Jean’s First Electronics age 5 (by sarah)

Again old photos but this is Jean doing her first ever electronics with Alaric - it was the first Christmas Holiday of Jean starting school - Daddy explained and Jean drew a sort of circuit diagram and then they made it 🙂

Shortly after this Jean received two electronics kits as presents.

Christmas 2010 (I think) (by sarah)

I think this is 2010 and that for actual Christmas we went down to Essex for dinner at my parents house but these are photos of our Solcist meal and general festiveness.

Jean and Al playing with the marble run.

King Alaric at the washing up again

Garlic Bread - as in bread with garlic gloves in it 🙂

Jeany sort of setting the table

Jean decorating the MK 2 of The Little Book of Festive Poetry - I spent ages printing out out the sheets and glueing the words onto the pictures as the laptop I had couldn't cope with me trying to do things with large files!

It snowed and I remember playing with Jean outside and me and Al taking it in turns!

Tom and Jean 🙂

Jean really could not get enough of being outside in the snow!

It was the first year we found a yard of Jaffa Cakes!

Jean ran off with them 🙂

Sleepy Jean after all the fun 🙂

Mary is 2! (by sarah)

Mary was two on Monday - she spent most of the day in nursery with her friends who made her a lovely card complete with scribble signatures 🙂

When she came home she opened her card from Uncle David and Aunty Michelle and the one Jeany had made her with a little drawn birthday story in it! Then there was one present from Al's mother - a ball pit which both girls had much fun with.

We sang Happy Birthday in four different languages - English (all of us), Lojban (Daddy), Polish (Mummy - or what I cold remember of it), and French (Jeany).

Due to Dad being ill and me having med issues too we have posponed the official celebration ie the party until the 16th of Feb.

Old Snow Pics from The Bakery (by sarah)

With the snow falling and having a broken camera I decided it was about time I dug into the archive and aired some of the snow pics that have been lurking around for the last few years. As I said yesterday I am both sad and happy not to be there anymore where snow is concerned. It was fantastic for sledding and pretty pictures but our water used to freeze and we couldn't look out the windows of the house for having to put bubble wrap on them to try and keep warm.

The new house is very different with double glazing and central heating and so snow is not the issue it used to be. A heavy frost could have us stranded in the valley so snow was a complete grind everything to a stand still.

Enjoy the pics - I'm sure there will be more!

A day of drilling (by alaric)

Last Thursday, I had my safety induction for using the laser cutter at Bristol Hackspace, and as my test piece I laser-cut a name tag for Jean. She likes that sort of thing.

However, she requested that it have a hole in the corner, so she can attach it to her school bag. So today we went down to the workshop and I helped her to drill it out.

But I had more drilling to do. A friend asked me on Facebook how she could drill holes through pebbles. It just so happens that Sarah owns a set of diamond core drills, so I borrowed them and had a go, so that I could offer some advice.

I set the bit up in the column drill:

The challenge was in how to hold the stone still while it was being drilled. Irregular shapes are tricky to hold. First off, I tried a simple clamp:

The drilling has to happen under water, to help cool it and to wash away the dust that the stone turns into. I put some scraps of cardboard underneath so that I drilled into that once I was through the stone, rather than the bottom of my box, which would lead to it leaking all over my cluttered workbench:

As soon as the drill cut in, dust whooshed out into the water and made it impenetrably murky, so after a short drilling session, I took the stone out of the water to see what was happening:

It looked good so I tried again, but this time the stone pivoted in the clamp. I tried to clamp it back again but it wouldn't go back at the same angle and kept shifting, so I tried a new approach - gluing it to a piece of wood that was large enough to not be able to rotate inside the box, so I just needed to hold the box steady while drilling:

That worked quite well, but the vibration shook the stone loose after a while, and I had trouble with the wood wanting to float and the stone wanting to sink causing it to flip over in the water. so I glued it more thoroughly (making sure glue came over the side of the stone so it was held in place rather than just stuck in place), and glued a bit of scrap metal to the bottom to stop it floating over:

That worked; now the stone was steady, it was easy to press on all the way. I had to drill a millimetre then back out (with the drill still spinning) to clear the dust out into the water, then press on again. Progress was slow but steady, taking a few seconds to do each millimetre:

Once I felt it go through the bottom of the stone, I had no trouble in peeling the rubbery hot-melt glue back with my fingernails to free the stone. Job done:

So, to conclude:

• Use a column drill.
• Use a diamond core bit.
• Hold the stone steadily in something that conforms to its shape. An ideal technique might be to use something like Plasticene to firmly secure it to the bottom of the box before pouring the water in.
• Drill slowly, backing off to clean the bit every millimetre or so.

When I came back, Sarah was asleep on the sofa:

Aww!