About Me

I was born in 1963 in London, England.
My interest in all things electrical and mechanical started long before I left school. My favourite subjects were Physics and Metalwork and not a lot else !

I am now married to a wonderful person and we have three children, two grandchildren
and a west highland terrier !

I started work at 16 as a printer and soon learnt to repair the machines myself, I also started doing the factory wiring and so on. After a few job changes, all in printing, I started working for my brother and his wife in their
craft oriented greetings card company, again in the print side of the business.

Thirteen years later (2007), I am now the production manager and run a large print room with eleven staff and a vast range of machinery. I have now progressed to building custom machines using PLC controls and compressed air drive with four successes to date, a twin head bag sealer, a massive ten station suction feed collator, a sheetfed inkjet barcode printer for coding the reverse side of their range of peeloff stickers and a card creasing machine.

I enjoy building things that do not have clearcut designs. They require the maximum use of my ingenuity and resourcefulness which leads to great satisfaction when complete.

I discovered Tesla Coils some time ago but it was only recently that I became interested enough to try and build one. They are fascinating devices because there are no real plans for them, you can't realistically buy all the parts for one off-the-shelf, you have to design most of the stuff yourself around the materials you can get hold of.

If made correctly, the end result is that they make utterly ridiculous amounts of electricty !!

I also have a keen interest in digital photography and am currently running my clubs' web site which can be
accessed from the links on the left.

After aquiring a nice Boxford lathe and small milling machine I could finally indulge in my all-time favourite pastime of making things out of metal. Checkout my engineering pages to see whats going on. I have a strong interest in live steam as well and that seemed to fit well with the new workshop, you can see the results in my pages.

In 2007, we moved house, the children moved out, and I now have an excellent double garage for my home workshop.

More machinery has been installed and I can make pretty much anything now.