The Journeyman's Workshop

I have been using Alibre for my drawings for some time, the learning curve is pretty steep and on an expertise scale of 1 to 10, I am still firmly at 1 or thereabouts! The latest version for 2013 has been renamed Geomagic Design following the purchase of Geomagic by Alibre’s parent company 3D Systems. There are a number of new features and some tweaks to the interface. There are different versions of the program with Geomagic Design Personal being the entry level that I have. Not all features are available in the Personal version but it is probably the most suitable for the home user and definitely the most affordable. There are plenty of free tutorial videos available and a useful users forum so the new user is well catered for. All you need is a brain slightly less fuzzy than mine…

After some time without new content I have finally added a new page. This is for a drill press hold down clamp. A useful adaptation of an old Mole Wrench which was lying unused in a box of bits that “might be useful one day”. Drilling Machine Hold Down Clamp

I have recently discovered that the latest update of Chrome mobile (Android) seems to have broken the menu system in the Journeyman’s Workshop. Anoying or what! Everything was working fine and if you use Firefox Mobile or Dolphin it still does. I have tried various tweaks but no joy yet. I think this problem may be apparent on the iPad as well but I have no way of checking.

At present the only sure fire way to navigate on a tablet is to use the Sitemap which has direct links to everything and is available at the bottom of every page.

Not a major upgrade but I have tidied up the code and made the site HTML5 compatible. I am not sure if this adds anything or has any advantage but it keeps my coding brain working! A few CSS terms have become obsolete but nothing major the most difficult bit was getting the site map table to validate at W3S.

I have also altered the menus slightly so that they work better on Android tablets, iPads and probably phones. They now stay open if you tap them, the items are perhaps a bit close for large fingers but the extra space at the top prevents most of the auto triggering.

Kempton No.6 Engine

I visited the Kempton Steam Museum yesterday and was mightily impressed by this engine. One of two engines built in 1928 to pump drinking water to London. The engines are some 62 feet (18.9 m) high and weigh in at 1000 tons apiece. One engine would pump 19 million gallons (86,375,710 litres) a day to the households of London.

The engines finally stopped pumping in 1980 and sat unused for many years until the Kempton Great Engines Trust was formed in 1995 to create the museum and preserve the engines. The No.6 engine has been fully restored and runs regularly under steam. Its partner (No.7) does not run but you can get a guided tour from top to bottom (not good if you have problems with heights). The picture is taken from the top gallery of the the No.7 engine.

The engines are run once a month so check on the website for running days. Kempton Steam Museum. The museum is well worth a visit and the Metropolitan Water Board Railway Society is busily restoring the narrow guage Hanworth Loop and this can be visited on steaming days. Hampton Kempton Railway. There is plenty of onsite parking and refreshments are available on steaming days.

I decided that it was time for a change… The old CIGN Workshop site has been around since 2007 with only a few minor updates. This time I decided that a complete new look was in order and set to making all the necessary changes to the site. The main change is re-writing the CSS stylesheets, there are two of these, one for the main site and one for the WordPress pages. I also decided to change the name to something slightly more meaningful.

Welcome to the Journeyman’s Workshop, if you have visited before nothing has been deleted, in fact it’s all still in the same place. The main changes are bigger pages and different colours (or colors if you are into CSS or American). The menu is also bigger so that I can add some more pages without falling off the bottom of the screen. At the moment the Models tab is rather sparsley populated, alright it’s only got one item but more will follow. I am off to the workshop now to make some!

A journeyman is a term not used much these days but used to refer to a craftsman who had completed his apprenticeship and was then free to move around improving his skills in different workshops in his quest to become a master craftsman. Well I did an apprenticeship a loooong time ago. I have a lot of travelling yet to do to achieve a reasonable standard. A master craftsmen?… ah well!