we won! every race we were in. craft beer was a good design, well executed, and crewed with bravado. huzzah!
we won! every race we were in. craft beer was a good design, well executed, and crewed with bravado. huzzah!
diary | 05 aug 2017 | tagged: slms
while simply finishing the race proved challenging for many of the fielded rafts, carpentry club’s actual boat proved stiff competition. it could be fast, as you might expect looking at those smooth lines. but what it wasn’t was directionally stable, and translating that lack of resistance through the water into straight-line speed proved challenging for them. plus, look at the paddles: no t-piece at the ends to grip onto.
diary | 05 aug 2017 | tagged: slms
after some bad ideas involving wheelie-bins, we realised that the brewery two arches down regularly chucks out empty disposable beer kegs. even better, they’re actually pressurised with nitrogen (it’s how the beer is squeezed out), and have hexagon end-caps. and so our design for a lean, mean catamaran came to be.
with cutlass decoration? and branded t-shirts? of course.
diary | 04 aug 2017 | tagged: slms · cutter
as part of the day’s ceremonies, i made these medals. i also must have driven the laser cutter harder than anybody had of late… look closely you can see the x-axis going horribly wrong on the medal that’s got it’s back showing.
For everyone who has laid a block, lined a panel, wired a socket… how to even enumerate? So many things. #archdone pic.twitter.com/UPsaB0aQmr
— South London Makerspace (@LDN_Makerspace) May 28, 2016
diary | 28 may 2016 | tagged: slms
i’d made this as a graphic for the poster, now here it was for real. happy days. the big build to make the makerspace done. lots still to do, but that’s the major renovation works over.
We cut the ribbon on the kitchen, the ribbon cable on the assembly space, bolt cuttered a chain on the machine room, and last was steel rod.
— South London Makerspace (@LDN_Makerspace) May 28, 2016
What was drawings is now real. One arch, fully renovated. We’re open. pic.twitter.com/4RankTlep6
— South London Makerspace (@LDN_Makerspace) May 28, 2016
For everyone who has laid a block, lined a panel, wired a socket… how to even enumerate? So many things. #archdone pic.twitter.com/UPsaB0aQmr
— South London Makerspace (@LDN_Makerspace) May 28, 2016
Favourite photo of our launch day… all generations together, in a lovely space (and… look, blocks still to clad!) pic.twitter.com/3rnarbVsgU
— South London Makerspace (@LDN_Makerspace) May 28, 2016
diary | 28 may 2016 | tagged: slms
the back half of makerspace has been a building site for the best part of a year. this is the poster for the party to open it. we’ll be cutting all sorts of ribbons. i want to see this graphic for real, that ribbon cable across the doors.
diary | 19 may 2016 | tagged: slms
as part of Herne Hill Film Festival, we screened “Ex_Machina” followed by a talk from it’s scientific advisor murray shanahan. great film, great talk, great Q&A.
Don't often get to see my cinema tkt specially laser-cut! Still smells like burning. @LDN_Makerspace @HerneHillFilm pic.twitter.com/8jsPOAbSpO
— Clare Killeen (@clarekil) May 11, 2016
diary | 11 may 2016 | tagged: slms
and with a televised show and tell at makerspace, my mixer and boiler retrofit were on show. brought out the 1970’s grass-valley switcher control surface i’ve had stashed for years – it’s a good prop, but also a beautiful demonstration of how things are different now: my mixer has exactly the same concept, a control surface wired to a box that does the heavy lifting. but now, the control surface is a user-experience largely defined by software, and the box is no longer a cupboard costing who-knows how tens if not hundreds of thousands, but something the size of a few matchboxes that costs in the hundreds not thousands.
diary | 03 mar 2015 | tagged: slms
big day for makerspace: awarded £20k from the mayor of london’s high street fund and chosen to be the place where all the awards were announced from. props to the trustees for making the application; i wanted to capture it all and wrote this.
diary | 03 mar 2015 | tagged: slms
history repeating: i shot a lot of quicktime vr’s in the early 2000’s, and here i am helping out mark emery shoot to promote makerspace. the toolchain has come on, but as far as google streetview’s “look inside” is concerned, it’s the identical concept of linked 360° panorama hotspots.
what makes something like makerspace special is what happened to “plus” the idea of documenting our work-in-progress build. mark got red boilersuits and white boots at hats, that spurred me to print the makerspace ‘M’ design on the suits, and a mad plan was hatched to pre-pixellate faces, so there would be no ugly smudging out.
diary | 01 feb 2015 | tagged: slms
any victorian structure is never quite square, and to compound that makerspace’s arch is on a slight curve. but if you’re going to line it and build a floor up, you at least need a datum to start square from.
diary | 28 dec 2014 | tagged: slms
one thing to sign a lease, another to clear the crap out and start the heavy lifting. literally: the rear wall to the arch was rotten and facing residential streets. we needed to build a proper wall, and make it not pass the sounds of late-night making. i can’t say i laid many of those blocks, some of those are mine, and woah are those acoustic blocks heavy. which, i guess, is kinda how they work.
diary | 27 nov 2014 | tagged: slms
fifty people putting in twenty quid a month got a three year lease on a railway arch in herne hill: south london makerspace has a real space to call their own. it’s a gamble, truly a case of think big or go home.
diary | 18 oct 2014 | tagged: slms
it’s common to hear people talk about the beginnings of projects, but rare to witness a post-mortem. doubly so in the world of kickstarter: the pitches are now part of maker culture, but where’s the venue for a summing-up at the end?
i wanted to do that. with what could be called the modest success of the *spark d-fuser, i had something i could be proud about. moreover, and this probably gets to the heart of the issue, without the disincentives of stratospheric success shrouding the business in secrecy or abject failure making me want to crawl into a hole or quietly move on.
and where’s the venue? well, elephant and castle mini-maker faire seemed a good place to get a draft together and punt it out.
it’s still a work-in-progress, to be done when the last mixer is sold and accounts reconciled, but nonetheless it’s great to have the bones together.
diary | 15 oct 2014 | tagged: taking stock · slms · dvi-mixer · talk
shaped makerspace’s stall at elephant & castle mini maker faire. while makerspace’s actual space is literally a building site, it was amazing to see people and projects come together and present something that looked anything but a work-in-progress, nascent thing. branding, content, members talking the talk. gallery of shots on flickr
diary | 15 oct 2014 | tagged: slms
5.30am sunday satisfaction: south london makerspace has a sign. laser cut, glued and painted, four of us were there for the one quiet dawn of the week to actually get it up there.
the good companion site is temporary, hopefully this will advertise SLMS’s existence before it likely gets tucked away in a more industrial nook or cranny. you can see it from brockwell park, with plenty of buses passing.
there’s a nice write-up on the SLMS site: a good sign
diary | 27 apr 2014 | tagged: slms · cutter