Tag Archives: British

London Shots, Part Deux

Posted by Steve on July 26, 2012 No comments

Slowly working my way through the shots I had planned to process. Here is the next batch!

While walking past Buckingham Palace, we didn’t plan on going in, but I would be remiss if I didn’t grab a shot of one of the guards.

From the London Eye, everything seems so small! I loved the skewed view of this shot, and the curve of the earth.

“As every school child knows, there have been ravens at the Tower of London since time immemorial, and if they ever leave, the monarchy and the tower itself will fall.”

While visiting the Prime Meridian, we got a great view of the city. You can see them building up te Horse Arena to be used for the Olympics.

Highgate Cemetery is separated into and East and West side. We opted for the East side and I am glad we did. It’s covered with overgrown graves and very ominous.

On Holiday

Posted by Steve on June 27, 2012 No comments

Cheers mates!

Just a quick post to say that we are heading off to jolly ol’ England for a bit of a holiday! Many gadgets will be used and pictures will be taken. An interesting note, we are not planning on taking any laptops! This will be a little bit of an experiment. Sarah and I are only taking the iPads and our phones. I’ll stock up on Memory cards and clear off the iPad to use for storage for pictures, but yeah, no laptop.

We rented a flat in London and it is supposed to have Internet access. to spread this into WiFi I picked up a [amazon_link id=”B004T8FC66″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]ZuniConnect Travel Router[/amazon_link]. So far this thing is awesome. It will bridge the connection from a wired LAN to WiFi, or the reverse, Or echo an existing WiFi! This will work out great to share the connection with the iPads and phones. So far I have used it to extend my WiFi connection to a wired only machine and it worked great. More reports to come.

We have a huge list of things to see and fun to be had, including a day trip out to Stonehenge! Keep an eye on Twitter for some potential updates along the way!

Father Son 1/2 size TARDIS build

Posted by Steve on August 1, 2011 1 comment

So, the wife and I have now made it through all of the new Doctors and I am slowly working my way through the classics, as well as catching up on Torchwood.

One of the thing that struck me was the Tardis. I looked at it early on and thought…..I bet I could build one of those. See, I love woodworking. Especially odd ball stuff. I designed and build a box for my cat to have his food and water in that we could see into, but the dog couldn’t get to it. So I thought, “why not build a Tardis!” Shortly afterwards my Son mention that we should do it as a team project. Since he is prepping to join the military, I figured this was a good bond type of thing for us to do.

So, here we are. For the last two months I have been browsing the forum Tardisbuilders.com, looking at everyone’s builds and gaining inspiration. I know that I would have a few days off from work (just switched jobs) and it would be perfect timing for this build. I eventually want to build a Full scale box but wanted to start small and get ideas. This will help me build the larger one when it comes time.

So we started Wednesday and I made a point to try and take pictures along the way.

Since this is a 1/2 scale (ish) we started with a simple base frame:

We opted to have the walls be plywood (1/4 inch thick) and cut out the squares.

Sonic Screwdriver says Math is Hard!

Cutting out the squares:

Our Corner pieces are 4×1 inch paired with a 3×1 inch, 4 feet long:

With the walls attached (doors are just leaning)

And here we are after today. Doors attached and everything mounted on the base:

So Thursday we got the backings on all the panels and added a roof to brace for when we add the tiers (and to hold everything in place.

Also, First Blood happened. I almost always bleed somehow on every project. Thankfully it’s only a small puncture.

You may also notice that the top is a tad shorter. We cut off about 3 inches to solve the tall top problem. our sinage will be about 3 inches tall so we should have maybe an inch of overage.

A big lesson learned here would be to save the door attachments until after the top is on. We now will need to take the doors off and trim them up a bit as they stick when opening. (Through warped wood or being 1/4 inch off.) That’s one of the downsides to working small scale. even 1/4 of an inch can cause HUGE problems.

Next stop, Lowes to pick up wood for the Signs and Roof! I think we may look at doing a flat roof instead of the slanted as in 1/2 scale the difficulty curve is pretty high.

We painted on Saturday and that means some outside time. I am so glad my shop is downstairs in the basement where it’s nice and cool.

So here’s where we are now: Took the doors off and started painting the main body, first coat.

While that was drying (and the wife helped with the second coat) the kid and I went down to build the roof. here it is sitting on the top. (Not the actual lantern that will be used)

I bought some pre-cut plexi for the windows and left the frost plastic on them.

So that leaves us with the Signs, Window frames, and Lantern for the top.

I opted to not do the Phone box on the side door because of the material we are using being very thin and the overall size being very small. On the plus side, the whole thing is extremely light!