Today I wanted to continue work on my tool caddy. But I slept in late. This is a bit of a problem at present; often unable to sleep at night, I’m then exhausted and in need of sleep during the day!
This hat arrived today. Was supposed to be blue!
Once I was up and about, I went to Wright’s Tools, for the missing bits for the HSS metal-drilling set I have, with a view to incorporating that into the caddy. Once I’d got those (and a set of tapered countersink bits), I had a long overdue haircut.
On finally getting home and getting started on the caddy, it was time to begin work on tier two. I needed to find a bit of wood that was suitable. Fortunately I have plenty of scavenged timber lying around, and very soon had what I wanted.
The second tier at close of play today.
One other thing I ought to perhaps note, is that the lumber I’m using for the big blocks, or tiers, is very rough. It has required planing flat. For which I have had to set up and sharpen my main plane. That has been going better than in the past.
The primary plan for today was to incorporate the multi-part HSS drill bit set into this part of the caddy. This involved working out how to accommodate the three mini-caddies. Here I diverged from the way Patrick Sullivan did his ‘instant access tool centre’.
I also committed the cardinal sin of not planning so much as busking it! But so far that’s not proved disastrous. Still… time will tell!
Disassembling the drill set.
I finally knocked off working on this at about 9.45 pm. And now I’m typing this. I could easily have carried on all night, or until this phase was complete.
As relayed above, I decided to buy the missing and/or broken drill bits from the HSS set of metal drilling bits I already have, rather than buy an entirely new set. And then disassemble that unit, retaining the individual drill holders.
Some tabs needed removing or bending.All done, ready to go in situ’.
To make the recesses into which these drill bit holders would go I cut a load of passes on the table saw, snapped off any residual ‘fins’, and chiselled, rasped and sanded the resulting recesses relatively flat. This went ok-ish. But I could’ve been a lot neater and more accurate.
Gluing support blocks into the recesses.
I then glued blocks of varied sizes into the bottoms of the recesses, on top of which each of the three drill holders would sit, with enough of each little red caddy showing to allow easy reading of the bit sizes, that are handily printed there.
‘Mock-up view’, testing fit during glue-up.Lots of stuff given a new home; but plenty of space for more.
Here’s another near identical photo to the one up top, showing the stuff I’ve made homes for in tier two: the HSS drill set (1-13 mm, in 0.5 mm increments); five tapered drills with countersink attachments; an allen key for the former; a countersink bit, and drill-chuck key; two awls (round and square); four (new!) engineers squares, two glue-sticks, etc.
I didn’t cut the slot for the dovetail ‘square’, visible in these pics, as Teresa was on the warpath about me stopping for the night! But I did add a rasp/file, to one of the rear ‘tall-boy’ slots. I also added a small round hole to the top tier, at far right, for the scissors I recently got off Amazon Vine.
They’re actually hairdressing scissors, but they’re great for the workshop as well (oh, and as previously mentioned, I had a haircut, at one of our several local Turkish barbers*).
Amy, Misty and Dan, chez Ellis.
Earlier in the day I collected Teresa from town, after she got off work. And we dropped in on Dan and Amy, for a cuppa and a catch up. Dan has his fourth chemo’ session tomorrow. Apparently, at his most recent meeting with his specialist, they reported that treatment so far has been going exceedingly well. With a better than expected response. That’s great news!
* Daniel, my barber, was (and doubtless still is) Bulgarian. The post haircut massage – scalp, neck, shoulders, arms, etc. – was the best I’ve ever had!
It’s interesting, what causes great happiness, and how that might evolve over the years. Today I was overjoyed that the post man delivered a set of four machinist’s squares! I ordered them about a month or so ago, on Amazon UK’s website, but they shipped from the US.
Well packaged for shipping!
I ordered the same brand, Woodstock, as Patrick Sullivan mentions he has, gleaning this info via his excellent ’instant access‘ tool caddy video. They arrived very well/nicely packaged, in a colourful card box, inside of which each square is individually boxed, and, in a third layer, in a sealed plastic bag!
Can you see the oil residue?
In fact there’s actually a fourth protective layer… of oil! I brushed some of the oil off with tissues. Very impressively packaged! And they look and feel beautiful. Can’t wait to get these into my caddy and into use, in the workshop!
Mmm… lovely!
Also arrived in the post today, a book on US WWII tanks and tank destroyers.
Teresa and I went for a walk in a nice old woodland that we discovered locally today. Gault Wood is a little over six hectares of land belonging to the Woodland Trust.
Gently forking paths split around a pond.
Teresa wanted to forage for stuff in the woods. Not edible stuff, mind. But rather materials for her art projects at work, like the annual seasonal murals. So she collected yellowing leaves for the Autumn display.
Teresa collects leaves and takes pics, in the woods.
This rather lovely green space is just a five or ten minute drive from our front door. It was particularly nice today, as the sun was out quite a lot. We had the place mostly to ourselves, save a young family and one or two dog walkers.
Verdant surrounds to a pond.
There are numerous little ponds. And a good number of benches. After our walk we sat on one of the latter, and had a flask of hot tea and some oaty biscuits, listening to the birds singing and the wind rustling the leaves. Tranquil and beautiful!
Semi-wild; signs of humanity, but unkept and lush.
Teresa wanted to watch a vintage movie, so we plumped for this. Starring a youthful James Mason, with some oddly comic support, and a very young Herbert Lom as the villain. Made in ‘44, but set in 38, it’s an oddball thing. It seems to want to be both a thriller and a comedy. And in the end it’s not that great at being either.
A young and handsome James Mason.
Mason is Peter Vadassy, half French and half Austrian, looking to move to France and become a doctor, and escape Hitler’s regime. A mix up of cameras with another guest at the titular Hotel Reserve lands Vadassy in the embrace of the French police, who ask him to do a bit of sleuthing or espionage type work on their behalf.
A young and suave Herbert Lom.
Essentially the movie is about how Mason’s Vadassy character struggles, in a rather paranoid yet also playful environment – folk holidaying in southern France, on the edge of war – teetering between appearing too nefarious himself, whilst trying to smoke out the real villain.
Southern France on a studio lot.
Mostly filmed on a pretty unconvincing set, and with a rather oddball cast, some darkly serious, others bizarrely comical, it’s not a classic. But it is a silly slice of period fun. And by the end it felt kind of lame but enjoyable. Weird!
I followed up phase one of my tool caddy build, with the second step: adding a back panel/spacer strips, for taller and thinner stuff.
Much to my surprise and delight, since my most recent major tidy up and reshuffle, whilst things are far from complete or ideal, I can at least work in the shed workshop space now.
This ‘instant access’ tool caddy should help increase efficiency.
Cutting and gluing spacer strips for the back panel.
I used marine ply for the spacers, busking the dimensions completely. It would later transpire, rather miraculously, that these spacers turned out to be near enough the exact same thickness as a piece of random ply I bought from West End DIY. How unlikely must that be!?
Cutting spacer strips with the super basic sled.
Cutting stuff on the Kity is going well at present. Although I think the blade – the same one that was in the machine when I bought it – needs either sharpening or replacing. And the very basic cross cut sled I made/adapted is doing sterling service.
Gluing the base strip on the rear of the tall segment.
The strip that runs along the bottom at rear is there to stop certain things, such as rulers, dropping straight through. I chiselled a few little bits away here and there; not all the way through. Just sufficiently to add more depth for some of the tallest ‘tall boys’.
The back panel gluing up, clamped and weighted.
After gluing the back panel in place I also screwed it in position. After which I planed some of the faces a little, to smooth and square things up a bit. Like Patrick Sullivan’s version of this idea, which is my inspiration for this project, mine will have two more sections, or tiers.
The single most satisfying part of todays work on this project arose out of a real pain in the ass: when I went to glue my spacer strips to the rear of the tall segment, I discovered there was a hump down the central axis of the chopped/glued board.
I have a planer-thicknesser for exactly this job, but I’ve still not got it hooked up to a motor, and running. I must attend to this ASAP! So I had to go old school, and simply plane the mother flat. That entailed sharpening my smoothing plane.
Time was, not that long ago, when I hated doing this, as I’d spend ages getting nowhere. But I now have the right tools – a plane-iron guide, a whole range of abrasives, etc. – and a few planes in basically good shape, that just need fine-tuning type maintenance. So it was pretty quick and easy restoring a keen edge. And once done, planing the rear face of this block proved easy as pie!
I’m quite keen to continue covering swathes of work from my favourite musical artists. With Genesis this basically means from when Phil Collins joins up to the 1980s, or put another way, the decade of the 1970s. So mostly the Peter Gabriel era, but also the earlier Phil Collins period, when they were still more prog rock, rather than clever pop.
Discography: From Genesis to Revelation, 1969, Trespass, ‘70, Nursery Cryme, ‘71, Foxtrot, ‘72, Selling England by the Pound, ‘73, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, ‘74, Trick of the Tail, ‘76, Wind & Wuthering, ‘76, Then There Were Three, ‘78, Duke, ‘80.
Not sure if I’ll do any of the albums after Duke? Indeed, I may stop at W&W. It’s really their ‘70s prog-rock era that interests me most, and within that the earlier era, with Peter Gabriel is, at present my favourite.
ALBUM REVIEWS:
Trespass, 1970
After a debut recorded whilst still at school, by a band aged 15-17, and comprising efforts aimed squarely at pop, Genesis came back, after exams, and …
Nursery Cryme, 1971
Foxtrot, 1972
Selling, 1973
Lamb, 1974
Peter Gabriel goes out in style.
I’m not totally sold on the whole ‘concept album’ aspect of prog. It’s a bit too much like musical theatre for me. Something I’ve never really dug. And the whole theatrical side of prog can be the least appealing aspect of it, partic’ in hindsight. At least for me
So the whole story schtick, with the associated imagery, and Gabriel’s surrealism gone long-form, none of this is what attracts me to or is what I really enjoy about Genesis. What I enjoy, pure and simple (in a manner of speaking!) is the music. The sonic worlds they create leave more room for my own personal response to the synaesthetic and poetic aspects of what music, as the most inherently abstract of the arts, can potentially be.
Having said that, undoubtedly the very attempt to tell a story across a double-album does of course have its consequences, such as the bookending (-ish) with the two ‘on Broadway’ variants. And this aspect of the ‘grand project’ I find less irksome. Indeed, it can give this more ‘pop’ type sound world something more akin to the scale and scope of what’s commonly called ‘classical music’. And that can be, in the right hands, as here, a good thing.
And as Peter Gabriel’s final work with the band, it’s a pretty magnificent way to bow out. I’ve often wondered, esp’ when watching film or video footage of the group, what the internal band chemistry around Gabriel was like.
The rest of Genesis are very focussed on their jobs as musicians. Gabriel, with his bizarre hair cut, exaggerated mannerisms, costumes, and flirtations with instrumental involvement – the flute and tambourine aren’t too unusual, but his own personal kick drum? that’s a bit odd – cuts a lone and very pronounced theatrical figure. Part vaudeville, part po’-mo’ neo-Dadaist performance art, I can’t help but feel it might’ve been both blessing and curse.
The blessing is that it draws attention, the curse that it draws attention. And as an interview included in the fabulous concert footage from Paris, ‘73, below, testifies, Gabriel’s pop star antics can become a distraction from the ‘pure music’ side of Genesis.
A Trick of the Tail, 1976
The first post-Gabriel album is, perhaps a little surprisingly, a relatively smooth transition. Musically and lyrically things appear, at first glance, to be little changed. And Phil Collins sounds remarkably Gabriel-esque.
But, truth be told, something has changed. Well, obviously… Gabriel is gorn!!! But that does have a knock-on effect. Even though the material seems very similar. It’s hard to quantify precisely how and why this might be so. But it indubitably is!
It’s interesting that the first two numbers are heavily vocal, and have no drums or percussion. Almost as if they’re settling Collins into his new lead vocalist role by temporarily switching off the drumming! Dance On A Volcano and Entangled are very much standard ‘70s Genesis lyrically, melodically and harmonically.
Once the drums are back in, on track three, Squonk, and the remainder of the album, it all sounds even more Genesis-ish. Although, having said this, there is something imperceptibly changing.
For me this album reaches its greatest heights on Ripples and the title track. Ripples could easily have been happy at home on a Gabriel-era album. But the title track, A Trick Of The Tail, sounds like a band feeling it’s way tentatively into new territory. And doing so very effectively.
Los Endos is, for the most part, pretty frantic, and one can’t help feeling there’s more than a little Brand X jazz-fusion vibes entering the picture here.* Tony Bank’s synth sounds help anchor things in Genesis territory, but the frantic hyperactive drum and bass combo may sound, to some, a touch like ‘trying too hard’, perhaps?
I like Trick of the Tail. A lot. It’s still very much classic ‘70s Genesis. But you can hear, with Gabriel gone and Phil on the mic’, that things are starting to shift.
* Brand X were (indeed, still are!) are jazz-fusion group formed in 1975, for whom Phil Collins was the drummer for a number of years. And Trick of the Tail came out in ‘76, the same year as Brand X’s debut disc, Unorthodox Behaviour.
Wind & Wuthering, 1976
Goodness, Phil Collins was productive in ‘76! Two albums with Genesis , as well as the debut for Brand X. Perhaps a little strangely, coming after Trick of the Tail, Wind & Wuthering actually sounds more like the pre-Collins Gabriel Genesis. At least on the first two tracks, Eleventh Earl of Mar and One For the Vine.
Having just listened to several mid-70s Genesis albums in succession, it’s quite amazing, especially given how distinct both Peter Gabriel’s and Phil Collins’ voices are individually, how alike they are in the context of Genesis! Remarkable!!
There are, as with Trick, signs of the musical evolution of Genesis from prog behemoth to pop leviathan, even just within the many parts of the epic second track, most notably during a brief slightly disco-beat inflected segment. One For The Vine is properly prog-tastically enormous, clocking in at about ten minutes, and maintaining interest the entire time. Amazing to think music like this one cracked the upper reaches of the album charts!
What a cracking album! Your Own Special Way is an absolutely beautiful number. And whilst sounding totally ‘70s Genesis, does subtly hint at a gentle move towards pop melodicism, especially in the marvellously pretty choruses. Could this be my favourite Collins-era Genesis album. I certainly think so!
After the beautifully melodic mellowness of Your Own Special Way (a definite contender for my all time favourite Genesis track), we’re somewhat rudely awakened from our reverie with Wot Gorilla? A reminder that ‘76 was a Brand X year as well as a Genesis one! The music is very Genesis, but the drum rhythms are high-octane jazz-rock fusion.
After the brief blast that is Gorilla, we return to the more epic and lengthy soundscapes of All In A Mouse’s Night, whose cute lyrics are simultaneously very Gabriel-esque, if a little lighter. Again the keys-heavy sound is pure ‘70s Genesis, and gorgeous. But the drum sound is morphing into something more muscular, intense, and modern. A heavier direction other progsters – King Crimson spring to mind – would take to great extremes in years to come.
Blood On The Rooftops starts with some utterly gorgeous classical guitar from Steve Hackett, on what was to be his final album with Genesis. And then Collins comes in on vocals, and Banks on mellotron, and finally the whole band. And, lo, it was good! It’s worth noting that this was originally a love song, but new lyrics of a more cynical cast, about TV news were chosen instead. The juxtaposition is odd and unusual, but both music and lyrics are terrific, so that the odd marriage works extremely well.
Like Wot Gorilla, Unquiet Slumbers is uncharacteristically short, for Genesis. But otherwise it’s very unlike Gorilla. Both are instrumentals but where Gorilla is intense thanks to Collins’ Weather Report-ish drumming, Slumbers is spacious, mellow, and drum free.
As if to make up for this, it then segues into the rhythmically intense and bombastic In That Quiet Earth. Surely rather misleadingly titled, the power and energy here again bring Collins’ Brand X jazz-fusion chops to the party. But Banks’ synths keep things sufficiently Genesis to balance the fusion flavour.
The album winds up with Afterglow, which also returns us to the album’s more dominant mellow feel. Gorilla and Unquiet Slumbers were relatively aberrant, as overall this a gently intense slow-paced disc.
OTHER ALBUMS: Abacab, ‘81, Genesis, ‘83, Invisible Touch, ‘86, We Can’t Dance, ‘91, Calling All Stations, ‘97…
I started making a tool caddy today, along the lines of the Patrick Sullivan one I mentioned in another recent post. I actually tried before, earlier in the week. My first attempt was a disaster!
But I learned from my mistakes, and approached the task a little differently second time around. But before I get to that, pictured above are most of the tools I’m planning to accommodate in my tool caddy, laid out, so I can think and plan things.
I set up my Kity table-saw; everything’s square!
After clearing the crap off my table saw, I checked it, to ensure both blade and fence are totally square. And they are! Cool. I also cleaned as much crud and sawdust from inside it as I could. And I dug out an old table-saw sled I made ages ago, for a different saw, which needed some adjusting to fit this more recently acquired Kity table saw.
I needed the table saw to cut the back block of wood in half, as trying to drill deep holes in the uncut block was where I went wrong before. Not having long enough drill bits, or drill press type tools that would reach deep enough, the first attempts at drilling holes for certain items went very badly.
With the back block cut in half, the wood was much more manageable, and I was able to drill the holes I wanted much more easily and neatly. Once holes were drilled – some of which had to be drilled from opposite ends – I also had to cut channels for rectangular recesses, to take certain other items.
Doing this with the table-saw sled was great. I felt like a proper YouTube type maker! Next I glued the upper and lower halves of the back block back together, having drilled some of the holes and recesses all the way through the second half of the block as well.
The tools that go in this section loaded in place.
Step two will be putting a back on this first section, for stuff like the rulers, saws, and other taller and flatter bits and bats. I’m hoping I can do that tomorrow. But for now, I’m very happy to have got stage one done successfully.
Steps three and four will be adding similar but progressively shorter blocks, in front of this back block. But that’s for later this week…
This is a weird mish-mash of a movie. Certain aspects, such as the core idea of AI-enabled military robots, used for nefarious ends, are quite good (if not exactly unique nowadays). Others, well…
Six holidaying US do-gooder doctors get lost in the forests of the Golden Triangle, where they run the gauntlet of drug gangs and their jungle booby-traps. Unfortunately for them they wind up in a village where a rogue US/CIA military-tech op’ is just getting underway. They rapidly become accidental eyewitnesses the dirty ops guys are keen to eradicate.
The CIA and Cyborg ‘baddies’ air-drop four ultra ‘hi-grade’ military kill-bots into the forest, as a real world test of the hardware/software capabilities. One of the bots is damaged during deployment, losing a key part of its ‘brain’ or control unit. The other three butcher almost the entire village, where the docs have wound up. Fortunately for the latter, ex Navy SEAL ‘Mason’ is also there.
Mason gets them out. But they start haemorrhaging lives. The three fully functional kill-bots hunt down the survivors of the massacre, whilst the fourth goes on a bizarre journey of cyber self discovery. All through this a trio of tech-nerds, flown in to ‘mastermind’ what rapidly becomes an appalling debacle, is having a crisis of conscience, as they realise they’re not simply ‘training’, but doing a fully lethal ‘black op’, with (mostly) innocent civilians as the guinea pigs and collateral damage.
This is a very, very, very uneven affair. Certain aspects are quite good, even emotively powerful, or reasonably clever. Others, such as the typical and arbitrary ‘some get away some don’t’, and non-stop action vs long hiatus, are weaker. A lot of the issues may be consequences of the fact that the whole film is probably about 20-30 mins too long.
There are some brilliant and/or beautiful locations (Cambodia, I think?), quite a bit of no holds barred brutality, and an interesting if convoluted plot. Very patchy and uneven, but quite an enjoyable watch.
Many years ago I was in a short lived group with some friends at sixth-form who were into Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, Einsturzende Neubauten, and all sorts of other stuff similar to or connected with such bands. What’s often (or is that just sometimes?) called the post-punk/no wave scene. I must admit that, whilst I liked some of these bands and their music enough to stick with the group for the brief period in which it existed, it wasn’t really my scene, man.
Some of the recordings that really reached me in the truly primal unmediated way I like best – and ordinarily at that time that might have been anything from a sweet bossa nova, like let’s say ‘Quite Nights Of Quiet Stars’, by Jobim, to ‘Pachuco Cadaver’ by Beefheart, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Little Green’ or ‘Criminally Insane’ by Slayer – were the early records by Swans. I think that was for several reasons, some of which I’ll go into in a mo’, but possibly chiefly because, as numerous critics and fans have pointed out, this is simply music like no other.
The sheer raw power of the music, and the brutal darkness of Gira’s lyrics, are frequently alluded to in descriptions of this music. But there are a few other things that I particularly like that I don’t feel are usually mentioned. One of these is that – and ok, granted, the lyrics are pretty horrifying – quite a lot of the music has a bizarrely beautiful quality, at least for me, deriving from two factors: its sheer intensity, and the fact it is so unique. Another element is that, for all that it is unrelenting, dark, and brutally minimal, yet there’s a note of looseness and improvisation. Jazz seems hardly the right word, but those are qualities that jazz prides itself on having at its heart.
The loose improv element is most apparent in the incredible drumming of Roli Mosimann, probably the best drummer The Swans ever had, in my view. Also the production has an incredible clarity that stops it dating. Comparing the brutally raw and unprocessed sound here to the compressed and reverb drenched drums of ’80’s Sonic Youth, for example, makes the latter sounds far more dated. Easy-listening this ain’t, and I can generally only take it in little doses these days.
Opening track Half-Life and closing track Thug (opening and closing the original Cop LP*) are, I think, the moments I dig the most. Slow grinding repetitive riffs, bass and guitar locking into huge but minimal slabs of raw distorted sound, and the drums crunching away, but just occasionally showing an inventively syncopated edge, and all moving in an intense slow-motion. Most so-called heavy music sounds like the froth on a weak lager compared with these numbers. And lyrically heavy metal and associated dark/intense genres tend to be utter garbage, kind of prurient teen horror movie type stuff. The darkness of the lyrics here is of an entirely different order.
But Holy $**t, Cop is an amazing and intense ride for the ears, the mind, and the emotions! There really is nothing quite like it. Turn it up loud, and prepare to be terrified, mesmerised, but perhaps also moved, and maybe even awestruck. Definitely not music for all occasions. Cop isn’t uniformly brilliant. But the best is, thanks to its uniqueness, astonishing.
* These days Cop is usually most easily found as part of a variety of ‘early Swans’ type compilations.
Set on board the ISS crewed with an international team, some time in the unspecified near future, a Martian soil sample, brought back by the Pilgrim 7 probe, yields a dormant life-form. The ISS boffins bring it back to life, only to wish they hadn’t.
Life is very clearly and obviously heavily indebted to the Aliens series. But it doesn’t have the same high drama of the ‘original’. Nor do the characters have the charisma of the older films’ cast.
But that said, there’s enough that’s original here, and it’s all somewhat more ‘realistic’ – the super-evil-kelp-demon-alien aside – in terms of the basics of life aboard the ISS (as opposed to the whole Alien Nostromo trip), and how things might go wrong, making it fairly watchable.
My wife is the one that usually suggests we try a sci-fi movie, and so it was on this occasion. I’m the sci-fi sceptic, who finds the whole genre big on promise but small on delivery. With a few exceptions. Life is okay, neither great, nor awful.
As with all the Aliens movies, and many a horror film (or classic western, for that matter), this is essentially a siege, with malevolent evil vs plucky humanity. Perhaps the best and the worst thing about this film is the final twist.
