Pen turning

Well it had to happen eventually. Given a lathe for enough time eventually you’ll give in to the allure of pen turning.

I had started talking about giving it a go, and not long after Kat found herself in Turners Retreat with her dad. Being awesome, she bought me some supplies for turning pens.

One cigar pen kit, one sierra pen kit, two pen blanks, and a pen turning mandrel, as well as some other wood for other projects.

Interestingly Turners Retreat did not supply any instructions with any of the items. I would have thought that seeing the selection of things being purchased they could have mentioned the need for bushings, to go with the pen sets. They could have indicated the existence of other associated tools even if they didn’t push them too hard.

As it was I placed an order to get a few extra bits and bobs so that I was ready to roll.

First job, cut the blanks to the tube lengths. For this I just used the tubes to set the fence of my bandsaw, and cut each blank. Easy peasy.

Second job, drill the blanks. I picked up one of the inner tubes for the cigar pen and sized it against my drill bits, and needed a 10mm bit. I clamped each section of blank, set up on centre by eye, and drilled.

The cigar pen blanks first, then the blank for the sierra.

Uh-oh…the tube for the sierra didn’t fit in the hole. Stupidly I had assumed that all tubes would be the same. They are not.
Luckily the sierra tube was bigger, not smaller – so no harm done. However, the 10mm bit is already the biggest before I jump up to much bigger Forstner bits. Damn.

Turns out that some pen kits cunningly require a bit just a little out of the normal range. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ll sell you one for £20!! So I put that aside for now, and moved on with the cigar pen.

I tried to square off the ends on my disc sander holding the tubes in place for reference. There are special tools for this, of course, but there are limits to how many custom tools I want to buy(or get bought ) just to get started.

I glued the tubes into the blanks and left them to dry.

Next comes the fun bit, I looked up instructions for the cigar pen and set up the mandrel and bushings as described.

Now for my first real mistake….
The mandrel is adjustable, and I’d played with it a little. So when I setup the blanks I had lengthened the shaft just long enough to tighten the end piece on to clamp everything tightly.
This meant a largely flat surface at the tailstock end, which I attempted to support with a cup centre.

This was hopeless, and didn’t centre the end properly. I should have realised and done something, but like a fool I carried on.

I shaped the pieces, and sanded, but found that closer to the tailstock meant more off centre from the metal shaft. Correspondingly it was hard to get a good finish on the ends with either tools or sanding.

The results were ok, but not great. I realised later I could have lengthened the mandrel shaft, screwed the end piece down much further, and let the screw threaded end of the mandrel shaft centre in the back of the cup centre. Next time.

Having finished the sections as well as I could, I enthusiastically set about constructing the pen. Using some wood blocks in my vice to protect the ends, I squeezed the bits into the ends.

But in my haste and enthusiasm I didn’t make sure I knew where all the bits went. Without instructions I went on what seemed right based on where threads seemed to fit etc. And boy was I wrong.
I think I got just about every fitting wrong! First I got the fittings for the bottom half the wrong way around. And at length had to figure out how to get them out again. (Mostly the shafts of drill bits that where just the right diameter to hammer out the fittings from the opposite side)

Having fixed the lower piece I set the ends for the top piece, only to find nothing held together. Stupidly I had set what should have been the very top fitting, as the very bottom fitting, and vice versa.

Lessons learned – get the instructions, read the instructions…*then* fit things together.

Also, as I’ve said before….*don’t panic* I screwed up everything, damaged some threads whilst trying to undo some mistakes, and ultimately still wound up with this:

Not fantastic, but I’m happy enough for a first try. I think I got quiet a few mistakes out of the way, so I can learn from them next time

Retrospective on an agile project

Yesterday I finished my 5 week project. I still can’t believe it’s been 5 weeks, it’s gone so fast.
I wrote a bit about it a couple of weeks ago. And now that it’s finished I wanted to reflect a little on how it went. This, of course, is part of the agile process. They call it a retrospective, and in theory you do one every iteration to consider what worked, and what didn’t. Since my iterations were just one week long I didn’t write anything down for each one.

One thing I said in my previous post is that I wouldn’t work long hours to achieve results, as it is unfair on future projects to misrepresent what can be done in the time. Almost the day after posting that I found myself breaking that rule.

I worked several long evenings, but I have an excuse-ish. One of our big problems was getting a system set up so that we could start on some of our tasks. But it gave us enormous problems, and I was tired of burning days on what should have been a couple of hours of set up. So I started working into the evening in the hopes of putting us back on track. Regardless it still took almost 2 weeks to get a system we could use. This was incredibly frustrating and I broke my rule because I didn’t consider the task part of what the project had to achieve. It was just a pre-req. But an important reminder that sometimes the things that take the longest are things you don’t even officially plan or size. I should have taken half a day at most, but it burned more like eight and a half.

I also broke my rule for another reason, perhaps one I should have factored in. We often needed to work with a team in the US, specifically with us raising questions or problems, and getting responses. To that end I joined a weekly conference call from 17.30 till 18.30. I also found it was better to check e-mail into the evening, since it was the difference of responding to a question and getting a second response by the next day versus finding the question the next morning. It’s easy to burn through days bouncing question/answer/question back and forth at a rate of one request/response per day. The conference call helped to speed things up. However the reality of relying on a team in another timezone is that you make faster progress if you spend more overlapping work time.

The common theme to these two rule breakers is things that felt unrelated to the *work*. Just stuff we needed to be able to get on with the doing. That said I need to remember in future to factor this stuff into short projects.

In terms of project results, I have mixed feelings. We failed to achieve all I wanted. However, I did achieve the major strategic investment I wanted. I never expected to be ‘done’ in 5 weeks. Just to have kick started it enough that it becomes a long term commitment to the direction. Although my project is over, most of the team will continue. Everyone agreed that we were going in the right direction, and we did enough to convince people that it *can* work.

I’m very happy about achieving the important attitude shift, and establishing the relationships necessary to succeed in the long run. At the same time I’m very frustrated by some of the things we didn’t achieve already which I feel we could have.

For me personally a big part of the project was trying to lead. My natural instinct when people aren’t doing what I’d like, is to wish I had the AUTHORITY. You know? That feeling that it would be easier if I had been bestowed with power such that people must do as I say. Perhaps this is what attracts people to management. To have that explicit power defined. However, I do not want to be a manager. So the trick for me is trying to lead with no explicit authority. And boy can that be frustrating!

I feel I had a particularly challenging crew. On previous projects I’ve worked with keen, enthusiastic people. Willing to listen and discuss. Ultimately accepting the group decisions, and working furiously towards the agreed goals.
This project could not have been more different. One person in particular had very specific views on what they wanted to do, and how. Whilst this fit with what was necessary that was fine, great even as they made great progress. But they would sometimes decide randomly on another priority. They totally didn’t get the idea of agile and committing to deliverables for this iteration. On one particular occasion when I asked on a Monday about getting started on one of our committed items, I was told ‘I’m not going to look at that this week’, other times I asked for where they had gotten to, and what was blocking progress. Only to be deflected with questions about other things. The attitude being that their tasks were none of my business, they didn’t want to explain the problems or the specific progress. They just wanted to be left alone for as long as it took to do it, their way.
On one occasion I got the Instant Message equivalent of being hung up on. Rather than answer my question I was told ‘I need to concentrate’ and they logged off.

It would be easy to say that person was just difficult, and in future I’ll only work with easier people. But of course I realise I have to learn to get the most from people like this. Perhaps I should have been more direct and just asked ‘ why don’t you want to tell me what the problems are?’

In that regard I feel I did badly as a leader. However in other regards I was getting better. One of my problems as a techie is that I come up with the solution I want, and I try to get people to do it my way. For this project I made a conscious effort to define the result I needed, and accept solutions that weren’t ‘my’ way, so long as they would meet the requirements. Sometimes this means watching something take longer than I think it should take. But maybe that’s just because the solution will be better?

So I still have much to improve on. That said, I was explicitly thanked by the manager in charge of the project for my leadership. So it can’t have been all bad

The Mallet of many mistakes

In last months woodturning magazine there was a project-in-a-day feature for making a mallet. I caught my eye because the head of the mallet was made from lignum vitae, a very dense hard wood which is normally found in the balls used for lawn bowls. As it happens I was recently given a couple of these by my Grandfather for the specific purpose of using the wood in a turning project.
The handle in the project was made from ash, and I had a similar dimensioned block of sycamore which I figured would do just as well. And so it seemed destined to be my next project.

And here is the finished piece

The eagle eyed woodturner might now be saying…”that doesn’t look like sycamore”. They would be right, and this is because it is in fact applewood. The reason why lies amongst the many things that went wrong trying to do this project.

So I had the materials I needed, and I had step by step instructions in the magazine. So what could possibly go wrong?

The first job was to drill through the centre of the lignum ball with a forstner bit. See the magazine image here

Easy right, just use a clamp to hold the thing still, and away you go.

Not so much. I probably could have spent much more time making a proper base to sit the sphere in which would have kept it stable. But I was trying to follow the magazine, and wanting to make progress. So I got the smallest clamp that I had, that would clamp around the size of the sphere. This is not a small clamp. It was rather difficult to hold it in place, much of the weight of the clamp is not over the drill press, and so I needed to hold it as best I could in place to try and get a good line through the centre of the sphere. Within moments of starting to drill another thing became clear. Removing dense wood with a 35mm forstner bit creates a lot of sawdust. Which makes things difficult to see,k and also jams up the drilling process unless you can remove it. So Wheeled across my dust extractor. But I currently have no way to mount it for the drill press, so I had to try and hold it nearby. This means I am now holding a clamp and a extractor hose, and trying to operate the drill press. Not easy, but not impossible. Then I hit a point that should have been apparent from the outset. My forstner bit is not long enough to go through the whole ball. The chuck of the drill is wider that the bit, so I could drill a little over half way and that was it.

Hmm, the article did not mention this challenge. ‘Obviously’ all I needed to do was turn the ball up the other way, and drill in from the other side. So now I’m trying to hold a vice and a extractor hose, whilst working the drill press, AND I need to be accurate enough to get the lines to meet perfectly.

What actually happened was that I made it connect almost perfectly, but not quite. I wasn’t sure how much of a problem the slight misalignment would cause me. I used a few tools to try and minimise the step between the two drill shafts. At this point I figured it was as good as it was going to get. So it would have to do.

Ok, then onto the handle. The steps said to turn between centres, shape the handle, and the tenon.

And so that is what I did, carefully setting the tenon the correct diameter for the hole I had drilled. I decided not to go too crazy with the finishing at this stage, so I sanded it down but didn’t apply any finish.
The next step was to take the handle off the lath, and use a bandsaw to cut a cross down the tenon. This is so that it fits easier through the hole in the mallet head. Then at the end you insert wedges to hold everything in place and make for a nice feature at the head end.

Keen eyed observes will not there are no wedges in the end of my mallet.

Having cut the cross through the tenon section it did indeed fit through the hole of the head section. And then I just needed to remount between centres. The magazine said that the prongs of the drive centre would fit into the cuts from the bandsaw.

Something I should have noticed is that they talked about a four prong drive centre. I only have a 2 prong drive centre. Though I suspect I would have had similar issues even with the 4 prong, I found it was basically impossible to get the thing remounted centrally. The handle was now turning a little off it’s previous axis.

I started to shape the head of the mallet anyway, I figured that it might not be too bad, slightly off centre only really shows when it’s rapidly spinning.
However the magazine steps said to blend the handle with the head a little. I was starting to shape the head, and noticing that things were not looking as they should. In a moment of madness I thought I might be able to blend the handle down to it’s new axis, and it wouldn’t matter. But of course there was not enough width in the shoulder of the tenon to cope with being turned off centre. A hasty cut and the whole thing was ruined. I also realised that there was no way I would get the mallet head shape in the article without cutting a chunk from the bottom of the ball, to being a wider part close to the handle. The article didn’t mention that either. Of course it would have made things much easier on the drill press if I had STARTED by cutting a chunk from the bottom, and making a parallel flat at the top.

At this point I left it with disgust for a few days. The handle was ruined, and I didn’t think I had anything else of the right dimensions available.

At this point I contemplated how I *should* have approached this.
Step 1 cut a section from one side of the ball, to bring a reasonable width to what will be the bottom of the mallet.
Step 2, cut a parallel shallow flat at the top. Step two, with the ball resting flat on the drill press, with a vice just to stop it spinning, drill as deep as I could go from one end.
Step 3 mount the ball on my expanding jaw chuck, the narrow jaws should fit inside the 35mm hole, I could then put the forstner bit in my tailstock chuck. And drill from the other side with a much better chance of true alignment.

For the handle I figured I should have turned such that the tenon was at the headstock end, and left a piece on the end for the drive centre. Turning the drive centre waste narrower than the tenon I could pass the whole lot through the mallet head without cutting any wedges and remount exactly on the same drive points as turned the handle.

I discovered that I had a piece of applewood that I turned down to a cylinder about a year ago, and left drying inside some paper bags. It was just about the perfect size for the project and I figured I was back in business. But I kept the mallet head from before rather than attempt to start again.
I also didn’t bother to do any handle shaping before I put the mallet head in place. I just turned the tenon. I wanted to be sure that if I had any trouble getting things back on a central axis that I had more material to play with.

I put some work into sheering the base of the mallet head flat and in line with the shoulder of the tenon. To get a nice tight fit. The tenon was just the right width that I needed to hammer it through the lignum.

And so I could proceed to shape the lignum to the mallet shape I wanted. This went mostly ok, though I had far too many catches trying to shape the ends. I still struggle to avoid causing spiral catches, even when I think I’m being careful.

Once shaped, sanded and finished. IT just remained to shape the bottom of the handle which I did eventually parting it off. This then left me with a stub of wood above the top of the mallet that needed to be removed.

So I took it to the bandsaw to remove most of the waste. And decided to sand the remainder on my belt and disc sander.
This was another mistake. The disc sander is very aggressive and difficult to present things at it square on. And so I wound up with an off-centre flat spot on top. I evened it up as much as I could, but in doing so I found I had revealed a gap where the rough hole through the lignum was not perfectly round and the tenon passing through did not fill it.

At this point I figured the easiest thing to do would be to just fill the hole with sawdust and glue. Which is less obvious than a hole, but still not as nice as doing the job right.

The finished article is actually very nice. In some ways I’m loathe to actually use it as a mallet because I don’t want to damage the beautiful lignum mallet head. However this project was a stark reminder that I am still such a novice. So many things went wrong. Blindly following the steps in teh article without thinking it through myself was a mistake. I’m almost tempted to try again from scratch, just to see if I can make it right, or whether I’d just hit another slew of problems. Maybe one day.

Candle snuffer, take 2

For this months HWA meeting my challenge had been set as a candle snuffer. I had already made one, exactly as it had been shown in the intructions I was given.
But the second candle snuffer I made, I decide to make articulated. This was really challenging, but I was determined to do something more interesting. The idea was that if the challenge of the candle snuffer project is to get it sitting flat on a surface, getting the angle between handle and bell correct. Then the obvious solution is to make it articulated and hence always be able to achieve that angle.

To do this I made it in 4 parts.
Handle – pretty much as before, I decided to make the handle reflect other parts of the design. So the end was shaped to a similar profile to the bell, and a bead around the handle was intended to reflect the ring used for pivoting the bell.

Bell – I actually made this from 4 sticks of 2 different colours stuck together, such that like colours where on opposing corners. I was worried that it would be difficult to centre, but it actually came out perfectly.
The design for the bell piece had a long narrow top, that would ultimately have a pivot pin pass through it.

Ring – This needed to be large enough to have the tip of the bell pass through, with room to move, But small enough to feel in proportion with the handle and bell.

Pivot – this was just turning down to a thin stick that was as long as the rings diameter.

By far the hardest part was the ring, it took about 5 attempts to get it right. Annoyingly the first attempt was pretty good, but I managed to crack it slightly tapping in the pivot, then I managed to drop it smashing it entirely…ouch

Subsequent attempts largely failed, I eventually realised, because the laburnum I was trying to use was simply too open grained to hold such a fine shape. Once I moved to a very closed grain wood, I finally got it right.

The pivot was slightly tapered, this wasn’t entirely intentional but was ultimately a good thing, as it meant I could make the hole on one side of the ring slightly larger than the other, and peg the pivot in place fairly easily but into a tightening fit.

After several attempts at the ring I think I got the right sequence to shape it and drill holes.
First I shaped the outer ring profile, then bored, end grain, to hollow it whilst leaving it still attached.
At this point, I took it off the chuck, and used the main body of wood to clamp it in my drill press.
Here I could drill the hole for the pivot and a recess for the handle to fit into.
If I screwed up here, I hadn’t wasted tool much time sanding and finishing. In one attempt I tried to drill before bothering to hollow out the ring, However that made it much harder to get the pivot holes nicely centred.

Having drilled the holes, and hopefully not made a mess of it, I could rechuck the piece, and begin sanding and finishing the ring shape more, This also means you clean up the edges of the holes just drilled.

Last job was to part the ring off the main body. An earlier attempt had also given me the idea to cover up the bin hole I made in my attempts for a tidier workspace
Whilst the hole is great for sweeping shavings into, it also turns out a parted off ring is quite likiely to fall into it. And it’s amazing how long it takes to find a small ring of wood, in a bag full of wood shavings, even if it has just gently fallen on top

I had to widen one of the holes for the pivot pin, since it was wider at one end than the other. This works well, as I didn’t need to glue it in place, and while the final fit is quite firm, there was no need to tap it into place with a hammer. Which is what has caused my first attempt to split.

It also means that it is relatively easy to disassemble should I want to.

As ever I was far more excited about making it, than the thought of writing about making it. So I failed to take any in-progress pictures.

Hmm last picture is a bit rubbish, but it’s taken me 2 weeks to get as far as adding pictures to this post, so it will have to do.

So Agile, they’ll need another word

This last week has been the first of a project planned to take four weeks. It is a great opportunity for me, since the project’s goal is to deliver on an idea I pitched, some months ago, to solve a problem with the way we test.

I have been very pleased with getting this far. When I first proposed what I called ‘a pretty radical change to the way we approach testing’ I wasn’t sure I’d be able to convince people it was the right thing to do. But as it turned out I had no real resistance. In fact so positive has been the response, that many have long forgotten that I got things moving in the first place.

Ironically I was busy constructing this plan when I was being told that I am ‘not perceived as having enough sense of urgency on the day job’ Apparently I should have been more head down and focussed on the job in hand. However I think that criticism was short lived, and short sighted. By planning the changes I wanted to put in place, whilst everyone else was too busy looking no further than the next day, I found myself with a plan and a proposal ready… just as the management team started to wonder what on earth people will be working on once the last version shipped.

My proposal got discussed, and sized. The team lead of the automation team, who will ultimately own the changes gave a sizing of four person months. And he was insistent that he get to pick the four. It’s no good just assigning four random people and hoping for the best. He wanted people he knew would be able to deliver. He also insisted that these people be allowed to focus on the job. This sizing was for four people working full time – not being asked to fit it in around other priorities. This was a pretty tall order, and the fact that we got granted those demands is both a factor of having sold the long term benefits. And the management team having little better planned.

As fortune would have it, I got selected as one of the four. I am certainly the person most interested in seeing the idea succeed. And I’m grateful for the unusual opportunity to actually spend some focused time on delivering my idea. I’ve often thought it would be cool if submitting patents would come with the possibility of being given funding to develop a prototype… but no.

So here we are, end of week one of this four week plan. We are attempting to follow the ‘Agile’ method.

For those unfamiliar, Agile is nothing new as such. it is a rebranding and repackaging of various ideas that have been evolving for some time. It is – in my mind – an attempt to have a software engineering process that fits with real business needs. Gone are the days when clever people could lock themselves away to produce something clever, and just deliver when they thought it was ready. Many of the older software development processes just don’t work in a world of ‘marketing splash dates’ and tactical deliveries. You have to be able to adapt to the market. Being half way through a 2 year development cycle when the market changes could be devastating. One of the main features of ‘Agile’ is that you construct just enough to deliver customer value every ‘iteration’ And those iterations are as short as possible. That said we’re doing 1 week iterations which is very very short.
But the idea is the same. At the beginning of the iteration you plan with your stakeholders/customers, what you will deliver in this iteration. Something they will be able to see, and use. At the end you demo that to them. This helps to keep you focussed on delivering just what you promised, and no more.

I can say after 1 week that it is *really* hard not to get drawn in to considering design and longer term goals. How should we do ‘this’ so that when we get as far as needing ‘that’ feature down the line it will work right, etc. Finding the path between bad design that will make life harder in the future, and over engineering a solution at the expense of delivering this iterations value. But the driving goal must be, that in the modern business world, you must be able to deliver value at any point. If the project got canned next week, we’d have something that would provide some function. It isn’t everything people want. but it’s also not just a pile of unusable code.

The aim for next week is to actually deliver enough to go live on our ‘customers’ website. It will not be ready for full fledged use. It will still have some serious limitations. But it will be able to do some key piece of the project goals. From there forward our delivery will be to update that live system with the latest set of capability. Every week our customer will get a little bit more of what they wanted.

This week when asked how it was going, one of the group replied, “We’re so Agile they’re going to need a new word”.
Which in part is a reflection that with this process you can apply it to greater and lesser degrees, depending on the project. With just five people in one room, and a single month, we can take it to the extremes of Agile development.

Another cool thing about the project, is that I am sitting in an office with four other guys (we ended up getting a fifth person for the first couple of weeks) And they are all super smart, capable developers. It’s unusual to work in this way, it’s not that I normally work with people that aren’t clever. It’s more that normally the way of working doesn’t let you collaborate, as much as just do your own piece without that much interaction.

This week I’ve been blown away by how fast we got something working, and doing clever things. And it’s really energising to work along side people that know how to do things I don’t, and (hopefully) fill my own roll of expertise. It’s an education looking at the code they write. I think nothing of throwing together the sorts of code and solutions I’m familiar with, and they all have different areas that they handle with the same ease. Together we seem to work pretty well. There are some differences of opinion on design, as is healthy. We all help to stop each other getting drawn into considering options and designs that are not part of our current deliverables. And so far we’ve not hit a problem that has stumped us all.

I haven’t been this happy at work for a long time. I’m actually finding it hard not to keep on working during evenings and weekends. However another key feature of Agile is ’sustainable pace’. It’s no good relying on people working every hour, they will burn out. As enthusiastic as we all are, I’ve been keen to remind us all that this project may be used as a template for others. And we owe it to future projects not to succeed only by working ourselves to death. We prove what we can do working just regular working hours.

Perhaps the strangest part of this agile project, is the acceptance that requirements are shifting. There is no hard and fast list of what we must deliver at the end of 4 weeks. There are key capabilities which form our first areas of focus. But at the start of each new iteration we review what, out of the possible options, is most important to deliver next. The expected output of the project will be the most important parts of a working system AND a list of the things we wanted to do, but were prioritised lower than what we delivered, possible enhancements that may form the basis of a separate project.

That’s probably more than enough of the subject for now. However I will post updates as we go through as to how we are managing this Agile project. And if we have hit the much touted problem with Agile, that of hitting a point where you realise you’ve designed yourself into a dead end by virtue of not thinking far enough ahead.

Also I may post about Rational Team Concert.. for now I will just say it’s awesome. (Yes I work for IBM, no I’m not paid to say that, nor is it praise I’d have for many other Rational tools).

Check it out at jazz.net