Workshop Notes

Fold Gallery

My first exhibition in the UK! I'm very excited about it. I have been invited by Steve Messam (pictured right) of Fold Gallery to show an exhibition of my paper automata. We had a meeting last Friday to discuss the possibilities and start some planning. The exhibition will be over easter this year, I'll be running a couple of workshops and hopefully showing some new models (should I call them 'works') It all sounds very exciting, keep looking hear for more information. the only problem is that it really isn't long untill Easter!
Back to work!

Updated Website

I've been updating the website over the last couple of weeks. Nearly done I think!
You can have a sneak peak at www.flying-pig.org Let me know what you think :-)
The new shop is working, the warded lock that I mentioned before is there to download. This is your chance to have a poke around before the whole thing goes live. Remember though, the shop is working, don't order anything if you don't want it!

Pushrods Revisited

Another day, another email. George Morgan sent me this elegant solution to the Pushrod Problem. He sent a QuickTime film which I have converted to an animated gif to speed up download, so apologies are due to George for the drop in quality, however, I think you can see how it works. It might just be the solution I'm after, time to try it out of cardboard.

Paper Steam Engine!

I was sent an email by Jef Raskin (Yes, the Jef Raskin, designer of the original Mac interface! www.jefraskin.com) Jef has been looking at the Mamod picture I posted last month and sent through this picture of a cardboard steam engine. In this model, the power source is air rather than steam (there's a soggy card problem with steam!) Blow down the straw to power model. Jef says the mechanism is the same as the Mamod engine.
I feel inspired, would a steam engine from thin card be possible? What about the flywheel? Card is very light. Perhaps coins as weights? What about the friction of the piston. There's only one way to find out - out with the scissors!

Combination Lock

I've just about finished a downloadable warded lock, it'll be another BitPass file. This is the second of the locks from my book Paper Locksmith which, sadly, is no longer in print. The final model will be a Yale type disk tumbler lock.

As well as this, I'm spending time working on the website. I'm updating the shop. I've found a fabulous new shopping program. Zen Cart. It is open source (free!) and has a great, very active support forum. I've had a fun week honing my PHP and MySQL programming. I'm hoping to integrate flying-pig.co.uk and flying-pig.com onto one site. It'll mean far less maintainance for me and hopefully an easier way of ordering for you. Back to work.