since there were quite a lot of other people working there, I decided to pop home to design and print a replacement. The twist here was that I was under a strict time limit – Jane and I needed to be gone by midday so I had about 1.5 hours to design the part, get it printed and get back to church to install it.

Measuring and design takes a while but the real challenge is that, to see how a piece comes out, you need to print it – 15 minutes plus cooling time before lifting it off the bed for the final piece. That meant I couldn’t work through many iterations.

I started with the base plate – fairly simple but a bit more than just a rectangle with a couple of holes. Only having the broken piece to hand, I had to stick fairly closely to it otherwise I might have got back to church and found it didn’t fit. I did print a base plate while I worked on the next bit of the design, to check that my measuring up was good.

Where I did slightly fall down was the two cylinders that catch the other bit of the latch. On the first complete version, they were a bit on the small side. I redesigned to what you see above in grey but time was running short and I had to get back. It turns out that first version did work although I think this one will be more robust and I’ll switch it round sometime soon.

Anyway, it was a good exercise to push my skills by working under a time limit and, pending seeing how it works out in use, I’m pleased with the result.

28 August 2026
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Songs I Didn’t Play

Tonight I had planned to go to the Open Mic at the Hathern Club but, by the time I’d finished working in the garden, catching up with something that had come up at work and then thinking about dinner, my time to finish working on songs and get across there had passed. The songs I would have played were:

Jolene (Dolly Parton – RIP)
Emmaretta (Deep Purple)
Valerie (The Zutons / Amy Winehouse)

The first is a song by a woman about a woman. It’s “conceit” is that the protagonist is asking the antagonist not to steal her “man” away. That is an unusual approach and a beautiful song which I love to play despite the gender issue.

The Deep Purple song is less well known and is the one I was least confident in. I’ve played it before but it was a while ago. This one is a fairly straightforward song by a man / men to a woman.

I was going to finish on another song about a named woman. Here it was originally written by a man but perhaps became more famous because of Amy Winehouse’s cover. That was the equivalent of me singing Jolene although Winehouse definitely had the better voice! I’ve seen a video that features the real woman behind the song, which adds some fascinating background to the song:

27 August 2026
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Rough Shapes

Sometimes in 3D design, you want the opposite of the smooth shapes I mentioned earlier this week. It can even be, as it was for me, another stage of the same project. Depending on your software, it may be easy, hard or impossible to create them at the modelling stage but an excellent solution which I tried out for the first time this week is BumpMesh, created by Stefan of CNC Kitchen. You can import your model, apply a texture and then export the result to slice and print.

The result I got was very impressive and I’m looking forward to finding more projects where I can make use of it. As with most things in the 3D printing world, it is always worth trying a small sample first. I did that by virtue of the object I was printing not having enough support and falling over partway through the print. Not only did I add better support but I also realised I’d dialled the texture depth down to the point where it look just like bad printing rather than the wood grain effect I was after.

26 August 2026
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Looking Down on the Back Garden – August 2026

If you click on the picture below and scroll back through my album of garden shots from the same position over the last few years, you can tell it has been a long, hard summer:

Some stuff is doing well but a lot of the plants are pretty dried out compared to August in most previous years. Still, at least we’re starting to get some rain again and things are beginning to green up once more.

25 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Smooth Shapes

This evening I’ve been working on some 3D design where I’m trying to create a moderately complex shape with a degree of rounding. I already had the basic design worked out in Inkscape but, if you simply import an SVG image into OpenSCAD, you can’t apply any profile to the top and bottom edges. For that you need the shape expressed as a path.

I spent some time looking into a library called PathBuilder. I figured out how to extract the path details from an SVG file and load them up as a shape but got stuck on converting the file into a valid path that I could use tools like BOSL2’s offset_sweep on. In other words, after a long period of messing around, I wasn’t really any further forward than just importing the SVG.

In the end, I turned to “turtle” graphics to work out my path. For what I did, I probably would have been better off just manually setting up the points but the turtle approach would allow me more control over creating more complex shapes like arcs rather than just jumping through a series of [x,y] points. Anyway, job done… I think. I’ll let the test piece finish off overnight and then I can test it in the morning.

24 August 2026
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Kale Crisps

One of the recipes that caught my eye in Jamie Oliver’s Easy Air Fryer book was Kale Crisps. I tried them yesterday and they were a bit overdone but I’ve dialled things down a bit and here is what I’ve ended up with.

I started with a pre-chopped bag of kale from Lidl (my current batch of allotment kale is still much too small to harvest), extracted a portion to a bowl and removed the larger bits of stalk. I then dropped in a generous pinch of sea salt and a dash or two of olive oil, which I rubbed into the leaves. That then got cooked for four minutes in the air fryer at 175°C, given a good shake and then cooked for the same period again. The result was spot on – green, crispy and an excellent garnish for tonight’s meal (chilli con carne).

The original recipe was 10 minutes in total at 200°C with a shake halfway through. Larger pieces might have coped with that but, for the pickings from a supermarket bag, taking it down a bit turned out perfectly.

23 August 2026
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Ephesians in 3 Words

I was helping with the music at a different church this morning so wasn’t able to attend the “community Sunday” service at Hathern Baptist but I did prepare a couple of video contributions. Apparently the second one didn’t load properly so I’ve put it on my YouTube channel for those who wanted to know what it contained:

It is only 2.5 minutes long but that was all I needed to share my favourite summary of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, based on a classic book by Watchman Nee. Six chapters of the Bible boiled down to three words, which neatly encapsulate the message of the letter.

22 August 2026
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Plastic Beer

This evening I picked up an “XXL” pack of Perlenbacher Gold beer from Lidl. It was only on getting it home and deciding to try one that I realised the bottles were plastic rather than glass. I would imagine that is quite a weight saving, leading to a shipping cost saving and thence contributing to low cost. I paid £9.99 for 9 bottles, so not much over a quid for 500ml of beer.

It must be one of the cheapest beers on the UK market but what is it like? Although it claims to have been brewed according to German beer purity laws, I did find it had a bit of artificial taste. It reminded me of cheap canned lager, so I don’t think it is the result of the plastic bottle but just mass produced beer produced to hit a low cost point. It isn’t quite down to the level of beer that I’ve bought in the past specifically to make slug traps but it would do best served cold on a hot day and I think I prefer their (even cheaper) Perlenbacher Zero (6 x 330ml cans for £2.99).

I’ll have to try both side by side but not this evening.

21 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Two Toads in Two Holes?

This evening, I decided to try toad in the hole (sausages cooked in batter) in the air fryer. In theory, I could have cooked it directly in the basket but it would potentially be hard to lift out and clean up without scratching the surface and the hot air would only be coming from on top. Instead, I decided to use a couple of oval ceramic dishes although that meant I had to use both drawers.

Overall it was pretty quick and easy – about 7 minutes in total to get the sausages (chopped into sections) browned and then another 12 minutes to cook the batter. The sausages could probably have done with a few minutes on a lower heat to start rendering the fat and then a couple more minutes on a higher setting to finish off. Likewise the batter stage might have benefited from either a lower start or being covered with foil for the first stage. At the end, the top was a bit overdone while lower down was cooked but the sausages looked a bit anaemic in parts. However, the speed was good, it was quicker than using an oven and the results were amply tasty.

The other challenge was that our trays, which allow air to circulate all round the cooking food, have raised bits in the middle. That makes them easier to lift out but is a pain to balance hard bottomed cooking vessels on. I wonder if I ought to try and find something like some silicone disks to act as non-slip feet and raise them up the small distance needed? Unfortunately that isn’t a job for my 3D printer as I can’t work with materials that have enough heat resistance for the inside of an air fryer but it does look like there are some options available to purchase. I’ll keep my eyes open for a few days first though in case I’ve got anything already in my possession which might do the job.

20 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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That Sucks?

A little while ago, I purchased a handheld airblower. It is the kind of thing often used for dusting electronics and I preferred the idea of a rechargeable one as opposed to the aerosol type. I think it will be more sustainable and the aerosol models can sometimes spit condensed liquid onto your devices!

It has been great but then I recently discovered another use for it. It blows air out of the nozzle at the front but that means it sucks air in from the inlet at the back. There is a model on Printables that creates an additional nozzle so you can get a reasonable vacuum seal on things like filament storage bags. It won’t be as good as a dedicated vacuum pump but it works pretty well.

I also want to use it in the kitchen so I’ve designed and printed my own extension piece. This makes the nozzle about twice as long and also adds a mesh at the end. That allows it to be poked into bags more easily and gives some protection against sucking up unwanted contaminants into the blower. I haven’t decided whether to publish my design yet in case it does cause problems but I’ll consider it after more testing.

The new design trick for me was using a part set to have no top or bottom surfaces, which I added in the slicer rather than in building the base model. That means I didn’t have to design a fine mesh and hope it printed okay but, instead, I’m simply exposing the infill (for which I selected a simple grid).

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