The Winscombe Omnibus : Hecate, Jayne, Housby, Jan: Amazon.co.uk: Books
Well folks, enough time has passed that our first three books now feel like they happened in another life time. So for the first time ever, The Chronicles of Winscombe have been compiled into handy book that can even help you poop!
This wonderful book, contains the stories from the first three books, combined into one handy brick of paper, that you can uses as a foot stool, when you sit down on the porcelain throne, to drop the kids off at the pool!
You can buy it now on Amazon or if you know me, you can hassle me until I get you a signed copy, but that costs more because I have to get Jan to sign it too and she has standards, she won't sign it for just anyone!
Anyway, while we face the middle of winter, with plenty more bleak, dark rain soaked days still to come, why not read something that is both funny and rude, while still being silly and satirical?
There was a character who just seemed to make sense to me, namely, Gary the Stormtrooper. His everyday life as a member of the Stormtrooper corps was always funny and in particular, the take your daughter to work day skit was perfect.
But whatever happened to Gary? I don't recall seeing him after he refused to save the lift for Emperor Palpatine...
So, here is my answer to the that question, what did Gary the Stormtrooper do after the fall of the Empire? Gary was not your average trooper, he had heart and he had a mind of his own, so when he saw the downfall of the Galactic Empire, he quit his job in the recruitment office, graffitied his views on the poster outside, bought a motorbike and went home to his wife and daughter.
Now you may be asking, why would I raise this point? Especially, about a non-canon character who was made by what was essentially Star Wars fans, albeit who had their own TV show. Well, it just so happens that I took a little trip to Forbidden Planet in Bristol. If Mos Eisley is a hive of scum and villainy, Forbidden Planet is a hive of Nerds and fascination. I love the place and every time I go in, I am so tempted to spend every penny I have, just on Star Wars stuff, despite having no room in my space. It was during my last trip that I found a Hasbro Black Series Qimir, from the Acolyte TV show. The Acolyte was not well received and one may speculate as to the reasons for this. Some may claim weak writing, some may claim it was a woke agenda. I would say that it upset people because it showed the Jedi to the be the parochial, dangerous child snatchers we always knew them to be, while making the Sith look charismatic and unbelievably cool. Obviously, Manny Jacinto helped a lot with this, the man is utterly beautiful. I first encountered him as Jason Mendoza in the awesome show, The Good Place. Seeing him embrace the dark side to play Qimir, the Stranger, was a testament to his skill as an actor. With his terrifying helmet and his brutal lightsabre style, Qimir is a fabulous villain, but he also has a depth that we have not seen before in a live action Sith. The original Movie Sith, Emperor Palpatine was a power hungry monster. Darth Vader was a tragic failure of a man, who we pity more than we fear. Yes, we had some lovely stories set out in the expanded universe, Darth Bane will always hold a special place in our hearts. But Bane never made it to live action, despite a cameo in the Clone Wars show.
So, clutching my new Qimir doll in my sweaty hands and wondering what despicable things I could do to him, I sat in my chair like a Bond villain and plotted.
It was at this point that my Mother informed me that she had some old Star Wars figures that I could have. A few days later, Gary the Stormtrooper arrived, along with Darth Maul, Kylo Ren, Rey Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. I put Qimir aside, while I waited for the arrival of some LED sabre blades and and gave some thought to Gary. As it happens, back in my youth, when I was still in my mid thirties, I used to collect model motorbikes. For those of you who have seen my blog before, you will know that I have made dioramas around some of these model bikes before. The Black Series figures are six inches tall, which is roughly one to twelve scale, the same as my old Maisto bikes. I had a quick look through the ones I had left and settled on an Aprillia RSV1000, but the paint and wheels looked fairly naff and not something that you would see in the Star Wars Universe. Yes, I know. The bikes in Star Wars do not have wheels, but we all know what the wise woman said when she was asked. She said **** it!
So I stripped down the RSV1000 and repainted the whole bike, using my airbrush. With the paint done, it needed lights and with four headlights in the fairing, the best way to do this was to use optical fibres, connected to a single white LED, which I am lucky enough to have plenty of in stock.
With the bike built and modified, I needed to build a place to park it and what better space is there than the back of an Imperial recruitment office? My upstairs neighbour very kindly gave me some off cuts of fibreboard from some DIY she was doing and I used one of these, with some cardboard from my stocks, with some other bits from my scrap box and some parts from my electronics kit and started modelling the scene.
I knew that I wanted street lighting, but I also did not want it washing out the scene with white light, taking away the light effects in the motorbike. So I found an old variable resistor, that ranged in one to a hundred ohms and would allow me to have a dimmer switch. The resistor itself was recovered from an old radio and had a lovely circular wheel attached, which with a splash of paint and some Aurebesh letters was very quickly turned into a sewer cover, making it a part of the scene, but not revealing what it actually did.
All went well right up until the final soldering and with the variable resister glued in place and the circular dial painted up, it failed and stopped passing any current at all. Gutted, I had no choice but to leave it in place, but not use it, instead, adding a second in line resister that reduced the light output of the street light.
Painting was fairly simple. Make it look imperial and then make it look dirty. Have you ever seen the back alley of a government building that looked clean? So I gave it some weathering, some filth and some hints at unsavoury activity having occurred there. The only concession I made was to make the metal door to the recruitment office look like it had once been a polished and cared for item, that had slowly developed its own sheen of filth and corrosion.
Gary the Stormtrooper was not very well painted. Not all of his black sections had been filled in and he was far too clean for a combat veteran, so I fixed him up and gave him his own sheen of filth too. The bike looked lovely, in a satin finish metallic silver and plum, but it needed filth too and I was a little sorry to make it look rusty and dirty, but such is the Star Wars universe. With that all done, Gary and the bike were glued in place and the power supply was plugged in and... it was fine. It now sits in our hallway as a night light.
Qimir's blades finally arrived after a mix up with the order, that was sorted out with no problems and a few gentle and empathic messages through e-Bay. What this proved to me was that every one is human and disputes are far more quickly overcome if handled with respect and empathy, especially when I was informed that the store I bought the blades from was a father and son outfit and the teenage lad had put the wrong blades in the wrapper.
The LED filaments needed a three volt power supply, basically two double A cells and to hide the battery box, I had to have a double thickness base. I milled this out by hand, using a power drill, wifey's woodworking tools and a suitable hammer. The base top was painted with scenic gel, to give a rough ground appearance and this was painted with a deep brown and left to dry, once some rocks had been added. Once dry, I covered the area with white glue and got out the static grass applicator and made everything nice and hairy, except for the area where Qimir was to be placed. I drilled a small hole down through the base and then set too with Qimir. His lightsabres are tiny, so using my pin vice and some tiny drills, I was able to hollow them out in order to fit the electronics. The wires I chose to use were zero point three millimetres thick enamelled copper strands. I have never used wires this thin before and it is not something I shall be repeating any time soon. It was a real trial and it made me realise that I do need a new soldering iron just for working with such fine materials. The LED filaments are very floppy and so I had to use some single strand copper wire that was half a millimetre thick to give them some rigidity, even when covered with colourless and see through heat shrink tubing. With this done and the wires hidden on Qimir, everything was glued in place. Some extra plants were needed and I sprayed these up to make them look more real. With Qimir in place, I added the white glue and filled in the gap in the grass. Two days later, when everything was dry and fixed in place, I think that Qimir looks pretty cool and I love the illuminated lightsabres. He now sits on my shelf, next to my slightly smaller scale Darth Maul and whenever I feel a little sad, I can switch off the lights and sit in the dark, gazing at the beautiful Qimir with his glowing red lightsabres.
Alas my friends, I write this while baring sad news. I have broken the APSE Artek brakes on my ICE trike.
They have always felt quite soft in use, the small piston in the master cylinder struggled to push enough fluid to activate the pistons in the calipers. However, when they bit into the disk, they bit hard and braking was generally excellent, until suddenly, it wasn't. The cause of this sudden change was because I did something a little daft, but great fun. I tried mountain biking on my trike and pushed them to the limit of what they were capable of.
Obviously, we filmed a video of this trip and despite the vibration that a fully rigid trike suffered, the film came out great, using Wifey's awesome Insta 360 cameras.
So what led to this silly adventure and what damage was the result of this journey? It is easy to answer this question. Wifey asked me ages ago about taking the trikes up into the local woods to ride some trails. I said no, stating that the trikes would not work, especially on greasy climbs over slippery limestone and gravel. With me being the wise old sage of mountain biking, Wifey nodded her head and the idea was dropped. This was until we went for a local ride along the sea front and then got bored. I said that it was a shame that we had nowhere fun that we could ride, but then I remembered Wifey's words about riding into the woods. It was a warm, dry, end of summer day and so I suggested that we try, we could always turn around and go home if it was impossible. So we set off past Birnbeck Pier and found the entrance to the woods, a spiteful little climb that is littered with greasy limestone and loose grit, with the occasional patch of thick grotty, gritty mud. I went first and fully expected to get no more than a few metres into the woods. It is true that the back wheel on Darth Dotty is easily spun out when grip gets sketchy, but I was genuinely surprised when she just kept going. The added boost of the Bafang pedal assist system really helped, but I had to keep it in Eco mode to prevent it spinning out the wheel on the loose stuff. At the half way marker, where the bridleway splits off to descend to the footpath that runs beside the Toll Road, I finally span the wheel and came to a grinding halt. However, a few kicks of the pedals and a little rocking to find traction and I was away again, to continue climbing up the rocky and muddy track. Wifey followed me up and where I got stuck, she passed me by with a wave and a smile. We pulled over to catch our breath and discuss the progress and how impressed we both were by the abilities of the trikes. I now consider the wise old sage of mountain biking to an honorific that I no longer deserve. Setting off again, we continued the climb up into the woods, though the beautiful autumnal colours and occasional mucky puddle and reached what we refer to as the roundabout tree. This is a lovely old (possibly Chestnut) tree that sits in the middle of the three connecting paths and makes for a great natural roundabout. From there, we continued climbing for a few more metres until we hit the top of the hill and the track that leads to the water tower. So where did the damage occur that put my trike out of action for a few days? Not on the climb...
At the water tower, we came to a stop. The area was swarming with dog walkers and I had managed to find a fresh pile of the unmentionable mess left just for me by a bad owner, that my front right wheel picked up and proceeded to flick everywhere as it came off the tyre at speed. I tried rubbing it off on tufts of grass, but it was fairly determined to stay and so I decided to run through the muddiest of muddy puddles on the way back down, to remove the offending organic matter. As of this moment, Darth Dotty was still in full working condition...
After a brief detour because I have the navigational ability of a plastic bag floating on a polluted pond, we made it back to the roundabout tree and as the old adage goes, what goes up, must come down... Oh boy, did I come down. What had been a greasy, bumpy climb up, was a hilarious, slippery descent and I cackled for most of the way back down. I maxed out my speed at close to thirty kilometres per hour, which is faster than the Bafang is legally allowed to provide pedal assist and then slid sideways into a bramble bush, without stopping until I remounted the pathway a few metres later. I came to a grinding halt and behind me, Wifey was equally happy. No damage was noticed at this point.
Having regrouped and after a wee break that saw me baring my backside to a thick and prickly bush on a steep and slippery bank, we set off once again, back down the rocky track. Speed was quickly picked up and like a character from a fairy tale, picking up her skirts and running home as the clock strikes midnight, I pushed Darth Dotty, the ICE trike, as hard as I could. After a brief moment of fear as I nearly flipped her on her side, but managed to get both front wheels back on the track, I hit the rocky section and oh boy, was this bit fun! The final hundred metres or so, is rocks leading into gravel and I left poor Wifey behind, finally sliding to a stop in the lay-by next to the Toll Road.
I am reminded of the wonderful film, The Blues Brothers. A movie I cherish, because as a child and just before I was adopted by him, my father bonded with me over this movie. It is full of fantastic music, incredible car chases and some unbelievable stunts. However, at the end of the movie, when the brothers arrive at the tax office, to pay the tax bill on the orphanage that raised them, their poor old car finally collapses into scrap, having been abused and battered by the journey to get there. As I looked at Darth Dotty, I could imagine her doing the same. The front brakes had faded to nothing, the rear brake felt like it was made of wood and I have no idea how I managed to stop. What I could not see was the damage to the battery holder, but I could feel that something was very wrong.
When we got back home and had both showered, I started to look at Darth Dotty and quickly found the damage. I was lucky not to have snapped the battery holder in half and it was obviously in need a major re-design to make it safe for long term use. The front brakes though were shot. I stripped them down, cleaned them and bled them, but I could not get the left hand caliper to operate correctly. The right caliper maintained the strength and bite that it originally had, but the left barely stopped the wheel at all, leading to only having a single front brake. I popped out the pistons and they seemed to be moving freely, but something was wrong and I do not know what that was. However, under load, the right wheel would lock without hesitation, but the left barely came on. The lever pulled back to the handlebar and I wondered if there was air in the system, so I bled the whole lot again and no bubbles came out. Having gone though almost a full bottle of mineral oil, there was most certainly no air in the system, but the lever would slowly just fade as the lever hit the handlebar. I will admit to being saddened by this and I do not know what I have done, but there is clearly some damage in there. Later while in discussion with my wonderful daughter, a hydraulics expert and fellow mountain biker, she suggested that maybe a swap of the master cylinder, to something slightly larger with the capacity to push four pistons. Her suggestion was to try a lever from German brand Magura, who have released a specialist mountain bike brake that runs a four piston caliper. Magura also make brakes and clutch levers for motorcycles and they produce a hydraulic clutch conversion that fits to the Suzuki SV650. I will admit that I have wanted one of these systems for a long time to make clutch control easier on my fabulous motorcycle.
So after a bit of research, I found the contact details for Magura and I sent them a message, asking if their master cylinder was large enough to push the four caliper pistons. A day or so later, the reply that came back rather surprised me. Magura make a hydraulic system that is designed for cargo bikes and trikes with a double wheeled axle. Why was this never made public? No where on the website could I find a link to this system and even now, when I know it exists, I can still barely find any information about it. This system is called the Big Twin. The master cylinder has a larger piston than standard, meaning that it can push four pistons easily. They suggested that this lever could potentially work with the Artek calipers, but were reluctant to say for sure. However, they knew for certain that it was capable of pushing the pistons in their own Big Twin mirrored calipers. Why did no one tell me that this system existed before?
The next step was of course to order the brakes for both trikes. My brakes had failed, but Wifey had suffered similar and slightly worse damage to all three brakes on Rebel Rogue, her trike. The cost of the brakes was a lot and sadly, the wise old sage of mountain biking that is Nik at SJS, was unable to order them for us. Instead we had to go to a different bike shop and one that we had never used before, but who were a Magura dealer. A quick e-mail conformed that the shop could order the parts, but they not only wanted a huge sum to pay for the brakes, but they wanted to charge us the cost of postage from Germany. Why such a cost? Because of Brexit making trade with the EU a lot harder and putting extra steps into a system that used to work smoothly and a whole lot better than the current situation, as brought about by the failed dealings and down right lies of the toxic fool Boris Johnson. I have no idea how much the brakes cost in the EU, but here in post Brexit Britain, they cost £400! Yes, you read that right. Four hundred quid for two calipers and a master cylinder. I could only imagine that they were made from the finest materials, machined from pure billet aluminium or magnesium, maybe an exotic carbon fibre brake lever, attached to a machined aluminium master cylinder...
What turned up was a plastic and cast metal mess of such ugliness, it could win the gurning Olympic prize for the next forty years. The lever blade is a cheap moulded plastic, as is the master cylinder! Yes, you read that correctly. The master cylinder is made of plastic. The clamp that holds it onto the handlebar is an aluminium casting, that the master cylinder rattles around in. It does however allow for positioning of the lever on either side of the bars, by turning the fluid reservoir inside the clamp.
The calipers are sand cast units that are basically old Julie units that are then machined out to make room for the pistons. However, the rest of the caliper is left rough, with the imperfections of the sand casting process left in place.
There is no attempt made to make them look nice, but the inner faces of the calipers have the 'Magura Big' label printed on the side. If you were to put the APSE Artek units next to the Magura units, the red anodised Artek calipers are so much better made, with post mount fixings that allow for infinite adjustment of the calipers and perfect alignment.
The old Julie units use the I.S. mounting system, which when combined with the subtle lack of alignment of the ICE kingpins made centring them on the disk really difficult. I ended up using machined aluminium spacers that were three millimetres thick, combined with all of the super thin alignment washers that came with them. When I ran out of alignment washers, I raided my box of Hope spares, using the ones that came with the old Hope C2 calipers that I bought in 1998. Using a set of Clarkes disk rotors (because the Magura do not include them in a £400 brake system!), I spent a couple of hours aligning every caliper as well as I could. To align the Artek units, took around thirty seconds. Once the calipers are loosely fitted to the frame, the brake lever is pulled, which centres the caliper on the disk and the bolts can be tightened. Like I say, this takes thirty seconds. To fit the old style Julie calipers, took over two hours and I was constantly having to remove the caliper and change the washers. When I thought that they were finally fitted, I checked the alignment of Wifey's left hand wheel and this was clearly well out and the drag on the disk was awful. The lever had not pumped up and so what I thought was centred, was actually still badly misaligned. Yes, this was a beginners mistake, but it was also close to one in the morning and I was tired. When I came back to it the next day, I checked the Magura calipers again and found that the ICE kingpin on wifey's trike is misaligned due to the welding. I know that the cycle industry has been accused of poor performance when complying with accuracy standards in the past, but this is pretty poor.
Finally, I had the calipers fitted and bled and ready to test, but the weather is foul and I have too much pain to even try taking the trikes outside. I am in the process of changing my medications again and while I ween myself off of one medication and onto another, my pain levels and energy levels are shot to hell. This means that the trikes are hung in the hallway until I feel fit enough to test the new brakes. This all feels slightly anticlimactic. I wish that I could tell you that the Magura system is brilliant and worth the £400, but just by fitting it and cutting down the hoses that were so long, they could have been fitted to a long wheelbase transit van, I am largely unimpressed. The Artek lever just does not have a big enough piston to push the four pistons in the calipers safely enough for the rotten British conditions, that can go from dry and dusty, to pad ruining gritty and wet during a ride. As the pads wear down, there is not enough fluid in the system to account for the distance from the disk rotors and so the system fades out under extreme use. I am so saddened by this, because the Artek units are so much better finished, being polished, anodised and painted. The lever fitting is easier and caliper fitting is far superior, they just cannot cope with riding in such wet and grotty conditions, over such difficult ground. This could be fixed by slightly increasing the size the master cylinder piston by a small amount and the system would be fantastic and yes, I would pay £400 for it and feel like I got a bargain. Meanwhile, I consider it unacceptable for a £400 brake system to made from plastic and to have a plastic lever blade. Perhaps the Big Twin system will work really well, but even then, it won't last because of the materials it is made from. Plastic levers do not cope with the sustained abuse of mountain biking. One crash and these are... well the language I could use would limit the readership of this blog.
Should Magura ever read this, I stand firmly by these comments. Your product looks cheap and once fitted it feels cheap. Working on it is horrible, because the parts made of plastic, feels really fragile. When refitting the cover over the fluid reservoir, the tiny screws going into plastic feel like they want to strip. Magura say in their information that once fitted, you hardly ever have to service the brakes. This is clealry because if you removed the cap more than a couple of times, the threads are going to fail, because they are made of plastic.
For an organisation which has feet in both the motorcycle world and the mountain bike world, you should know better. I certainly know better and for the record, I will not be buying the clutch conversion for my SV650, because I have been so unimpressed by the quality of the Big Twin brake system. Paying £400 for plastic brakes is shameful. To quantify this, I had a quick look at the Hope website and a two piston caliper with lever, made from machined aluminium, costs £200... If only they made mirrored calipers. I would be more than happy to run a set of Hopes for the next thirty years. My old C2s were only retired because the seal in the master cylinder is not available any more... after thirty years!
I genuinely hope that in the future, APSE Artek are able to fix their master cylinder, because it is better in every way and it is far easier to work on, with a far better attachment system all round.
In the mean time, my health is rubbish right now, but so is the weather and the both are always connected. When the weather is miserable, so are my joints! When I finally get out to ride the Magura units, I will let you know how they ride. Until then, have lots of fun, you beautiful bunch of maniacs. Love from Jayney
Have you ever wanted something so badly, that the universe seems to notice and then helps out, just a little?
Well, buckle up because this is going to be a long one. Since becoming disabled, I have wanted to ride my mountain bike and my motorbike more than I physically can, but ill health and constant pain have pretty much stamped their icky little paws all over that dream. Then a little while ago, Carol and I got talking and I said that the only way that I could realistically continue to go cycling was if I was to get my self a recumbent bike.
If you don't know what a recumbent bike is, imagine a bike as if it were drawn by someone who had only ever seen deckchairs and they built a bike on one. The general principle is that the pedals are out in front of the rider, who is seated in a sun lounger, rather than the usual razor blade bike saddle. The wheels are slung under the sun lounger and as you would expect for a wheeled sun lounger, they are a danger in traffic and the riders head is level with most exhaust pipes, thus road riding is less than pleasant.
I found a company who build such a recumbent bike. Now imagine if a person had never seen a bike before, but knew how front wheel drive cars worked? Cruz Bike of America have designed a bike with a super comfy seat, the steered wheel though is also your drive wheel, with a clever triangular front end that puts a steering bearing between your knees and goes down to the bottom bracket. This is utterly genius, it is just a shame that they don't import to the UK, so getting hold of one is really difficult. The biggest problem with them, after sourcing one to ride, is getting started on the road. Beginner recumbent riders with two wheeled bikes do tend to crash a lot and with my ailing body, despite my experience riding these machines already, crashing is not a viable option for me any more because I do not recover well.
Never one to give up, Carol started scouring the internet and she came across a small business in Exeter, called Freetrike, which is owned by a chap called Tom. Tom is well versed in dealing with disabled cyclists and his salesman patter is great, unless you are a thirty year veteran of the bike industry. Luckily, when the technical questions start, he gets even more enthusiastic. We arranged a trip to Exeter to test ride a couple of trikes, but not before having a fight with my Jedi Master father, using Lightsabres and as with every Jedi knight, he went for the hands!
Riding the trikes with bruised hands was a bit of fun, but the pain spasms I was having that day were anything but and as I stood talking with Tom, a spasm put me on the floor, which I think startled the poor chap. With the best will in the world, we were never going to be able to afford a new trike or even a nearly new one from Tom, especially one that came with DI2 electronic shifting. Shiny and new, the ICE trikes we were interested in, would have cost as much as a brand new small family car with a turbo and nice alloys. We asked about second hand options and were horrified to discover that even when second hand, ICE trikes still sell for ridiculous amounts of money, even more so if they come with electronic gears. If you have a big wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket and you crave the latest in electronic gears on your trike, go and see Tom. He's great fun and very helpful.
Feeling a little sad knowing that everything he had was out of our price range, we got back in the car and drove back home. However, the seeds had been sewn and the idea had been watered. The green shoots of a plan were seen among the pebbles and horse poop of modern life.
In a sad turn of events, Carol found out that her distant uncle, a very clever and resourceful silversmith had passed away and the result was that a small sum of cash was going to end up coming her way. The green shoots grew into a hardy stalk of a plan, albeit with a sad flower on the stem.
Browsing e-Bay and then Farcebook market place showed us a couple of nice examples, but nothing really shone out to us. Then one spring morning, while cruising Gum Tree, a new add popped up for a blue ICE trike and it was going very cheap (there was a reason for this, which we will come to later), but it was on the edge of London. Borrowing money from Carol's deeply understanding and supportive Mother, we set out excitedly and were very soon in the heart of Slough. The seller of the trike had picked it up from a Police auction, a place where they sell off recovered stolen goods that cannot be given back to the former owners. What we didn't know, is that along the way, someone (possibly a Police Officer washing off crime scene evidence) had jet washed the trike. The damage was not spotted as the water sloshed around inside the frame and bearings. It was only when we got the trike home and started checking it over and getting it ready to rebuild, that the damage showed itself. Both head bearings on both sides of the trike were dead with corrosion. Worse was still to come. The frame was filled with water and where the aluminium and steel frame sections join, a nasty oxide layer was forming. As I tipped the frame over, filthy, rusty water flowed out, staining the carpet and ruining a very nice pair of socks.
We replaced the headsets and pulled off the rusty eight speed drive system, which I replaced with a nine speed Deore XT set up, added a disk brake on the rear and connected both Sturmey Archer drum brakes to one lever, with a clever double cable pull brake lever, sourced from the on line shop of SJS (more on them later). It sounds so easy when I type it up like that, but this was hours of work. Finally, Rebel Rogue Three (as named by Carol), was ready to go. At the same time, Carol found for me a red 2014 ICE, going for a very good price (there was a reason for this, but we will come to that!) that I fell in love with. Things just started falling into place. The red trike was on the other side of the country, but the lovely gentleman who owned it, just happened to be visiting Bristol and could deliver it. Carol's dear Aunt loaned her the money to pay for the trike and when it arrived it was just as the owner had described, in a glorious candy red, albeit with an awful nine speed, Sram x5 gear system, that included some of the worst grip shifters I have ever experienced. The rear gears were all but useless and would not index. The owner told me that it had been like that since new and he had got used to just using the triple chainset to make gear adjustments. The cause of the fault was obvious and once I was able to start work, I rectified the problem of a badly bent gear hanger, which the awful Sram gear set had no chance of ever working on.
Historically, I have always been difficult when building my own mountain bikes. Shimano had the concept of total integration years ago, where every component on the bike was made by them and it was all in matching colours and designed to work together. Back in 1993, when the new black Deore LX was released, it was a cheaper clone of the shiny new XTR. The best finish of all though, was on the STX-RC components, which was a kind of smoked chrome, but the LX was still lovely. The shifters and brake levers shared a common mount, the cantilevers were matched sets and even the headset was stamped with the Shimano logo... I hated it. The last proper mountain bike I built, consisted of a Suntour XC Pro-MD chainset, Avid Arch Rival rear brake on an Avid adjustable pivot lever, with a Hope C2 front disk brake, running on a Hope Titanium hub. The gears were Deore XT, eight speed, running from a set of 1990's Deore Thumbshifters. None of this stuff should have worked together, yet somehow it all did and it did so beautifully.
Sram are trying to do the total intergration thing with their products, just as Shimano had tried back in the 90s. Well, having used Sram equipped bikes and having had the almost endless chore of fixing them, the Sram stuff was not staying on my trike. That was when Carol was informed that Probate was over and she was due to take a small inheritance (which we have now spent) within days. When the money arrived, our bills were paid, our debts cleared and our thanks was sent out to those who have supported us in our weird crazes. It was at this point that I informed Carol that I needed to discuss DI2 gears with an expert on such things. Luckily, near us, there was only one place that would fit the bill of being a great bike shop, that was well versed in weird stuff.
I have not been a fan of Bridgewater, in Somerset, since living there briefly in the early 1980s. A large plastics factory gave the town a legendary bad smell that lingered on your taste buds as you sped past on the motorway. But where I lived, the factory chimney was in view at the end of the street and it was dank! However, come forwards in time by forty years and the plastics factory has gone, yet Bridgewater for me remains a place of dark memories and much unhappiness. I was sent there more recently to attend meetings with a psychiatrist who helped me rebuild my life after becoming disabled. However, every time we visited we always failed to visit the globally famous Thorn Cycles (AKA SJS Cycles, or Saint John Street Cycles). Thorn have a history in esoteric cycle adventures. Their tandems are world beating machines and for years they made the custom frames in house. They truly were the things of legend and I loved them from a far, especially having raced tandems back in the 1990s, with my beloved and now departed friend Jonathan. So with my skirts swishing around my ankles, we jumped in the car and drove down to Bridgey!
SJS has changed a lot over the years. It had to stay relevant with the modern cycling ethos and it has diversified in order to stay a market leader, especially in the on line shopping experience, just read their reviews. Sadly, Thorn no longer build frames in house (hearing this broke my heart) and the shop front is a showroom for Brompton folding bikes. The chaps who man the front desk are clearly ferociously clever when it comes to modern folding bikes, but when I asked for weird, esoteric, HPV-ish trike stuff, they all grinned and said I needed to speak to Nik...
Nik turns out to be an athlete, around my age, with a history in bikes that is likely just as, or even more strange than my own. Over the months that we have been dealing with Nik now, we have discussed Streetfighter motorcycles, Human Powered Racers, the history of Suntour groupsets, the joy of building wheels, the demise of the hand built frame and the art of bicycle design. He is a remarkably patient man, with a fast wit and a sharp mind, unless he has been talked at by a crazy woman, speaking at over 120 words per minute about the joys of Self Energising Brakes (but more on that later!).
He listened carefully to my strange and unusual wants and needs, nodded or disagreed where appropriate and then he asked the pertinent question. Why did I 'Need' DI2 derailleurs? I showed him my gnarled and ancient fingers and he grinned and dropped a set of Dura Ace bar end thumb shifters on the desk, with an eleven speed Deore XT 11 – 42 cassette and a GRX clutched derailleur. He added three XT chains and gave me a sage shake of the head when I said I would only need two chains (he was of course right, I have learned not to doubt Nik now!). So with two identical gear sets, Carol and I set off for home, Carol's purse faintly smoking from the abuse we had just put it through. I built up the trikes and we waited for the e-assist conversion kits to arrive. In the mean time, I took the red ICE trike out for a couple of rides. It was a marvellous machine, once all of the vile Sram rubbish was gone. The Clarkes rear disk on mine was not brilliant, even with a complicated 180mm rotor. The Truvative triple chainset up front was nasty, so I swapped it for a Deore triple that was compatible with 10spd systems. However, our plan was always to swap the pedal system out, in exchange for an e-Bike conversion.
The Bafang e-Bike up grade kits looked shonky to me, as a dyed in the wool, old school mountain biker. I was of half a mind to not fit my kit (I quickly learned my lesson here), but Carol's kit was perfect straight out of the box. The battery attachment was a complicated affair on both frames, with Carol running a twin battery set up and me running a single. I made the mistake of thinking that I would be fine with a forty two teeth chain ring (I really wasn't, the knee pain made my legs wobble!), given that I had an e-Bike motor. I used a Problem Solvers one into Two cable splitter to run the front Sturmey Archer front drum brakes and Nik had suggested an XT brake lever. This did not work with my fingers and in an emergency braking situation, I do not think that I could have safely stopped. I later proved this when during a trip along the Keynsham to Bath tow path, a crazed woman on a shopping bike tried to ride through the space I was in. I nearly needed new fingers! I was clearly struggling with the braking and I so I did what any sane and rational woman would do. I e-Mailed Hope. To their credit, Hope were hugely busy and although they do not produce mirrored brakes for a ten year old trike, they suggested a way that I could build a system that would 'work'.
I looked on line for our nearest Hope dealer and took a trip over to Clevedon. Have you ever seen a little baby bunny, huddled on the side of the road, having just been scared half to death by the hellishly fast and huge wheels of articulated lorry rushing past? That is what the owner of the Clevedon bike shop looked like when I approached him with a list of requirements and questions. Utterly baffled by most of my questions and unable to supply a single piece of kit, the man promised that he would e-Mail me, when he got the stuff together (I am still waiting to hear from him, I am guessing that by now, he is not going to mail me, but I still have hope.). Feeling a little despondent, I headed home and checked the map of Hope dealers... Somehow I had failed to notice that SJS are listed.
That night, I scoured the internet looking for brakes, for a twin front wheel system, with mirrored callipers. No one in the EU was producing such things and then I found something. A small web page came up in a Google search and I was suddenly looking at a single master cylinder, driving two, twin pot, mirrored callipers, built specifically for a trike. The website was up to date, but it was also for a company that I had not heard from in at least a decade, APSE Artek. I scoured the internet again, but not one shop in the UK had this system in stock. If anything, e-Mails came back with more questions than answers. Finally, thinking that I had nothing else to lose, I filled in their contact form and pressed send. APSE are a Taiwanese company and they have been making cycle brakes since the 1980s. If you have worked in a bike shop, you will have seen their products as OEM parts on many different companies bikes. I asked them, “who do I need to speak to in the UK, who can sell me one of their trike brake systems?”
The following day, my in box contained an e-Mail from a woman called Alice. I can tell you now, not only is Alice one of the most kind and decent people on earth, she is also very patient and does not mind messaging with a somewhat strange, slightly vinegary, old, disabled women from rural Somerset!
Alice did not beat around the bush. No one in the UK stocked her trike brakes. But provided I could cover the cost of postage, she would send me a sample set to use on my trike. Straight away I stared at my screen and blinked. I have been around on the internet for long enough to know that there are an awful lot of strange and unusual folk out there in internet land, no one was going to send me a set of brakes, that cost hundreds of pounds, for the cost of the postage (this is certainly the view that my bank took, when a couple of weeks later I contacted them and asked them to send sixty US Dollars to Taiwan!).
Only, this time was the one time in a hundred, when the person on the other end of the internet connection is a thoroughly decent human being. When I told people what was happening, they all gave me that same sceptical, jaded by the internet, face. The face that wants to ask how much cash I have transferred to a Nigerian Prince, with the promise of getting several million back?
I have not met Alice in person and I don't know if it is considered polite to hug strangers in Taiwan, but if I ever meet Alice, I will offer her a hug of friendship, because she is truly remarkable.
The next day, it was back to SJS to discuss progress. We jumped back in the car and flew down the motorway and parked outside, our poor old car wheezing like an asthmatic, with one lung, running up K2, in a pair of budgie smugglers. As soon as we walked in, the front desk guys called down Nik, who took one look at my Hope shopping list and immediately asked “why?” I showed Nik my dodgy hands and explained the difficulties I was having. Nik lamented that Problem Solvers had just gone bust and then said that he could order the parts, but the brake was problematic and he was not sure that it would work on the left hand, front wheel. I explained that I had made contact with APSE Artek and what had happened and Nik once again, nodded sagely. He knew of APSE Artek and had spent time working on a lot of OEM bikes back in the days before working on esoteric stuff in SJS. I don't think that he was sceptical about my brakes, but I know that if it had not worked out, Nik would have moved heaven and earth to find the parts I needed to run disk brakes. Instead, he measured up my trike, now named Darth Dotty and then we had a deep and complex chat about making a 100mm x 12mm hub fit onto the axle for a 70mm x 12mm hub. “If only you had a lathe”, he lamented. I headed home with enough Hope hubs to build a wheel set, a set of Halo rims and enough spokes to build four wheels (but we will come back to that, later!). One might say that Nik could see the future, even if I could not.
Have you ever had a lightbulb moment where the lightbulb is clearly visible above your head? In this case, the lightbulb above my head was a fifteen watt, oven lamp bulb, that was fifty years old and had gone brown with age. I don't have a lathe, but I know a certain genius engineer who has a whole shed in his garden, devoted to incredible metal shaping machines. I had a chat with Phillip regarding the axle problem and I was tying myself in knots, trying to solve the issue of how to make everything fit, with custom axles and the like. Finally, late at night, I was drawing up the design to send to Phillip, who would make the axle from special super strength steel, when it struck me that I was over thinking the whole thing. I didn't need a custom axle. I just needed to spin down two aluminium spacers...
The next morning, I took the ailing car over to see Martyn, of Page Engineering, in Weston Super Mare and handed over the two offending hub spacers. In less time than it takes to shave a super model, Martyn had reduced the size of the spacers and refused to take payment for what took him less than five minutes to fix. He did add that for such jobs, Danish pastries would cover the costs and I was to supply one when I was next passing.
The next stop was Weston Fasteners, where I purchased two long M12 high strength bolts and a pile of washers. Less than two hours later, Darth Dotty was ready to roll, on her shiny new wheels. All I needed was the brake callipers and I could throw away for good, the awful system I was trying to make work with the drum brakes.
When the brakes were nearly ready, I asked Alice if the lever would work with my Bafang pedal assist system, most importantly, the brake detector. She passed me over to her colleague, Paul. Paul is an unbelievably brilliant engineer, who just happens to have a friend at Bafang. He sent me a wiring diagram of the brake lever sensor and explained in intricate detail how it all worked. This was the the sort of detail that showed just how seriously the team at APSE Artek were taking this bizarre request from a mad woman in England and how much work they were putting into the project. I am genuinely, even now, completely overwhelmed by the actions of Alice and Paul of APSE Artek.
The day of shipping arrived and I arranged to transfer the funds to them, to cover the costs of the postage. My bank, having heard of every scam going, were extremely dubious and they repeatedly asked me to rethink sending the money. I knew in my heart that in any other situation, they were entirely right. But this was the one in a million.
I watched the tracking of the parcel as it made it's way around this beautiful planet, noting that it landed in Stanstead airport and was then shipped to Türkiye, before it was unpacked and shipped back to Stanstead, before being shoved in a truck to Bristol and finally, chucked in a little van and delivered to us by our wonderful Fedex service.
I was out when the box arrived and Carol placed it on my desk to wait patiently for my return, but life is complicated and having spent the day dealing with other things, it was several hours later when I finally sat down to open my package from APSE Artek. It was a heavy box and very carefully packaged. To be honest, had it opened and a spring loaded clown popped out with a message telling me that I was a fool, I would have been less surprised than by what I saw. Two complete sets of brakes, one each for mine and Carol's trikes. I had mentioned in passing that we both had trikes, but I had not said that we wanted brakes for both. Alice had looked at the photos I had sent and had decided to send two sets. It included everything we needed, well almost. There was a tiny misalignment by 1mm on the converters from post mount to IS mount. With a little bit of filing on the ICE kingpin, they would have fitted, but the king pin is already thin and made of aluminium, so I decided to fit ones from the Clarkes brakes, which I had removed from my MTB.
The APSE Artek brake callipers are beautifully made, in highly polished aluminium that is then anodised red. The lever is a complicated unit that can be run on either the left or the right, with a built in electronic brake sensor. The action on the lever is so soft that it feels almost like there is no resistance to the lever action. For a person with disabled hands, this system is utterly perfect. Pulling this lever, even without my fingers being strapped up, feels like I was not even exerting myself to the same level of force it takes to lift a posh bone-china tea cup. The bite of the brakes is gentle and yet it feels like I could stop a runaway steam engine. However, if I pull the brakes like the uncouth youth I used to be, I will be propelled from my chair, to use my face as a brake pad on the road! I know this because on my first ride with these brakes, a child stepped out into the road in front of me and although the trike stopped easily, I nearly didn't. Luckily said child escaped being flattened by a screaming, hysterical Jayney and I learned not to pull the brakes like a hooligan. These are refined units, that require manners and etiquette when riding. Not that I have any manners and certainly no etiquette. After all, I have already turned my trike over, while riding like a maniac and trying to drift it around a corner. I am going to have to be careful with these brakes, it is far too easy to get the back wheel off of the road.
With my wheels built, my brakes tested and functioning, it was back to Nik one last time, to pick up the bits to build Carol a set of wheels. I will admit, I feel a bit sad knowing that I am not going to be a pain in the neck for Nik and the SJS team any more. On another point, it was his colleague Sarah, who informed me that as a disabled cyclist, trying to get back into cycling to improve my health, I can avoid the VAT on certain items. It is true that we dropped off a box of sweets and a couple of chocolate bars, but while going through this adventure with the brakes on the trikes, we have felt completely supported by Nik, Sarah and the whole SJS team. Seriously, if you need quality bike stuff and advice, give your cash to SJS, they are fab!
None of this could have happened though, without the generosity and fellowship of my new friends, Alice and Paul, of APSE Artek. I am not generally a person of much faith, particularly of the religious type. But it feels very much to me, like the universe really wants me to get out there and get fitter than I currently am, perhaps there is something in my future that requires me to be fighting fit again, or at least able to ride like a pillock some more?
To everyone who has been forced to listen as I rave about Hope products and how brilliant they are, I will now add that you need to think about APSE Artek too.
When the current news media we are exposed to, being filled with horror and genocide on a daily basis, as we witness flag waving xenophobes raging against refugees fleeing war zones and witnessing those same moronic xenophobes slapping paint where ever they can, it can be very easy to be disheartened with the state of the world. But then we find people like Alice and Paul, working for a company like APSE Artek. We meet people like Nik and Sarah and the whole team at SJS. I have friends like Phillip and even my wonderful daughter and her partner. With this much positive energy around me, it is hard to ignore that perhaps, if you look in the right places, there truly are some really lovely people out there and just perhaps, the whole meaning of life is just sharing empathy and kindness.
To our friends Alice and Paul, of APSE Artek, from the very bottom of my heart, thank you for your technical advice and your generosity. You have truly helped a peculiar, disabled and possibly mad, cyclist get back onto her wheels.
To Nik, Sarah and the SJS team, thank you for your hard work, your patience and your advice. We could not have done this without you.
To Phillip, thank you for your engineering advice and for not laughing at me as I thought myself into ever decreasing circles of despair.
To Martyn, of Page Engineering. Thank you for your help and advice and for doing the stuff to bikes that not even I can do.
To Alice, Cerri and Carol, thank you for being my beautiful family and for going cycling with me, even when I moan about the hills or when I hurt bits of myself on stuff, that no normal humans can hurt themselves on!
To my dear friend Jan, thank you for chatting to me while I built wheels only to have a melt down because the hub logo is one spoke hole out! Also, thanks for coming out for rides and laughing at me when I crash!
As for all of you out there in internet land. If you see a mad woman on a red trike, squealing with delight as she rides over stuff that no sane trike rider would ride over, give me a wave or even say hello. As soon as the rabid foam is wiped from my mouth, I might even be able to say hello back.
A final huge thank you to Carol, my better half and one of the kindest people on planet earth, who has recorded our adventures on both film and photo. All of the images in this story are hers and to be honest, she was the driving force behind this whole adventure. I guess she's a keeper! You can check out her story here.
I always listen to advice, when it is given by serious looking medical people...
That is a lie, I am barely able to remember a time when I did what I was told. So when they warned me that sudden jolts to my neck could have serious repercussions. I took that advice very seriously.
My dear other half and our daughter planned a route and we out out for the afternoon and into the evening. It was great fun. I only crashed once and if you skip ahead to seventeen minutes, you will find me making quite a spectacular scene. Nothing was badly hurt other than my pride, but I might have to start listening to the medical advice before I do something too silly.
I just about remember the day I learned to ride a bicycle, on a paved walkway outside our flat in Germany, when I was about seven years old.
I had what you would think of as a utilitarian, safety bicycle, which I absolutely murdered, riding off road and trying to jump. That one day changed my life and set out who I was going to become.
The next time a bicycle changed my life was when my brother Pauly introduced me to Mountain Bikes. The humble Mountain Bike has been a feature of my soul ever since I was sixteen years old, other than a brief period when I had to go without at the end of my degree.
I have worked in bike shops, I have worked as a Mountain Bike Instructor and a Guide.
Mountain Biking was not just a hobby for me, it was a part of my personality. So as my mobility decreased and I lost my ability to ride, a part of my personality was lost with it. I grieved hard, those close to me will know how much I grieved for my sport. In 2021, I was sent to see a Physiotherapist about my pain levels in my knees. He looked at my knees and noticed that they bend forwards rather more than is usual. He then looked at other parts of my body and saw something similar. Months before, my friend Dr G had seen me move and she announced that I was hyper-mobile. My GP at the time was close to retirement and discounted it, but the Physiotherapist confirmed Dr G's diagnosis. She was right, I have hypermobility, which is partly why I was able to climb so well as I did. I was able to bend myself in ways that were rather odd, but being able to bend my fingers backwards until they touched my wrist, was considered an extreme. However with age and time, I am stiffening up and losing a lot of my flexibility. The Physiotherapist did not pull his punches. It is only going to get worse, before it gets better, but when the pain stops, it will be because the joints no longer move. Brilliant.
The plus side was his advice. “Go mad, there is no more damage that you can do to your body, it's already knackered.” His second piece of advice was to upgrade to DI2, but we will come to that later.
Hearing the words “go mad...” was oxygen to my fire and I immediately set myself a challenge for 2022. I would user a turbo trainer and over the weeks, do a work out as often as I could and build up a total distance until I had achieved the same distance on my turbo as if I had cycled from Lands End to John O'Groats. On the 11th of November, 2022 I rode twelve Kilometres on my turbo trainer, completing one thousand, five hundred and ten Kilometres, following a route set out by Google Maps.
Sadly, the Physiotherapist was not entirely right by saying that I could do no more damage. Without getting too personal, lets just say that I ended up needing to see some specialists when I started bleeding inside and developed difficulties passing water. (peeing, not being adjacent rivers!) I had to have two procedures performed with my being under anaesthetic to try to trace the cause of the problems and because I didn't want to see the correlation, I didn't even think that my dear Mountain Bike could be the cause. It was only when I was finally forced off of the bike by severe pain and suffering that I made the connection and I was heart broken.
My spouse Carol, doesn't see the world like most people. If you present her with a problem, she will mull it over, apply her special brand of Carol logic and then present you with a solution that in all likelihood, you would never have thought of. I do not believe that there are any problems in the world that Carol could not fix if she put her mind to it. So she took me to a meeting with the thoroughly entertaining Freetrike in Exeter and persuaded me to try riding a three wheeler. Instantly I knew that this was the answer, however there was no way in hell I was going to be able to afford £10K for a new one and even second hand the prices were scary. But Carol is a force of nature and with the love and support of her incredible family, she set to scouring the online markets, finding obscure bargains. We met some lovely people as we looked for trikes and then a delightful man called Derek delivered a shiny red older model for me to look at it. It was love at first sight, but the old girl needed a professional mechanic to strip and repair some minor age related issues.
The first ride showed me that the gears were toast and the chain had been treated with what I assume was motorcycle chain lube, which was just a smidge too thick. I removed the chain and soaked it in a petroleum based product to clean and once it had been swilled and sorted, I applied my favourite Finish Line wet lube. The derailleur hanger was bent. It arrived bent and Derek informed me that he generally used the front chainrings and rarely changed the rear because they were so janky. I blamed Sram instantly, because I have worked on their products before and have often been left underwhelmed. However, with the aid of my even more janky Ali-Express derailleur hanger alignment tool, I was able to see just how far out it was bent, moving the derailleur out of alignment vertically and horizontally. In this situation, I would usually fit a replacement hanger, often from the always brilliant BETD. But on this occasion, I just bent it back into place, but a new hanger had been ordered, because it is almost certainly going to fail the next time it takes a hit or bending force.
Twiglet the cat helps refit the cleaned chain
A 180mm disk rotor should stop me!
Why am I wearing padded bib shorts?
This thing is amazing
With the derailleur properly aligned, I ran through the gears on my work stand and they were functional... Well to Sram X5 levels. The grip shift is as poor and difficult to use as I remember and quite frankly, this bottom of the heap rubbish needs to go. My eventual aim is to fit electronic gearing that will help with my dodgy arthritic hands. This will likely be in the form of Shimano DI2, but I have considered going into darker waters with something like L-Twoo, one by eleven speed. However, as much as I dislike Sram for their failure rate that was an issue when I was in last in the bicycle trade, L-Twoo are not just an unknown quantity, but a huge risk due to unreliability as they are still fairly new to electronic shifting and they are barely established in the western markets.
So with the trike running and everything working almost as it should, I set out for a first ride and my first impression was that ICE trikes are brilliant fun. However, going down hill at forty kilometres per hour (24MPH), the steering became so quick that it was terrifying and I genuinely thought that I was going to flip over. Thank Specialized, for their brilliant helmets... Just a shame that I had left it hung up with my MTB gear! For future rides, I will be using the helmet, because the thought of going to the sort of speeds where one of these things can flip over, fills me with Devilish glee!
Having hit forty KMH going down hill, I wanted to know how easy it was going back up hill, before I went on my usual training ride. It is very different climbing with a recumbent position. For a start, there is no extra power gained by standing up on the pedals. Instead, this is steady power and careful gear selection. With a front Deore triple (22-32-44) and a nine speed rear (11 – 32), climbing is not hard and if anything, the low wind drag is wonderful. Riding into a head wind, over taking conventional bikes was a novel experience. The cheers I got from the young mountain bike riders as I went past where they were chatting, was entirely uplifting.
The down sides to riding a trike though are serious. Never before have I felt so vulnerable on the road. I am less than a metre tall when riding and even with my flag fluttering in the wind (until it blew off on the sea front) I am still hard to see for many cars. I am also wider than most bikes, so passing close is extra scary for me. To ride on the road, you need to trust other road users and you need to apply your best skills. It is hard to prove you were in the right in road law, when you have been mashed by a Land Rover Discovery! Discretion being the better form of valour, there were times when it felt prudent to ride on the pavement, especially when the road is narrow or I am going to hold up traffic. However, I have undertaken advanced instruction when riding my motorcycle and I applied many of those skills when riding the trike. I do not want to end up as a pancake of flesh, goo and metal.
Riding the sea front was brilliant. My speed was slightly higher than I was on the mountain bike, both ways, even with a rather strong headwind heading home. The less good bits though were that as a triker, I am much closer to dogs, why people allow their extendable leads to trail out across the prom baffles me. Aggressive dogs were a worry. Also, people do not expect to see what is in effect a high speed wheel chair, whizzing along the prom. As I have found when using my mobility scooter, people see that and I become a disability and not a person. If you want to become invisible on the streets, just look disabled. However, you need to make sure that you look properly disabled, you don't want some overly entitled pecker head telling you that you are not disabled enough to park in the accessible bays! If you have something that is an invisible disability, get used to justifying your existence!
On getting home, I did not want to stop, so I started riding laps of my street. From our front door, around the corner, onto the straight, past the garages, around the corner, down the hill and around to the right and then a hard turn and up the hill to the front door is three hundred and thirty metres. Ten laps is three kilometres. Added to the seven kilometres of front door to the end of the sea front and back again, that gives me a total of around ten kilometres (give or take, the computer is reasonably accurate, but I wouldn't want to trust my driving license to it! Lapping the street gets boring very quickly, I know from previous experience, when I started riding again in 2022, I started out barely able to do three laps before I was knackered. Come the end, I could have ridden one hundred, but my brain would have melted out of my ears!
So what is my big take off from this? Firstly, I have got a new spark. I can ride again and I can do so without pain. I have not ridden a bike without pain since October, 2006. I even took my motorcycle training and test with a TENs machine attached to me. Today, I was on pain killers only and my body did the rest. It was brilliant, I loved every second. Yes, the gears were clunky, inaccurate and difficult to use with the awful grip-shift, but the rest of the bike was magnificent. This has, without hyperbole, changed my life for the better. I can ride again and I cannot begin to tell you how happy this makes me.
So it is with joy in my heart that I thank all of the people who have assisted me in getting here. You know who you are and you know what you did. Most of all though, I want to thank my partner in life, Carol. On this occasion, your solution worked out very well indeed.
Who would want a Hell Mouth in their home? Well, as it happens, I wanted one.
It came about as I was perched upon the porcelain throne, one winters day. A cold breeze blowing about the fundament is liable to inspire one to become creative, usually, this is with swearing. However, on this occasion it was artistic endeavours that called.
I had a small box, that once held a small motorcycle, that I used in a medium sized diorama. The small box was more like a plastic display case and as I thought about it, I developed a growing horror of what could be contained by it. I started by carving a set of grave stones from lolly sticks, some of which were a little more intricate than I had originally planned. But when glued into place, they looked good enough to pass as made of stone, with a splash of paint...
With the stones carved and glued into place, I needed to add some paint.
I recently discovered the horror that is shopping on Ali-Express. Once you start, you can't stop looking for weird things to buy at reasonable prices, rather than buying the same tat from Amazon, at elevated prices. One of the things I have purchased from Ali, is a static grass applicator. This is a bizarre piece of modelling equipment, used to apply fake grass to dioramas or for flocking weird stuff that you want to be hairy. The effect is quite pleasing, especially when combined with different colours and lengths of grass fibres.
Along with some static grass, I added some other plant like material and even gave it a warning sign.
But Jayne, I hear you plead. How could this possibly be a Hell Mouth? Surely a Hell Mouth needs to show the fires of eternal damnation? Well, it turns out that with some flickering LEDs and a battery box, you can create a crack in the ground that leads to somewhere abominable!
With tracing paper underneath the crack, to act as a diffusion filter, the glow is suitably ominous. With the cover fitted to the top, it becomes so much easier to dust! Now I just need to find a home for the Hell Mouth. Oh well, I guess it's back to the toilet!
The answer in short terms, is sort of, but not really.
To give a better and more understandable answer, you need to know how I came to play with this model for a weekend and what went wrong. Firstly, this kit has been supplied to me by a friend. I am not able to afford such kits, but every now and again, someone close to me buys a set and I get to play with it. I am not going to tell you who this person is, just that I value their friendship because of who they are, not because of the Lego they buy, even if I get to play with it.
When they handed over the set and said “have fun, see what you think...” Everything was still sealed in the box and all seemed fine. The box was quite pretty, but in a serious, 'make everything black' kind of way. This is the first time I have been able to play with anything from the new Powered Up and Control Plus systems, having been playing with Power Functions for several years.
Out of the box, there is an awful lot of black pieces in this set, with some light stone grey and a little bit of dark stone grey. The only pieces of any brighter colour are a few pins and a couple of cross blocks, none of which you can see after construction. Once the model is fully built, it is a large, complicated, black box. Thankfully the wheel rims are a nice shade of red, giving it something pretty to look at. If you want a moody teenager's perfect model, forget the old spooky girl minifig, this set is very much of the dark side. In fact, I don't think that even the old Sith Infiltrator set from the Star Wars theme was this dark. To add a splash of colour to the model, there is roughly seventy kilotonnes (OK, two large sheets) of stickers. None of which I had the patience to apply. This many stickers is bordering on offensive, it is clear that they only want the parts to be used for this model and this model only, but more on that later.
With all of the numbered bags out of the box, I found four loose tyres, the control plus hub and the envelope that holds the instructions and stickers. Thank the maker that they put the instruction book in an envelope, because the oddly oily tyres are oozing out a slick and slimy substance that stained the envelope. This stuff is persistent and remains even after I had to wash the tyres with detergent. I scrubbed those tyres with a nail brush and some Fairy dish soap and then put the tyres aside to dry. Twenty four hours later and they continue to ooze out this oily substance, that reminds me of the GT85 Teflon spray I used to use as a cycle mechanic. My guess is that this is some kind of moulding release spray, but it is odd that it continues to leach out, leaving oily stains on fingers and anything absorbent.
Building the model is a dreary affair. There are no complicated and fun gear boxes or even the barest hint of an actual cockpit. There are lots of clever angles and some well thought out use of curved panels, but the emphasis here is purely on the playability with the remote control (not supplied!), rather than making this a fun build. The new wheel hubs seem a lot stronger than previous versions, but come already assembled, so I have no idea what they look like inside. The drive shafts have been redesigned and are significantly bigger now, meaning that they are stronger too. However, the front axle does have a significant amount of bump steer, which is controlled by a secondary rack and pinion. Without this secondary system, the wheels develop a significant amount of toe out as the suspension compresses. As always, Lego suspension is a crude undamped spring. Any force applied to the spring, is released immediately, meaning that the car does not have actual shock absorption, but this is a petty criticism... unless you know that Lego have in the past made damped springs.
The Control Plus hub and the associated motors are powered by six double A cells and not the 12 that is listed in the instruction book. Surely someone must have proof read the instructions? I am using alkaline batteries, having tried rechargeable batteries in the past. Alkaline cells will give out 1.5 volts, which leads to a pack that runs on nine volts. I used a set of rechargeable cells and discovered that each cell only gave out 1.1 volts, which came to 6.6 volts, meaning that anything I built was down by almost two and a half volts. Fitting the batteries to the hub required the use of a screw driver to remove a cover, that exposes a battery box that slots into the hub in an exact location. It then needs to be screwed back in place. Knowing that previous versions of this unit had a clip in battery box, one can only assume that it developed faults and needs the screws to hold it in place. Again, the power functions battery boxes, with their side covers are easier to use. However, having to have the controller with line of sight to the receivers did make for some complicated builds. The Bluetooth system allows for the hub to buried inside the model and does not get interference from strong sunlight.
Controlling the car requires a smart device, a mobile phone or tablet with Bluetooth will work. I have a Samsung phone that is an older model and rather cheap, but I was able to download the application and it installed rather quickly. There is the potential for fun here, with it giving you information about the car and recording data about its use. It has tip over sensors and can work out the camber of roads. However, from the moment it was switched on, it told me that it is always going up hill, with the back of the car being two degrees lower than the front of the car. I put this down to the bump steer problem over extending the front suspension, making it stiffer than the rear. Using a mobile phone is fine, but it can be limiting. Not every child has access to a mobile smart device modern enough to run software this complex. My version also developed a couple of glitches, always with the steering, that would stop registering my finger movement and making the car crash into whatever I was trying to steer around. I am aware that Lego make a Bluetooth controller to run the trains and I wondered if this is compatible. A quick chat with Lego will tell you that this is not possible. However, an ever quicker on-line search will show you that this is possible, but going more in depth you will discover that you need to be able to hack the hub and rewrite the firmware. Thankfully, some helpful souls out on the wild internet have made this a lot easier and I have been having a lot of fun driving the car with this controller.
If you want a really good controller hack, have a look at this brilliant tutorial. This is entirely the video producer's work and I am in awe of what he has done.
It was at this point that I was forced to ask why Lego do not allow this functionality as standard? When I spoke to Customer Services at Lego I was told that there was no provision made for the controller or MOC building, using the Control Plus system. To my mind this is a poor decision and a bad faith move on behalf of Lego. Once again, we are being controlled by the tech we choose to play with, rather than playing with the tech and customising its abilities to suit our needs. Supplying a simple controller with the set makes sense to me, with perhaps optional increased playability through a smart device. I will be honest, I fully intended to hack the hub as soon as I got my hands on it. However, the car is going to remain on a shelf for a little while because the tyres are still oozing a greasy substance onto their surface.
The tyres are another new design and size. Trying to fit other tyres to the car is all but impossible due to the design of the steering system and rear suspension limiting tyre width. Trying to fit larger tyres is impossible because of the body work of the car scrubs on the tread. The only wheels I managed to make fit are the medium road wheels as fitted to vehicles such as the wonderful Mercedes AROCs truck. However, they do stick out rather a lot. I am thinking of possibly using some pulley wheels to space out the hub and allow other wheel types to be fitted, but I am yet to try this.
Overall, I have found this whole model to be rather disappointing and that is because of some unnecessary design decisions made by Lego. Making the hub locked to this model (or the others that use the same hub), with the exact motor configuration, with no access to constructing a model of your own, is ludicrous. Shame on you Lego.
The fault with the tyres is an ongoing issue that I have been discussing with Lego customer services and after nearly a week, I am growing increasingly dissatisfied with their answers. Being told to just wash them off was fair enough, but how many times do I have to wash them before they finally stop oozing oil? When they do stop oozing, are they just going to perish and rot away? I have a pair of small rubber balloon tyres that came on a model from 1999 and these have become rotten and feel like jelly sweets that have been left in a hot car for a year. I can see these tyres developing the same issue in time and I would worry that if stored with any of other Lego tyres, they would damage them.
I am not sure where Lego are going with these licensed sets that seem to be more about collecting exact models, rather than creating new ones. Saying that, I do have the Lego Triumph, Ducati and Kawasaki motorcycles as display pieces and am waiting for them to finally release a GSXR1000! However, I do enjoy creating my own machines. I have in the past built rock crawlers, dumper trucks, fire tenders and fighting robots. Lego Technic has always been versatile, allowing the builder to construct some seriously clever mechanisms. As I write this, I have sat in my build area, a complicated eight wheel drive, eight wheel steered truck, driven by two power functions controllers, with more on the way. Power functions servo motors are becoming rare these days and can cost in excess of forty quid. However, there are many different companies on e-Bay selling Chinese clone parts that can work very well with the power functions controllers. I know this because after my last servo started to develop a wiring fault, I looked elsewhere for replacement parts. The weakest part of power functions has always been the wiring. My worry with the new control plus system, is that damaged wires cannot be repaired quite as easily. With power functions, I am able to just cut of the wire and solder on a replacement. With access to cheap Chinese clone parts, I should be able to continue to run my power functions parts for a long time, because I have no plans to upgrade to control plus as of now.
I would like to thank my dear friend who has made this and another high end set available to me to play with, this week. They know who they are and they know that they are more treasured than any rare power functions servo I could find!
As twenty twenty three passes into twenty twenty four, we can all sit back and reflect on where we have come as a society, marvel at the changes we have made for the better as things have improved for everyone, to ensure that they can live happy, worry free lives...
This is of course utter nonsense. Things have not got better, if anything, things have got considerably worse and many families in the UK are facing an uncertain future, filled with fear and misery. With heating bills rising, rents out of control even if you can find somewhere to live and medical waiting lists moving from months into years for essential health care. From this, we can only conclude that Britain is failing. The old Etonian schoolboys who have run the country for the last decade and a half have lined their own pockets, sold essential services to their friends and stolen the hopes and dreams of the poor. Food bank usage is higher than ever and of course, Brexit has been a huge, wonderful success... Opps sorry, I mean a catastrophic failure that we could all see coming, but somehow the likes of Farage and Johnson convinced the masses that a future separate from our biggest trading partners was the best option for us.
Why am I writing this now? I have kept quiet on my views for long enough. In twenty twenty three, I turned fifty. I never thought I would make it to fifty, I had always thought that I would have died in some exciting mountaineering accident, my mangled body slowing rotting in the high altitude sunshine, having dropped from an indeterminate ledge upon which I was having an epic climb. But arthritis and injury put a stop to that dream! Instead I am stuck indoors, riddled with pain and losing my mobility and independence, while living in fear of the next PIP assessment form that is going to drop through my door and force me to justify my existence.
I realise now that my hope for a happy peaceful future has evaporated. I am terrified of getting tooth ache, because I have no access to dental care. If I have an injury that needs medical attention, the NHS is so stripped of money, I will just sit on a waiting list to see a specialist Doctor who probably died of stress related alcoholism or Covid some time ago and may not have been replaced yet. I am not alone in these fears, so many others here in the UK have these fears and I cannot see a bright future for anyone here, except the very richest, most of which are already multimillionaires. Our current Prime Minister is richer than the King, meanwhile his wife has dealings with companies that are alleged to have made huge profits from Government involvement or even corruption. We all know that the Government are corrupt, but the media has carefully taken the hatchet to the anyone who would oppose them, leaving us with an opposition party who recently praised the work of Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher. The woman who destroyed the mining industry before it was cool to do so and also sold off our water and energy infrastructure, who took us back to the dark ages of the rich owning everything the poor rely upon to live. Currently, we have an unelected member of the cabinet, put there by making him a member of the house of lords, a completely unelected body who include people like Andrew Lloyd Webber and even Jeffrey Archer, of Weston Super Mare (some of us remember the scandal that involved him while he was in Government. Oh, they were such happy days, back when a political scandal meant that the minister was caught having intimate relations with someone he/she/they were not married too!). I am even getting e-Mails from Lord Michael Hesseltine, telling me that we have the same views on important political issues, such as Brexit and membership of the EU. OK, well only on that issue.
So what is my hope for twenty twenty four? It is this. I hope that nothing happens to me or my wife, because I do not know how I will pay the rent on my home. I hope that I do not need dental care or surgery. I hope that my car, that helps me with my daily mobility, does not fail the MOT in January. I hope that my Daughter and her partner can find a home of their own. I hope that my friends can find stability and freedom from debt. I hope that my seventeen year old cat makes it for another year . Finally, I hope that my arthritic hands can keep going as I explore my art and my writing. See? I do have hope after all.
My dear friends, I hope that the coming year brings you much needed peace and restorative rest, so we can face the horrors of our society and fight to put them right. I hope that we can remove these overly entitled bigots and old Etonian schoolboys from power and put in place a better, more egalitarian Government who don't want to ship desperate, hurting people off to the country that is still recovering from a horrific genocide of it's own people.
But if all of these hopes fail, you will find me on a mountain, real or metaphysical, praying to the spirit of nature to take me back home and away from this hellscape I have landed in... Oh yeah, I should mention that shouldn't I? Twenty twenty three was the year that I discovered that I had swapped universes, travelled across the metaphysical barrier between realities and landed in this unrelenting hellscape of far right politics and revolting nationalism. I should have guessed really, after all, what kind of lunatic would vote Boris Johnson into power or believe the lies and evil of Donald Trump? The world feels like a computer game, being played for laughs by a teenager who wants to see how evil a society can become before it implodes! Surely, at any moment, the points score is going to be so low that we are going to be wiped out by environmental disaster, while fighting global warfare started by underendowed oligarchs or simply failing to reach the next level in the game. I know how this works, I used to play Theme Hospital and occasionally I put the most evil and corrupt characters in charge, just for the giggles. Oh Heck... None of this is real. What kind of reality would allow for a fourth Matrix movie or make Darth Vader the sympathetic character we all feel sorry for?
Good luck my friends, I hope that despite it all, the coming year brings you the things you need to make your life safe, happy and peaceful. If it doesn't, then come and find me on the mountain and we can shout at the sky together.
Our dear friend Neil arrived at our door one day, with the ultimate gift that any Star Wars loving kid from the 80s would want, a three and a half inch tall Hasbro Scout Trooper, with opening helmet, complete with an AT-AT Imperial Walker!
These items had been rescued from a skip and as such were incredibly dirty. However, Neil could see that these items would be of great value to the Star Wars fan in me and so he handed them over accepting only a hug in return. The odyssey of the Imperial Walker was about to start as it sat on a shelf in my office, ready to be given the Jayney treatment. The weeks went by, slowly becoming months and every time I looked at the walker, I could see the damage, the missing parts and the broken sound module. Finally, I put a post on Facebook asking my friends what I should do with it and the resounding reply was that I needed to give it the Jayney treatment and resto-mod it to within an inch of it's armoured life.
Step one was to strip it down and scrub away the filth that it had gathered, clearly sat in someone's loft before entering a skip to be scrapped. It saddens me that someone would throw a toy like this away when it could be played with by a child who would love it, but I am sure that the Rebel Alliance would approve of it being scrapped! However, as a confirmed adherent to the Dark Side, I could not allow such a thing to happen to Imperial property and accepted my fate. The cleaning went surprisingly well and under the filth was a very good condition body, with only minor damage to the legs that was easily fixable. The biggest problem however was the missing chin mounted heavy blaster cannons. With some on-line research I found out that this was the Endor Edition Walker, released in 2006 and in it's incomplete state was next to worthless, making it the perfect candidate for what I was planning. Replacement blasters were available, but at just under twenty pounds per side, I was not keen and started to look into constructing my own. Here I went down a strange and unusual path delving into the depths of Spru-Goo, sculpting and chemistry.
Wobbly time slip time... Wooo! On the 7th of February of this year, I took some old model sprues and chopped them up into small sections and dumped the lot into an old cherry jar. I then poured on a bottle of acetone based nail varnish remover and screwed on the lid good and tight, not only to keep the smell in, but to prevent spillage if it got knocked over when I left it to work its magic on my shelf for months. The styrene reacted with the acetone and over time melted in the liquid, forming a strange rubber like compound that could be easily sculpted by gloved hands.
When it came to making the chin blasters, I needed a nice curved shape to hold the barrel and my home made Spru-Goo worked a treat. I scooped out the goo from the jar and laid it out on a work mat and started to roll and shape the spongy mass into shape, carefully folding it into layers that gave it a good thick base to work with. When I was finished, I was left with a smooth, one centimetre thick patty of styrene and I left this on a shelf to cure. As the acetone evaporated from the styrene, forming into a strong, rigid plastic once again. It took three days for the Spru-Goo to become workable and then I was able to saw, file and sand it into the shapes I needed to make the barrel holder. Then it was back to the cardboard supply and then e-Bay. I needed a pair of blaster barrels and during my investigations I had found someone who was 3D printing barrels for the original Kenner AT-AT from the early eighties. These although completely useless for my AT-AT were very, very cheap at only £2.50 including the postage and they took less than a month to arrive thanks to sitting in the local sorting office for three weeks due to a major staff shortage and restructuring by post Office management that has still to be resolved.
When I started to build up the blasters, using the Spru-Goo, the 3D printed barrels and some cardboard, I used the bottoms of some vitamin bottles to make the plasma generating chambers and then made a discovery. The 3D printed barrels were hollow, meaning that I could drill out the ends and install some LEDs directly into them to give them the muzzle flash of a firing weapon. The electronics was the easy bit, but shaping the rigid structure of the cannon to hold them was a little more tiresome. It slowly came together and I was left with something I liked, if looking a little more industrial and weapon like that the smooth sculpted original that had been lost. Being made of a mix of materials though, the cannons needed something to pull them all together. The 3D printed barrels visible ridge lines of the printing and although they were smooth to the touch I still didn't like it. I decided to seal the lot with UV resin, a product I have been using more and more of late and have really come to like. So using a small brush, I painted a thin layer of resin all over the complete cannon assembly and got out my UV torch to start fixing the resin... which failed to set. There was simply not enough power in the torch to set the amount of resin I had ended up using and the result was that the resin remained tacky and unpleasant to handle. I finally left it under a sheet of tin foil with the torch switched on until the batteries finally failed, but each cannon remained sticky and wet. In a fit of rage, while sat bored in a hospital waiting room waiting for wifey to come back from an MRI, I scanned Amazon Prime and found the answer to my problem (purely the setting of the resin, my other problems are to discuss another day!). A huge, plug in, resin curing lamp so powerful that it came with a warning about it being dangerous to the eyes and skin! The next day it arrived and I began baking the tacky cannons until they were glassy smooth and everything was coated with a firm, strong layer of plastic. Unfortunately, it was too shiny for the paint and I had to lightly sand it back to give it a key for the paint to stick too before using my airbrush to give each cannon a coat of gunmetal grey.
With the paint on the cannons drying, I turned my attention to the head of the walker and set about making the modifications to the carriers for the chin cannons. This was deeply infuriating and just when I thought I had it all set, the gears would jump, the sliding plates would slip and the whole lot would stop working. Luckily, I have the power of the Dark Side and thus was able to hold all of the pieces together, like a lightsabre under construction before I finally got it to work as I wanted. I cut away the wiring for the useless wheat seed bulbs that came with the unit and replaced it all with the wiring for the LEDs. I also took a razor saw to the horribly printed windscreen of the beast and cut away this awful looking piece of plastic. Using a pin vice, I was able to drill about twenty tiny, half millimetre holes in the cockpit control desk for the optical fibres I wanted to use. Again, the UV resin and curing lamp came to my rescue. I have in the past tried to secure the optical fibres with super glue, hot glue and plastic glue and all of these attempts have been less that successful. UV resin however is optically clear, easy to apply and cures in less than ten minutes with no damage to the fibres. I was able to bunch the fibres and then use resin again to attach LEDs to the other end of the braid. Optical fibres are great and being flexible are easy to use because the light travels along the inside through internal reflection, allowing the light source to be some distance away from the output end, without issue. So bending the woven fibres around inside the head, I was able to hide the LEDs in the base, away from the cockpit. I then lit the cockpit interior with a menacing red light to give the newly fitted windscreen the appropriate evil red glow, just like in the movies.
The wiring was a little more complicated because there is already quite a large wiring loom fitted as standard to the AT-AT and when it arrived with me, something was very wrong with the sound module and failed to work, even when new batteries were fitted. The only option I had was to open the module up and see if I could find the cause of the failure. Removing it from the superstructure of the walker was a royal pain in the arse and I was quickly left with a pile of parts, held together with the long strands of wire that had been fed through small access holes in the plastic parts. Without wanting to rip through it all, my testing had to be done with the parts in place, which was annoyingly awkward at times as bit fell from my work top or got caught around the cat who had wandered past. However, I quickly found the source of the problem, several cracked joints and a fault in the battery box. Cutting away the wiring felt like a bad move, but what choice did I have? It was already broken, if I failed to fix it, nothing was lost. The fault with the battery box however is still present and when changing batteries, the lid must not be screwed forcefully into place because it will damage the box and break the connection to the power lead. I suspect that somewhere in the past, the battery box screw was over tightened and damaged the housing. However, while I had it apart, I also took my razor saw to the housing of the battery box and fitted a hidden switch, which cannot be seen, even with the hold door open. If you did not know it was there, you would never know about the extra cockpit functions I added. Putting the sound module back together, I accidentally pressed one of the activation buttons and was presented with the noise of the walker slowly stepping on Luke's speeder, from Episode Five, The Empire Strikes Back. The other buttons also worked, as did the chin cannons and the sound module sounded great, if rather loud.
Final assembly and paint was the bit I was looking forwards to. Painting something to look factory fresh and clean is all well and good, but everything in the Star Wars universe is grotty. Ships have oil stains, dirty marks and carbon scoring from blaster fire. The smooth grey paint of the AT-AT just looked too fresh and so I raided the paint drawer for the box of texture paints that live at the back. Texture paint is a new thing to me, but having used it for this, I will undoubtedly use it again, despite my having got it almost everywhere including on my lap top screen! The feet of the walker are now covered in mud and sand, all of which came from the box of texture paints. Weathering is most exciting part of any build and for this one, I wanted it to look abused and filthy. I splattered the chassis with crusty dirt, oil stains, rust stains and filth from wading through water. I used roughly six colour washes and stains to give the effect and what I was left with looked OK, but it also still had that shine of fresh paint. It is hard to explain, but freshly applied texture paint is just too clean and dries with a slight sparkle. What kind of filth shines in the sun, I ask you? The wrong kind...
I used a flat matt varnish from Army Painter to finish the model and then left it to dry for four days before I touched it again. The effect is fabulous and I am now very happy with the result.
There is just one problem. The model is roughly sixty centimetres long, twenty centimetres wide and fifty centimetres tall and thus is too big for my office. The obvious answer is that the AT-AT needs to go, but where? This is where you come in. If you would like a one off, Jayney Magicked, Hasbro Imperial Walker, I am prepared to sell the great beast, although I might just keep the little Scout Trooper, because he's cute and I may have other plans for him...
Seriously though, the Walker is now for sale. I am aware that having put over thirty hours into the restoration and rebuild, I am never going to get that time back, but this is not the reason for doing what I do. As a disabled person who has lost her hobbies and her career, I have little else to fill my free time. However, the paint and parts used are not cheap and if I can cover the cost of them, that would be helpful. If you are interested, do please make me an offer and I can deliver it locally (around Weston Super Mud) or mail it anywhere else in the world. With all of painting and modifications, this Walker is now more of a display piece than a playable toy, so it is unsuitable for a youngster to fill with their figures and take it into battle in the sandpit in the garden. However, with care, the older child in us all can have a bit of fun with it. I remain unconvinced by the Hasbro figure scale, given that according to the Star Wars Vehicle manual I have read (thanks to Carol's Mom for that one, last Christmas) the cockpit should house three or more people. The cargo and crew deck in the main body should be two levels, with storage for two speeder bikes, however, if you put a three and half inch figure in there, you will be lucky to get two in the head and three more in the body, with no room for even a single speeder. I imagine that if the Walker were in true three and half inch scale, it would be close to four feet in height and weight more than is safe to risk falling onto a child playing with it!
As always, I am indebted to those who helped me with this project. Carol has made a fabulous video of the finished model and taken some lovely photos of it too.
My close friend Ginny supplied the air brush that I have been abusing with all sorts of paints and of course there is Neil who supplied the AT-AT. Finally, thank you to everyone on Farcebook who encouraged me to undertake this restoration project. I hope that you approve of my work... If not, tough titties, I have done it now!
I grew up in Germany in the 1980s, a time of the cold war, Chernobyl and the Chieftain tank. Sadly, only one of these things has turned into something fun to play with at the weekend.
I have loved the Chieftain tank since childhood and had more than one chance to crawl across one, while still an overly excited pre-teen, visiting the Tank Museum in Bovington. Obviously, as soon as I hit my teenage years, I immediately stopped loving something as loud, obnoxious and heavy as a tank and instead got into music, namely Heavy Metal music.
Along with my love of Heavy Metal music, came my delight in the peace movement and even now aged horribly close to fifty, I am still involved in the peace movement, albeit, while wishing that I had the disposable income and large area of unused farmland upon which I could dabble in my interest in Chieftain tanks.
As we all know, the venerable old Chieftain had something of an Achilles heel out back, in the form the Leyland L60 engine. However, when it did work, the nineteen litre, opposing piston, two stroke multi-fuel engine had a glorious howl to it, despite being chronically underpowered for the vehicle it was propelling. Luckily the pack was easy to pull out and replace while in the field... Every cloud etc.
You can now buy your own Chieftain tank, providing that you have £60K to play with. However you also need a thousand pounds to fill the tank, every time you want to go for a drive of more than half a mile. If you want to know more about this kind of thing, why not go and have a look at the Mr Hewes YouTube channel. If you love tanks, you will not be disappointed.
Now of late, I have of course got into my art in a big way and when I say a big way, I now have a room in the house entirely dedicated to my making art. I have some of my art displayed in our home and the wife even likes some of it! However, I have wanted to make a Chieftain Tank Diorama for a while now and always put it off because of the cost of a decent sized set. Now obviously, the kindly folk at Google would never listen in to my conversations through their monitoring devices in my phones and computers, so it was by pure chance that they displayed to me one day, a whole host of cheap model tanks... It would have been rude to ignore it, so I snapped up a Tamiya 1/35 scale model set for a penny short of £17. The bastard Post Office added their own stab in the back for delivery and four days later, it arrived in my disgustingly sweaty paws. Thus, the plan came together and I got my magic bucket out of the shed. I cut the wood for a base and dropped it in the bucket. I also slapped in some ripped up newspaper and a bottle of glue, then tickled the lot with a paintbrush and then dropped in the bits of tank. I put the lid on the bucket, gave it a hearty shake as I said the magic words (do you really think that I am going to tell you my magic words?) and what do you know? A load of spilled paint, sticky glue, broken plastic and ripped up newspaper fell out of the bucket!
So with a new model set delivered to my desk and the magic bucket on toilet cleaning duty, I set about doing it properly. The base was a piece of off cut chipboard donated by a friend. The newspaper came from my Mother in law, while Wifypoozles supplied the PVA glue. Knowing the dimensions of the tank, I was able to map out the diorama and then start designing the landscape. I knew that I wanted a rocky bank and a drainage ditch either side of the vehicle, with a fence and some grass. Using a cardboard tube and flower arranging foam, I quickly modelled the bank and then using a drill and a Dremel I cut the ditch into the base board.
The base board was then coated with newspaper and a mix of paint and PVA, sealing the tube and foam into place. I also placed a couple of pretty stones and a larger rock into place to give me a rocky bank with an exposed rock face.
With the base dry, it was time to add the soil and substrate, for which I used a mix of builders sand, gravel and pebbles, mixed with PVA. It took a couple of days to dry, but when it did, it was as hard as rock. Using my airbrush, I gave it a quick coat of burnt umber paint, which just deepened the already very brown of the sand and gravel. I used some lichen that had fallen from one of our trees to simulate bushes and shrubs and used some sheet grass from a model railway to make the grassy tufts I wanted at the edge of my gravel road.
I used cocktail sticks and super glue to knock up a fence and then found the measurements for a stile and added one of them too. A quick on line check sourced an army range sign warning about the dangers of picking up used ordnance.
With the base done, I turned to the model tank and began the construction with painting and building of twelve road wheels, two front guide wheels, two rear sprockets and six return rollers. Five hours later, each wheel was assembled, painted and ready for fitting to the bogies. By the end of day one on the tank build, I had assembled the lower hull, with tracks.
Day two saw me make a start on the upper section of the tank, also known as the Glacis Plate and engine deck. This took barely more than an hour and the boxes looked great assembled and fitted. Moving onto the turret was where things got complicated as several tiny parts needed to be located and fitted. The crew doors had to be functional, so that if I decided to use them, I could add the figures for a heads out driving of the vehicle. I also had to fit the barrel lock, which again had to be functional to allow the main gun to be locked into the rearward position. With all of these parts functional, it was fun to add the first coats of paint, a dark green acrylic ink designed for use with an air brush. With the dark green base coat of the plastic, it needed only thin coverage to give the wanted effect, however as the paint dried, it took on the usual glossy finish, totally unsuitable for NATO camouflage. Luckily, when I bought the model set, I also purchased a bottle of clear mat varnish.
Some parts of the set were extremely well made and thus it went together beautifully, not needing anything more than a light sanding to remove moulding marks. Sat on the shelf behind me in my room was two jars of experimental spru-goo and not once did I need it. However some parts were quite poorly made. Actually, that is unfair. The plastic tow cables were brittle and did not lay like real steel cable, so I raided the mountain bike spares and pulled out a stainless steel brake cable, which I unwound to find the wire core. At point eight of a millimetre, this was the exact size to replace the plastic tow cables. However the eyelets that connect the cable to the tank were another story. Using some of the spru-goo, I attempted to model some eyelets. However at the time of writing, the spru-goo has not yet reached full hardness. So with a heavy heart, I cut the eyelets off of the plastic tow cable and with a micro-drill, made a 0.5mm hole and then enlarged it to just under one millimetre. This was just big enough for take a tight fitting steel cable and thus the tow cables were made.
The final pieces to be assembled were the crew and in the instruction guide, all three of the crew are to be painted as white European men. This grated against my more egalitarian heart and so when I started to paint the figures, I painted the tank Commander with a skin tone that matched a photograph of Grand Tour level cyclist, Biniam Girmay, the first Black African cyclist to win a stage in a grand tour. The young man is an extremely talented professional cyclist, who was unfortunately taken out of the 2022 Gyro d'Italia after winning a stage, when the cork from a podium celebration bottle hit him in the eye.
With my crew painted, I fitted them and then decided that they needed a back story, so here it is. The Driver is a Gay man, out and proud. The Gunner is a Trans Man, brave and strong and then the Commander is a young Black man. The sad truth is that during the years of service for this vehicle, it is extremely unlikely that such people would ever get into the army, let alone command of a main battle tank.
Thus my project came to an end, with a large stone holding the tank hull down to the base board as I waited for the glue to dry. So while I wait for the glues, paints and resins to harden, I must find another project to distract me from the unending pain I suffer every day. I know, I will design and scratch build from paper stock an entire model of my motorbike! I am a fucking idiot.
As a former climber, mountaineer and maniac for mountain sports, it was a joy to come back to the mountains once again, this time in a completely new way.
My dedication to mountain sports was prematurely stopped by illness and disability and so I sort of came to the conclusion that I would never see the mountains again. However, a strange series of events, the love of my friends and family and a determination to give it a shot, led to my return to the Snowdonia mountain range after a gap of twenty years. Obviously this came with a cost and that was in pain and suffering. My body has taken the hit surprisingly well, with only one minor meltdown and a complete failure to comply with my demands. However, this is why we have pain killers and comfortable beds.
The trip started with strapping my faithful friend, Sylvie my Suzuki SV650 to a trailer on the back of my car.
With some glorious company in the form my wife, her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend, we set off on an adventure. Well once all of the annoying mechanical problems had been fixed! We won't go into them here, but let us just say that my patience has been truly tested.
Our adventure took us to North Wales, a place that I loved with a lot of climbing passion back in my twenties and thirties. This year I turn fifty and to be honest I am not sure how I feel about this. I am clearly no spring chicken, but I resent the idea that I am old, I still have toys, albeit big shiny silver ones and I am still very silly with my toys.
Carol rode from our home in Somerset to Wales on her trusty Kawasaki ZRX1100, a true beautiful beast of a bike and Alice rode her Kawasaki GTR1400, a machine that is a mix of sports bike and comfy sofa. The ride up was fun, but the wind on the bridge across the Severn was terrifying. The poor little car felt like it was going to be thrown off at any time.
We arrived safely at a beautiful little farm and set up base camp in a converted grain store. The roof was hilariously low and sloping, but inside it had a basic luxury that was joyous. We unloaded Sylvie and prepared for the week ahead. Our first ride out was a gentle local ride, taking in my old play ground of Tremadog. I spent many happy (and some terrifying) moments on the climbs at Tremadog and enjoyed camping in the field behind Eric's Café. To my utter horror Eric's has gone, replaced by some modern, electronic self service, anti-climber hipster shit hole. With security cameras, huge warning signs and strict private property notices, it has become a hugely unwelcoming place and with a heavy heart we quickly left.
The following day was the big ride out, the trip to Snowdon itself. More correctly known as Yr Wyddfa, the mountain is the second highest in the UK, being around 1030 metres above sea level. I have spent many happy hours playing in this region, climbing some of the classic lines and basically living in the moment. To return on my motorbike with my beautiful family wiped away those frivolous memories and gave me new, happier and more peaceful ones.
The ride was glorious, the roads were hard work, but I loved every second of it, even when I got beyond exhausted and moved into migraine territory. The last ten miles was the hardest, most demanding motorcycle riding I have ever done due to how poorly I was feeling and there were moments when I simply had to grit my teeth and hope for the best as I twisted my throttle and went for an over take. Once back at the house, I boiled over into a grotty, shivering, crying mess and after swallowing incredibly strong painkillers, retired to bed.
I have no regrets, the riding was amazing, even though it caused me a lot of pain. Sylvie was faultless and my little family were beautiful. So despite the pain, I could not be happier. I no longer have this chasm of grief in my heart for the mountains. Instead, I have softer, kinder and happier memories of being truly at peace with myself in an environment that I truly love.
All photo's have been provided by my partner Carol, for which I am very grateful. A feature length Youtube video will no doubt follow soon given that both Carol and Alice are film makers of some talent. Until then, just know this. No matter what happens from now, in this moment, I am truly happy.
With the global state of LGBTQ+ rights being rather shite at the moment, it is occasionally nice to come across something that affirms the right for rainbow people to simply exist and I found one of these things recently and was then rather taken with the character of Goth Dad.
Dusty Gannon created the character for Tictok and Instagram with the intent to share a message of kindness and support to young Goth kids and to be honest, us older Goth kids too. The words of kindness he shared were beautiful and I started to look for more of his kindness and wisdom in the short films and quickly discovered that Goth Dad was the singer of the American Goth band Vision Video.
For many years it has been easier to say to folks who meet me for the first time that I am a Goth, rather than trying to explain the intricacies of Heavy Metal culture. After all my first love is extreme metal, mainly in the form of Black Metal from bands such as Emperor, Enslaved and Akercocke. Already I can see that some of you want to discuss the differences between Black Metal Art, Viking Black Metal and Blackened Death Metal, but lets just make it easy and stick it all under the easily pigeonholed title of “Fokkin Goffic!” to quote the abusive thugs who enjoyed shouting at me as I wandered the dark streets of Plymouth in the late 1990s, before they swapped to “Fokkin Tranny!” Ahh, the vigorous repartee of the average urban 1990s thug, draped in his Burberry tracksuit while smoking Happy Shopper fags!
So back to my original point, I will identify as Gothic when asked, because I tend to wear a lot of black, often with funny make up and appear somehow Vampiric. The fact is though that I do enjoy the occasional Goth band, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Fields of the Nephilim, The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. Pictures of You, by The Cure is one of the most beautiful songs ever written and everything ever sung by Siouxsie Sioux is pure magic. However Fields of the Nephilim have that dark post apocalyptic feel that makes me want to curl up and die in blissful soundscapes, with the track 'Trees come down' being my particular favourite. So when I found Vision Video, a fairly minor pop Goth band from America, I was happy to give them a listen. What I heard combined the wisdom of Goth Dad with the sadness of American societal despair at school shootings, huge economic inequality, almost constant war and a lack of health care into something beautiful. Despite the poppy sounding music, the themes have a serious message and strong heart, especially when the content of the song drops into the personal experiences of the singer's military service in Afghanistan.
I bought the first album, 'Inked in Red' almost instantly and played it nearly constantly. It reminded of the the very best parts of The Cure, mixed with the best parts of Siouxsie and with hints of Joy Division thrown in too. It remains a beautiful little record, with several high lights among the tracks. However the track Kandahar mixes beauty with a deep rage over the horror of the war in Afghanistan and the slaughter of those caught between the combatants. Let us not hide from the truth here, history will judge this era harshly, for the rampant capitalism that funded wars for oil in the Middle East, which then resulted in the deaths of many innocents. Meanwhile there was significant Governmental funding of groups such the Taliban who were set up and trained by the CIA in their early days, to fight against Soviet interests in the region. After twenty years of war, the West pulled out Afghanistan, leaving it to the clutches of the fundamentalist Islamic Government, who promptly took away the rights of women and girls before starting to complain that running a country was a lot harder and far more work than they had expected!
This leaves the world now as a fucked up mess and let us not hide from the main cause of this as the super rich companies still fight for the right to mine coal, while burning mega tonnes of what they already have dug up and filling the atmosphere with filth. Meanwhile, you are being chastised for not putting out your plastic and glass recycling in separate boxes (I read Environmental Science for my degree and it was heart breaking learning that with enough time the Earth will rebalance just fine, it's just unfortunate that our species probably won't make it!).
Vision Video as a band is not just about Goth Dad. Keyboard player Emily Fredock has a powerful voice as well as being a great musician and when she sings, you can hear her anger coming out too, despite the gentle pop sounds of the music. Combining with Dusty on vocals and guitar, Dan Geller on bass and Jason Fusco on drums, they make some truly joyous sounding music, but with those dark edges that Gothic music demands. None of it is offensive despite the sad imagery each song creates and it is fairly clear that these people will not be burning down any churches, murdering rival musicians in fights over who is the most evil or burying their stage clothes so they can feel the pull of the grave when they perform... All infamous tropes Black Metal has been guilty of in the past. The first. However, as a small Goth band in America, I never thought that I would get to see them... and then came the announcement, that they were to be support for the March Violets on a limited EU and UK tour.
I purchased my tickets that afternoon, despite knowing next to nothing about the March Violets, for the show on a ship in Bristol docks, The Thekla. Having seen some very good shows on the Thekla, I knew that that it would be intimate, with beautiful sound and a small crowd. I purchased two tickets, one for me and one for my friend Jan, my companion for the slightly more odd gigs, such as when we went to see the Kunts in Bristol, or when we went to see Richard Herring live in Wells, or when we went to see Richard Herring interview Kunt in London! I had played 'Inked in Red' to Jan and she quickly grew to love it. So she was quite excited to be going to see Vision Video.
A few days before the gig, we were told that Vision Video would be on early and it was advisable for us to get there in plenty of time for the show or risk missing them. However, the weekend before the show, Jan and I found ourselves broken down in Keynsham where we had gone to play with Lego on a steam train. The alternator in my car had failed and I had driven into the car park of Bitten Steam Railway with no power steering, nor any ABS brake assist, air conditioning, music or dashboard lights. It was thanks to a fairly new battery that we got there at all, but the journey back home again on the back of an RAC van, driven by Rob the kindest mechanic I have ever met. Luckily for me, my darling wifey Carol was on the case before I even got home and she quickly ordered replacement parts and also said that a new serpentine belt would be a good idea and promptly ordered one of those too. By Tuesday my car was back in good health and ready for our trip to Bristol on Wednesday evening. When we arrived at the venue, forty minutes before the doors (hatches?) on The Thekla opened, we sat in glorious sunshine listening to my favourite punk band, Alice Donut. As soon as the (as it turned out) roller shutters opened on the ship, we queued up and were inside within five minutes, only to come face to face with a poster of band times. Somewhere along the way, we had been viciously lied to! Vision Video were due on about twenty minutes later than we anticipated...
Jan and I headed inside the ship and quickly discovered that the floors were remarkably uneven. I had not noticed this before, but on this occasion I really struggled with the venue and found it difficult to keep a steady footing. I wobbled about like Bambi on ice and we eventually found our way down into the stage area (hold?) of the ship. Away from the heat of the day, it was deliciously cool and the DJ was playing some suitably gentle Goth themed music, some of which I recognised but most of which I did not. Like I say, I am mainly a metal head, I just look like a goth to the untrained eye. The first act on stage was electronic musician Kristeen Young and she reminded me of a mix of Diamanda Galas and Kate Bush, with powerful grinding rock backing and her voice that was capable of violent roars and shrill squeals. It was impressive, she was clearly hugely talented and very good at her art, but I did not gel with it and lamented that with her incredible vocal talents, she desperately needed to front a powerful Black Metal band, rather than playing a keyboard based rock music. However, I was probably alone in this thought because she had a lot of fans among the crowd who surged in to watch her perform.
I took the time to grab a t-shirt from the Vision Video merch stand and caused a laugh from the softly spoken American woman behind the desk when I asked for a size suitable for a fat bitch like me. Jan just shook her head knowing that I had said something objectionable, without actually hearing my words.
Finally Vision Video took to the stage and the four piece are just as beautiful on stage as they are on you tube or album. It was fairly clear that they were playing to a crowd who were on their side and I was not alone in singing along to some of the tracks from 'Inked in Red', although I did not hear much if any from the second album 'Haunted Hours'.
The songs were beautifully performed, both Dusty and Emily sang with their usual power, despite having spent several weeks on tour in both Europe and back home in America.
But all too quickly it came to the last two songs and that was when we got to see the heartfelt politics of the band as Dusty gave us a spoken word introduction that laid out all that is wrong in modern American society. He talked about wealth inequality, gun violence, health care provision, warfare and human rights and he did so with the undisguised disgust of someone who has seen the horrors of fighting a war. It was utterly heart breaking and yet also uplifting because surrounded by others of the same opinion, it gave all of us hope that by standing together we could change some of these awful things. With the speech over, they launched into 'Organised Murder' and it felt justified to be dancing to such angry and heartfelt words. With the final song done, they walked off stage to the whooping, yelling and applause of a very happy crowd, despite the sadly short play time. This is not to denigrate their performance time which was just over thirty five minutes. The truth was that I could have listened to them play each album twice and then the special new tracks from the as yet untitled new album. It was a very different experience for me, for a start the front of the stage did not turn into a violent maelstrom of a mosh pit. The dance floor was a remarkably gentle place, while still being energetic and fun.
With the band finished, Jan and I retreated to the seating area and then the toilets and had a chat. We had hoped to get to say hello to the band, which has happened a couple of times on the merch stand when I have seen bands on the Thekla, but sadly this was not to be. We chatted and I complained about the low lampshade that I had hit my head on when we had sat down earlier. The March Violets took to the stage and when I had recovered enough energy, Jan and I descended the stairs to check them out. The March Violets have been touring and producing albums for over forty years, but each song was new to me and to be honest it was not really my thing. It was very clearly being enjoyed by the crowd, but for me, it lacked the brutality of metal or the heart of Vision Video. It was perfectly good, electronic, new wave music from the eighties and I was a child for the eighties and did not turn eighteen until 1991. I had also not been exposed to a lot of music during my childhood, which looking back saddens me now because music is such a huge part of my life these days. However we did not have MP3 players with the sort of data compression needed to carry a whole album collection in my pocket when I was kid. Modern technology utterly spoils us these days, given how easy it is to access my music collection, take photos of bands and browse the internet from the small computer in my pocket that also allows me to call out for fried chicken whenever the whim takes me (thanks Ginny, for convincing me that smart phones were great. I never leave the house without it now!).
Feeling slightly sad that we had missed the chance to say hello to the band, while also feeling unsteady on my feet and remarkably energised at having seen the band, we decided to leave slightly early, meaning getting home at better time and not getting caught by the rush at the end. Slowly and unsteadily I climbed the stairs, with Jan behind me worried that I was going to fall and we reached the top, turned the corner and almost barged into Goth Dad himself, Dusty!
Dusty was everything you hope that a rock star will be. He was generous with his time, he was happy to sign albums and even pose for photos with fans. But the best of all, the politics and the heart are all real for him. The standing up for and caring about LGBTQ+ young people is real. The caring about the state of the world and his wisdom are all real. I wish that I could remember his exact words, sadly I was too star struck to take it all in, but it went something like this. “Those Motherfuckers in power are all old and they are fighting as they die out. Eventually they will be gone and the world will get better as the young people see them for what they were.” I could have cried. It was at that moment that Emily strode along the deck and said hello. We had obviously kidnapped Dusty and she had come to find him, the poor lad was probably on his way to the loo when we nearly crashed into him. But they both stood with us for photos, signed albums and Emily even talked to Jan about cats. These two people, gave me hope. Fuck, I feel old saying that. Now when Jan and I write about faerie warriors in our Winscombe books, it is just possible that we had unknowingly based one or two of them on Dusty and Emily.
I have said it before when I had the pleasure of spending some time teaching art to my friend's daughter, the insight of the youth is what is going to save our world and it will be safer in their hands than it ever was in ours. They will take the goodness from us and the vileness of our hate will fade away, acceptance and kindness will rise, maybe even the religion will fade away too? The world will be 'woke' and when you look at what woke means, a woke society will be a good society where minorities are protected, where institutional racism is dismantled and egalitarianism takes over. Fuck me, I am a fucking dreamer. At my darkest moments, all I can see is a foul dystopian end to humanity as global warming destroys the human safe climate and brings an end to the Anthropocene. As I think of this, I think of my nieces, of my friend's children, of my own children and grandchild and ache for a better world for them and for all young people. I want the youth of the future to feel safe to be true to themselves, to be accepted for being a rainbow person. I want the distinction of being LGBTQ+ to be minor to how we live our lives, just like eye colour is or how tall we are. Maybe, in his own small way, Goth Dad and the band Vision Video can add to that better future?
Being a disabled person can be boring, really really boring! There are days when I really want to do things, just like I used to do in the past, but my activity levels are directly related to how warm and sunny the day is. If the day is cold and damp, my body refuses to comply and I end up stuck at home, often pumped full of pain killers and barely able to move. On a nice warm day, my joints are a lot less painful and I can do things, although I must be clear here, not to the levels that I previously did. I won't be climbing any mountains anymore.
I have made peace with losing my mobility and to some degree my ability to participate in the rest of my life. So on good days when I can move, I embrace the day and live my best life. Such a day happened last Wednesday, when the weather was just warm enough and my pain levels were just low enough, Carol arranged to meet up with her daughter and daughter in law and then go on a adventure. An adventure that involved riding our motorcycles. For me, I had some trepidation, but I made it, albeit I was exhausted at the end of the day and I could barely walk from the garage to the flat afterwards, despite spending the day sitting down!
We met up in a service station car park and then headed out into the countryside to head towards a small set of locks that have a dock on the banks of the river Severn. We pottered around the dock for a little while, enjoyed the sights, admired the steep drops and tried not to be silly when stood on the edge of the scarily deep canal.
Bored of the docks, or to be more accurate, I ran out of ability to walk, we got back on the bikes and set off to find some dinner. Sitting together to break bread and just be a family was a moment that has changed how I see my world. I don't know when I became old, I certainly don't feel old, but being sat with two young women still in their twenties, right next to a group of international students who had also entered the restaurant at the same time, I felt the weight of my years upon me and yet I was not sad.
I feel blessed to have the family I have. When I made peace with disability, I made peace with myself and with the world around me. I have new hopes and I want to have new adventures, who knows where we are going to go in the future, but one day I really will be old and as I have recently been informed, Alice is going to choose which old folks home I end up in!
Carol filmed the video, with cameras on her her bike and mine. This is the video of our trip.
Well, it's winter and it's cold. As is often the case with me, I am fighting the winter blues because the cold and the damp make my bones ache and my connective tissues stiffen like old ironing boards. To counter this, I use the tried and tested method of swearing, sulking and acts of self destruction, such as learning new sports or going too hard with physio therapy to overcome a frozen shoulder, which leads to extra aches and pains.
This year, I have decided to give the complete self destruction a race pass until spring and instead focus my attention onto arts and crafts. To which I have dabbled quite a lot recently, having made the discovery that I am in fact an artist as well as a science graduate. You may be asking why I have talked about my disabilities and then my art? This is because on this occasion, I have combined them in more than one way and I shall explain further, so read on if you would like to know more.
Basically, I really love reading. I read every day and will devour a book in anything from hours, to days or to weeks, depending on the chosen book. However, heavy, thick paper books with fine print are no longer something I can spend my time with due to failing eye sight and painfully arthritic hands. So a few years ago I acquired a Kindle e-Reader and to be honest, it is the best piece of tech I have ever owned and my dear device must be close to ten years old now. I have read hundreds of e-books, some were great classics while some were pure trash. Some of the classics took some work to understand, in particular the philosophical and political works of Hyndeman or Kropotkin and then there was several weeks of my trying to read Marx for fun.
An adaption that the Kindle has, which makes reading so much easier as I approach middle age is that the font size can be made as small or as large as your can comfortably read. Recently, I had noticed that for night time reading, the font size was trending towards the sixteen or eighteen point size. I could wear my reading glasses, but even with font size changed, my biggest problem was light. The Kindle cover I use with my device is now so old and tatty that the flex points are as floppy as old curtains and the LED reading light has significantly dimmed over the years, even with new batteries fitted.
So what was a girl to do? I could go out and buy a new one, the Kindle itself is starting to show the signs of ageing too, being no longer able to fully charge any more and then losing charge in a matter of days rather than previous time gap of weeks. Or maybe I just read too much? However, both Kindle and cover were bought for me by my wife and as such, they have a great deal of sentimental value to me. Luckily, the wife knows that I border on being a crazy artist and despite her saying that I should treat myself to a new device with cover, I think that I can keep these two going for another few years yet. So into the workshop we must go, my dear beloved Kindle.
Step one was the planning and with a simple book cover design, with a built in flip over reading light, the original cover was a rather plain looking design in red PVC fake leather. The edges were fading to white and the spine was threadbare, so it needed some repairs as well as customising with some paint and other fun details. The original light was a single white LED, which I considered changing to a different colour, but I was not sure how that would effect my ability to read in the dark. My next option was to swap out the LED for a brighter white one and then when I took the light unit apart I found that the LED had been wired with a dirty great resistor, which lowered the light output significantly. So I set about fiddling with it to see what I could retrofit and that was when I discovered that the plastic construction of the light unit was somewhat thin and flimsy when it split, before falling apart in my hands. Not to worry, I simply made other plans, involving using a modern pair of LED's mounted on a custom board. Finding the board I wanted to use was easy, I just took a standard LED light and took a hacksaw to it, reattaching as many LEDs as I desired once I was finished cutting, which in this case was just two. I then cut and shaped a new light housing, reflector and set the angle of the LEDs to shine on the middle of the Kindle 'page'.
The rest of the cover needed some inspiration, so with my almost (yeah, right!) fanatical obsession with Star Wars, I set about making the device look like an Imperial Officer's data pad. As always, my choice of media was old bits of cardboard and plenty of cheap super glue. However, for this project I also used riveted snap studs, old knicker elastic and nylon webbing from an old back pack. The front cover still looked fairly plain, so I raided the bottom of the box of making junk and found a moulded plastic sheet that I have used in the past to make realistic looking street cobbles. I don't know what possible function it could have on the cover, but it really does look like is belongs there.
Once I had finished the construction and made it look bright and resplendent, after I sprayed it with my new air brush, with a flat metallic silver paint giving the cover it's smooth shiny gloss, It was time for some fun. This is the bit I enjoy the most, the fun with the filthiest of filth. Using a mix of brown, black, metallic copper and metallic brass paints and then attacking it with sandpaper, I got it looking like it had been through a firefight on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, maybe the Death Star itself. Once it was finished, I hit it with clear coat and left it to harden, while I fiddled with the other parts, such as the new clasp that holds it closed and finally attaching the new light. With it all done I was rather pleased with the outcome. Happily, it is far from perfect because it looks dreadfully dirty, maybe even a little scorched or corroded in places and the previously actual worn out parts have been reinforced nicely. Hopefully, I will get another ten years out of this little beauty.
This is a precursor to the main event. I present a Maisto 1/12 scale Yamaha R1 modified with fibre optic headlights & taillight. Built into a street scene diorama. This was an experiment because the next project is for my wife, building a Kawasaki Z1 1/12 model kit that she has had for over 20 years. This version of the R1 is a very pretty bike, for lovers of sports bikes, although I prefer something more comfortable these days. The KX Series phone kiosk & post box are all scratch built from scrap card & plastic packaging. The paving slabs are cut from mounting card that had been water stained. The base is made from a damaged insulation board offcut. The electronics are all recovered from scrap computer parts, as are the wires. The LED for the headlights is hidden inside the engine & is attached to the fibre optic strands with UV resin. #scalemodelling #diorama #maisto #Yamaha #r1 #bt #recycledart #womanartist #motorcycleart #yzfr1 #phonebox #artist #modelmaker #painting #uvresin https://www.instagram.com/p/CoVl9IwICER/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
I was so very bored & felt creative, then my dear wife came home with a kids model set of the venerable old Tiger one. It's a boxy little cat, with a powerful main gun & a fiddly engine, but for a modler with a brand new airbrush to play with, it's the perfect first victim, I mean project! The model is very simple, with a few well moulded parts & it went together very simply. The turret can turn & the main gun can move up & down. The plastic though was a grim shiny orangey brown, so out came the airbrush. The kit came with paint & I filled the cup. Only the airbrush is very economical with paint, so I had to pour it back out again, which made rather a mess. Lesson learned, I discovered that a few drips of paint go a long way & the tank was looking as fresh as a a year seven on the first day of school! Along came the airbrush again & this time we added filth, grime, dirt & mud. Perfect. The base was a little more complicated. I wanted to try modelling with expanded foam blocks. This base was my 3rd attempt & when given a skim of plaster & gravel, with a dash of Bermuda sand, it was ready for the airbrush. Applying washes is so much easier & the colours are so delicate. A huge thank you to those involved in supplying equipment & model. #modelmaking #airbrush #womanartist #lgbtq🌈 #tigertank #airfix #scalemodelling #painting #diorama #tanks #panzer https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnjqm2xoWDs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
