It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but today I added a new button it’s over there on the top right of the page.

This links through to a paypal system that allows people to send me money. For the moment it’s free form, but I’ve titled it ‘buy me a pint’. Obviously if anyone wants to give me much more than that I won’t say no, but if you enjoy reading my blog, or use witter and want to cheer me up by buying me a drink, then a couple of quid is always welcome.

I write this blog normally drinking coffee in my local coffee shop, so any donations that offset that cost will only help with the ‘running costs’

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I then lost all inspiration for what I wanted to do with the block. I probably shouldn’t have cut anything until I had a firm plan in mind, but sometimes I go to my workshop and wind up just pottering, doing bits and pieces of different things whilst listening to a podcast. And so I cut the block with vague thoughts of doing a small hollow form, but nothing truly planned out.

Then along came my next woodturning magazine and it had a nice little hollowing project that fit the bill perfectly. This is the second time I’ve found a project in woodturning magazine that suited me perfectly, in both tools and material available to me. One of my biggest frustrations with the magazine is the number of projects that require some absurd array of tools or something particularly special that the average person can’t possibly have laying around. Planer thickenesers are a particular example, I’d like one but I have no room. Drum sanders being another which are required for similar purposes. I prefer examples which show clever ways to achieve what is necessary with basic tools and equipment. That said of course I scarcely notice the fact that pretty much everything is easier with a bandsaw now that I have one. Where as for the dark and terrible times pre-bandsaw, I was just as frustrated by the projects that were hard to even start because I had to hand saw wood into sensible blanks.

Anyhow, I set to work on this project which required you to get a basic exterior shape, then part the narrow neck section off. This then allows you to hollow the body through a relatively large hole, which you later glue the neck section back into, matching grain. In this way you can have a very narrow neck opening, and a pretty thin walled hollow form.

Here with the neck glued back on you can see that the join is hard to see, and the distinctive grain helps to disguise the connection.

Once the glue had dried I could shape the neck and use some groves to further disguise where the join is.

You can also see that I’m supporting the neck end with the rubbery end of a shuttlecock stuck onto a revolving centre, this then supports and doesn’t mark the wood.

Here it is with all the shaping finished and the support removed

Sadly, at this point, just as everything was going so well, I was parting the vase off at the base when disaster struck. I had worked too thin at the base, and the stress of parting off caused it to rip a small hole in the bottom of the vase. Revealing the base to be about 2 mm thick. As ever when these things happen I was not very happy. It seems that I spend more time recovering from the mistakes I’ve made than I do making successful things. ;-(

In this case I decided to turn a thin base, in the same contrasting wood that I was going to use for a stopper. I could then glue the base on and at least try to make it look like an intentional design rather than the cover up of a msitake. The slightly frustrating thing is that I know it will now look like I obviously hollowed through the bottom and covered that, rather than the more interesting method I actually used.

In any case the final piece looks pretty nice, and I really was happy with how it went up to that moment.

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Inspired by this I turned back to a project that I screwed up a year or so back. I was making a little lidded box in spalted beech. All was going well enough but as I came to hollow the lid I managed a nasty catch which sent it flying and damaged the finished exterior. I was then unable to get it mounted true again, and wound up finding that the exterior of the lid and the box were no longer quite lined up. I gave up in frustration at having gotten so far and then irrecoverably screwed up.

Or so I thought at the time, it was certainly true of my skill level and experience at the time that I could see no way to fix what I had done. However I came back to it with fresh eyes and new experience and realised that I could at least try to recover the piece.

I gripped the lid in my long jaws, and trued the the section that inserts into main body, making it a little longer to give a reasonable join to the base. I also hollowed the top and finished it, leaving just the outside to deal with.

This meant that I could now grip the base in the jaws and using kitchen roll form a tight join holding the lid in place. Wit the piece rejoined fairly tightly I could true up the outside again. I had left it pretty thin in the first instance, so I was concerned that too far out and I might make one spot far too thin, but as it happens it was not so far out as all that. I was able to get the lid and body to join nicely and taper the top of the lid differently to remove the dents left by the original catch and the chuck jaws. finishing the lid at this stage I was then able to remove that and focus on finishing the body. This basically just involved expanding the long jaws into the inside of the body, with some kitchen roll to minimise damage from the jaws themselves. I was conscious of the thin walls and careful not to expand too much. This allowed me again to clean up the bottom of the base, and match the profile to the new shape of the lid.
Again there was a risk that I had gone too thin originally and left not much room for this kind of alteration, however it turned out to be fine.

And so it was that I was able to rescue another mistake and one again prove that short of complete destruction, there is always hope!

Next job is to fix a spalted beech bowl that I went through the bottom of.. I’m thinking that I can neaten up the hole and then turn a contrasting plug to fill it and make a feature of it.

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Just as we were really getting in to the holiday, something kinda crazy happened. A volcano erupted thousands of miles away in Iceland. Well I say erupted, it started venting ash high into the atmosphere. It is so easy, in a modern world of aeroplanes and tiny pocket computers that can pinpoint your location on the planet surface by talking to satellites and all that great stuff, to forget that our modern existence is so easily disrupted. I mean a volcano!?
Anyhow, due to this our flight home was cancelled by EasyJet.  Oh no…what a shame, stuck in Cyprus for extra time… In fact when I got to rebook a flight it was due to be 10 days before we could go home! On the surface this sounds like an awesome thing. However, I really needed to be back at work, as did many of the people now stuck. We had plans for the following weekend that needed to rescheduled. And it is far from certain what financial support I will get for the delay. EasyJet’s terms and conditions pretty clearly state that they only expect to have to provide a flight home sometime. Though there is lots of talk about them being liable for some cost of living expenses. My insurance, I discovered did cover £35 per 12 hour period per person insured. But only up to a maximum of £200 per head. So that’s something, but 10 extra days in a foreign country is not a cheap proposition. Fortunately friends that we were staying with have a friend with a villa on Cyprus and were able to arrange for us to stay there at a reasonable price to limit our unexpected costs.

I managed to contact work, and there was some discussion about how I could get to do work as semi-normal from Cyprus, so not just extra holiday. As it happens IBM has an office on Cyprus, but it was not immediately clear that they would have any equipment or space to use. I also discovered that the office is in Nicosia, which was a long way from where we were now staying. So I decided to investigate buying a netbook (this is definitely the last time I travel without at least a netbook with me. I love my n900, but I can’t work on it). There was sadly never any question that IBM would be able to reimburse me for it, so I made sure it was something that I would actually like to own. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a netbook for a while and I found an Acer Aspire One. Turns out there are a bunch of models beneath that name, I got the Nav50. With that in hand I rushed back to an internet café in time to find out that IBM Nicosia could provide a laptop and a desk, and IBM would pay for me to get taxi there and stay in a hotel. The strange bureaucracy of big business means that there would be no problem spending €500-€600 on taxi and hotel costs, but not €330 for a netbook to let me work from where I was. This in stark contrast to my friend working for another smaller company who was quickly given the green light to buy a netbook and just expense it.

In any case it suited me better to stay with my beautiful fiancée and our friends and just work from an internet café on the beach, I now just have to make sure I get plenty of good use out of the netbook, and I am finding it really quite nice to use. The keyboard seems pretty nice at least so I may take to writing my blog on it more often.
It took a bit of doing but ultimately I got up and running and was actually able to work fairly normally from an internet café on the beach in Cyprus. Sufficiently so that I could see me doing this more intentionally in the future, extend a holiday across more weeks, but work for some of the time.

Yesterday a colleague, also stuck, but working from the IBM office, let me know that our rebooked flight was now also showing as cancelled! However he had managed to book a flight for today, so full of hope I returned to the website and tried to amend my flight, and was horrified to find the earliest flight it would let me rebook was another 5 days on the original 10 day delay! If someone was going to be picking up the tab for living costs I would have been reasonably happy, but as it is my bank balance was not happy about the news. So I found a phone number and made an expensive call….

After 5 minutes on hold, at a minimum of 39ppm, I very nearly hung up and accepted my fate. However, shortly after I considered it the phone was answered. After a short conversation I was told that there are ’2 flights tomorrow, which would you like’…erm the first one! I was expecting a call in which I begged them to cover some cost of living for the crazy delay, only to find out that flights were available the next day, despite their website being quite happy for me to book my flight a back over 2 weeks later than the original date (for a 1 week holiday).

And so it is that I am writing this blog post, on my shiny new Acer Aspire One, on a flight home from Cyprus, just 5 days later than intended. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster, on the one hand I am sad to be leaving, part of me was looking forward to another week or so in the glorious sunshine working during the day and having fun with friends in the evening. However part of me is also very happy to be returning home, to my cats, and my comforting familiar routine. I foresee a certain amount of bartering with EasyJet and insurance companies to cover my costs as much as possible, but I’ve had a really nice time and have enjoyed my Cypriot adventure.

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My copy of woodturning magazine arrived and in it was a 1 day project ‘spinner box’ the idea of this project is that the finialed lid doubles as a spinner.
It’s an interesting project with several stages, and it doesn’t require too much wood.

First reducing a 55mmx55mmx65mm block to round, and forming a spiggot on each end, you part about 15mm off one end to form the lid, then hollow the base.

Hollowing and finishing the base went smoothly and I got to the above stage.
Then I started work on the base of the lid.

Forming the curve first, then reducing the dimameter and checking against the base for fit.
That done I remounter the base and fit the lid inside using kitchen roll to make sure it held tight enough to be turned like this.
First drilling a 6mm hole for the finial to fit into.

Then I had to switch chuck jaws to narrow jaws to form a spiggot on the end of a 10mmx10mmx65mm piece of mahogony that I had as a contrasting colour to the box.
This was glued into the lid and pinned in position with the tailstock.

At this point I think I should have left the glue drying, I didn’t have any of the type mentioned in the article so used some tightbond, but I think it’s curing time is quite long.
I went straight on and had some trouble with the finial shifting it’s position which I’m sure would have been avoided with patience.

The idea is to curve the top of the lid with the sides of the box and flow the curve into the finial. I struggled here because the mahogony split out badly at the base making it difficult to blend nicely. Perhaps more skill with a sharper tool, or just a denser wood to avoid this?

I think I got away with it, but with a thinner bottom to the finial than I had intended.

By this stage the glue had still not quiet dried so pulling the lid out was a careful manouver.
The last stage is to reverse the base to expand a chuck into the lid recess. Then shape the body and remove the spiggot.

I used the tailstock for support during initial shaping, then took it away whilst I gently removed the spiggot with very fine cuts from a bowl gouge.
Then just sanded and finished

At this point I decided to deviate from the design and try making the top a little like that of a chess rook. For this I used my indexing ring and marked out 3 sections from the lid ridge to remove with a chisel.

Then I hand sanded the low sections and finally completed my box

The grain in the sycamore isn’t very pronounced, but if you look closely you can see the grain match.

All in all it was a fun little project. And nothing went wrong…

What? It all went to plan, alright?…

Stop looking at me like that, what do you mean the sudden decision to do something different with the top was unnexpected….what of it?

Ok, ok… So *maybe* not everything went to plan.

Whilst gently taking off the spiggot, being super careful to use my spindle gouge as pictured in the article, I had a catch and the result was this :

If you live in Hampshire, you might have been able to hear my response to this catch right at the end of the project…

However, I came up with a new design that removed the damaged sections…never give up…never surrender.

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I decided to glue a spiggot on to help hold it and use the tailstock to pin everything in place whilst I turned the outside profile.

I refined the outside profile and cut a recess that would ultimately be the hole my box sat in. But would also allow me to reverse the piece and expand my 4 jaw chuck into the recess to turn the underside.

Here you can see that it’s quiet easy to judge thickness because it’s ‘winged’ you can see a translucent effect of the wings seeing the outside and inside profile

This made life fairly easy and at 2000rpm it was fairly smooth cutting despite big sections of any rotation being free air.

It’s fair to say I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as things were going well.
Then, just as I was reaching my desired thickness, just as I cut through the bottom of the recess…BANG! it exploded off the chuck, hitting the back wall and shattering in to smaller pieces.

At times like these I am glad I wear a full face shield. Not that anything hit me, but it’s easy to see how it could have. Always wear protection!

So far I’ve only actually found half of the pieces, I have no idea where the other half went.

Clearly the wood was simply not strong enough against the expansive force of the chuck once I’d removed most of the weight of wood.

And Mark made is look so easy….

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This brings a bunch of challenges. For me the first was wanting to separate my code into separate python files for the first time.

It took me a while to find what I needed to know, but it’s not all that hard. Just not all that obvious either…

Basically you want a structure that looks like this

app-folder – application.py

app-folder – applibsfolder – __init__.py

app-folder – applibsfolder – whatever.py

where applibs folder is what ever you want to call your collection of supporting files.

The ’special’ __init__.py file contains a list of imports. So for example

from whatever import *

That’s important since this is how things in those supporting files are made availiable to you main code.

It can then have an import of:

Import applibsfolder

so if your whatever.py has whateverClass in it, you can now refer to it as:

Applibsfolder.whateverClass()

Once I’d figured that out, I could write a class which handled threads, which could call back into my main logic.

Basically the heart of that class is a start method that uses

threading.Thread(target=self.refreshLoop, args=args, moreargs=moreargs).start()

The refreshLoop method can then be used to drive whatever. In witter I create one thread for each of the views that needs refreshing. I pass in a refresh interval, which is used to drive a time.sleep to stop the thread doing anything between refreshes.

The other important thing I discovered is that the thread must not do anything directly with the UI. Doing so caused nasty errors which killed the app. originally my feed refresh routines used the following to raise notifications:

hildon.hildon_banner_show_information(self.window,"","Tweets Received")

This references ’self.window’ and I believe this is what caused my trouble. This morning I found the following alternative:

 note = osso.SystemNote(self.osso_c)

 result = note.system_note_infoprint("Tweets Received")

This hooks from the osso context created at the start of the application. Since it is not part of your apps UI it seems to allow threads to use it without causing nasty errors.

The update methods do load data into some liststores. Which are backing the treeviews in the UI, so those can be updated, and the UI will reflect those changes.

There are of course many complications to threads that need to be controlled. Suddenly you find that resources might get updated by two things at once. One way to control this is to use some primitive locking. By setting a flag when you enter a method, and unsetting it at the end. You can attempt to provide a structure of checking whether another thread is already updating the same resources.

You can take a look at witter’s source code here

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