Project Review

November 26, 2016

Earlier this year, I suggested that I should finish more projects than I start to avoid an increasing pile of boxes on the bench.

Finished this year

There’s been quite a few projects finished this year, a mix of high tech and hand crafted.

A good start in January as the contemporary sculpture was started in 2015. The repousse medal was swiftly finished in the first week too. Later, in the spring I made a simple bird table from scrap.

The Dragon Detector project has been a long-running project which started out as a competition entry in late spring but evolved into a finished project in the autumn.
In the summer there were a couple of woodworking projects, an old plank was turned into a garden bench and a handmade footstool was made from scrap. A couple of little electronic projects emerged along the way. Firstly a Raspberry Pi based Test Card generator, which has now been used to test out two different LCD displays. Also a prop for Halloween, the “Terminator Eye“.

Work in progress

The Stirling engine project has been running for several years now but this year a strong positive step forward was made when the flywheel was cast. Casting requires a combination of several hours available with no distractions along with good weather. The next key steps are casting the A frame to support the flywheel and machining the flywheel to hold an axle.  There’s plenty of other tasks too so this project will need a bit more time to finish but is achievable.

New Projects

There were two new projects added this year that are not year completed. One was an idea I had whilst preparing for the Pi and Gnome workshop back in the spring. It was to use a stepper motor to drive some dancing gnomes. Although you’ve not heard much about this project there has been some other progress happening with various control circuits, music boxes and wooden cases being assembled. I’ll see if I can post more about this before the end of the year.

My other project is “A little saw” – A Workshopshed guide to cutting tools. This is an EBook project that’s progressing well with lots of the words having been written and edited and it now needs lots of illustrations creating. I should be able to make good progress on those through the winter months.

So all in all I’m only up by one project with just over a month to go…

By Andy from Workshopshed One Comment

  Posted in: Projects