A new project idea

I'm a ridiculous know-it-all, any time I see a business being run I'm convinced I know how to do it better and the food industry strikes me as ripe for improvement almost always...it MUST be easy right? Anyway I was talking about this some time ago to my brother who told me about a chip shop he'd travelled more than an hour to visit. It only open's twice a week on Friday's and Saturday lunchtimes and reputedly has a queue out the door. He said they were some of the best fish and chips he'd had. So as a result I was interested to find out more about it...

Today I visited the famous Upton Chippie in Upton near Gainsborough, North Lincolnshire. This is a BBC Look North segment from their webpage about the shop.

My interested was really in that the chip fryers are heated by coal. Recently I started to cook bacon in a pan on top of my log burning stove. The slow and constant heat combined with the bacon taking a little time to cook somehow made the bacon taste extra nice... well at least in my mind it does. It seems to have a nicer texture and more intense flavour than the bacon cooked on the gas hob. I had similar hopes for the chips from the coal powered fryer!

The chippie was busy and the staff friendly letting me take snaps and telling me about how the fryers work. I asked about temperature regulation and the lady in charge said that it was quite an art to getting the fire right and the temperatures right. The fryer had a coal hole at each end and a long tube for the fire up the middle below each of the fryers. There are a number of storage areas to keep the food warm along the top of the fryer.

In this picture Sally Shaw the co-owner is moving stuff about in the hot oil. You can see the fire grate's door at bottom right. There was a similar one at bottom left.

 I was only a tiny bit disappointed with the chips. The chips are a bit, well soggy. I'm not saying that they aren't everything they are supposed to be. I'd sort of put it into my mind that they would be crisp and chunky because that's what I suspect I've been conditioned to think a "good" chip looks like. These aren't supposed to be gourmet chips though, they are supposed to be traditional and I am certain they are JUST as they would have been in 1950. They are made using beef dripping. I had cod and that was very nice indeed. The chips were nice too, just not what I had imagined. To emphasis, this chip shop is about tradition and I was going with a mind for quality. Though there isn't really any question that these chips were comparable with the best chips I've had anywhere else.

When I visited my friend Glen in Grantham "Shades of Japan" at his woodworking shop where he had a very good gas bottle stove in his workshop and I got to thinking... could you build a fryer out of one?

Soon in a blog article I'll be telling you how Jarkman (Richard Sewell) helped me make a titanium spork. In the meantime I've been looking at his project "Steve's Stove"  as I'd like to try and make a portable coal fired fryer from an old Gas bottle. I suspect I'll be going for a bit more showman ship than tradition.

I want to make a great crisp modern chip that people might like to think is old and traditional because, lets face it most people won't have had an old traditional chip and like many experiences in life, we could just make them up to suit our pre-conceptions. More on this project as it happens!

I hope to put wheels and a steam whistle on it too!

Vinyl Cutting Vs Screen Printing

A couple of weeks ago I decided I absolutely had to have a vinyl cutter. How had I managed so long without one I said. In the end, preferring simplicity and a friend’s recommendation over the gamble of “something” cheaper off of eBay I purchased the Cameo Silhouette from mdpsupplies.co.uk for about £320 including a big bundle of vinyl’s, backing/transfer film, VAT and delivery.

Screen printed t-shirt Democratic People's
New Republic of Space Korea (on the Moon)

You could say the Silhouette is firmly aimed at the crafter market. It even has a picture of a girl on it and is sort of pastel coloured. The best thing about the machine is it’s software called Silhouette Studio, (I don’t think it runs on LINUX) which is slick and functional. The interface is really well done too. I’ve been impressed also with the trace function and the simplicity of working with the images you’d like to cut. A laser cutter with software this good would sell like hot cakes (take note HPC and others) and I can’t think it’ll be many years before we’ll see A4 sized cutters on the crafter market with similar functional software. Having software that works must increase sales through word of mouth and recommendations. After all I brought one, because I tried the software first, because the software was straight forward AND I could try it before buying the machine it eliminated some of the concerns I had about a cheaper machine with unknown software.

So far I’ve used the Silhouette to cut vinyl rather than paper. Having dabbled a bit with screen printing I could immediately see that I could get very good quality results from using heat transfer vinyl rather than a screen and ink. Screen printing can be very messy indeed. You need lots of space and time to do things and it’s easy to mess up. I was making a QR t-shirt (this would be quite hard on a vinyl cutter though) and made 3 or 4 different screens before I got the result I wanted, even then the ink didn’t look professional but blotchy and uneven. Then after you’ve made the t-shirt you have to dry it and clean up all your screens and squeegees. Doing something yourself is fun of course and I’d not discourage anyone from trying to make a thing they way they want to. It’s only after having messed about with screen printing that I feel I can move on to this simpler method. I almost certainly would never have considered vinyl cutting if I’d not already done a load of screen printing!

Vinyl cut logo

I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the chilling aspects of the cold War and have been wanting to make a t-shirt based on the 80s “Protect and Survive” civil defence leaflets for ages. After a bit of messing about with the image I was able to use Silhouette Studio to trace the logo and output a line to cut. I popped along to Tesco and purchased a £4 black t-shirt and it only took me about 30 minutes to cut, weed and apply the logo.

Vinyl cut layers the backing needs
to be just a simple circle next time!

Weeding is where you pick all the unwanted bits off your vinyl. It’s the most tedious part of using the vinyl cutter though it does have the same satisfaction (at times) as popping bubble wrap or scrapping the silver stuff off scratch cards. My brother showed me an Aperture Laboratories t-shirt he was going to pay £15 for. Instead I found the required logo and cut him one out. He can now iron that on any t-shirt he likes and it cost less than £1. The possibilities for customising t-shirts is pretty much endless, you just have to have a few “original” ideas!

I’m working on a standard t-shirt for Nottingham Hackspace. I’m hoping to stock them in the vending machine if they can be folded small enough. The Hackspace logo is “Lincoln Green” which is a dark green. This means it only really shows up nicely on light colours. It also tends to look black against colours like yellow and light blue. Being of “powerful” build myself (ahem) I prefer a darker colour t-shirt. This means that it’s really difficult to make a t-shirt with a dark green logo. To make the green standout on any colour I’ve been experimenting with layering the vinyl. The green going on top of an under layer of white. Here are the results. As pointed out the shape of my white layer isn’t great on this example though I’m pleased with the layering generally and I’ll hopefully be able to either use a white circle (worried it’ll look a bit 1939 though) or some sort of shape like an ink splash or something. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

If you’d like a custom t-shirt or laptop sticker making or one of the designs in this blog post please do comment or email mechickengrylls@gmail.com and I’d be very happy indeed to help you out!

I made a Maker Faire

Derby Mini Makerfaire from Barney Livingston on Vimeo.

So I probably owe the Nottingham Hackspace about £150 in "I'm going to blog once a week or pay Hackspace £50." money. However I think as I was busy organising a Mini Maker Faire that I should be let off the hook. 


The faire was awesome and I'd like to thank all those who worked so hard on it especially Hannah Fox, Kim Miller, Emma Hallam, Amanda McLaren, Jonathan Wallis and the staff at the Derby Silk Mill museum particularly Alan and Andy who where brilliant! The Maker Faire was a great success for a number of reasons. 


The event started on Saturday 2nd June with a Maker's only day. I think the Maker's only day worked well and I was particularly pleased with the talks by Tim Hunkin and Andrew Harsley. Tim was very enthused by Jonathan's behind the scene tour of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery and gave a short talk on the History of Electricity Research which he sort of gave on the fly but had some excellent slides ready to show us. Andrew really surprised a few people with his talk. Everyone who went to it felt they'd got a treat really as it wasn't a well advertised part of the day. 

We had makers from all over the country and a particularly strong representation from Hackerspaces. London Hackspace brought along their giant “Ridiculous Mini Golf” course which took quite a long time to set up. If you ever organise an event and they offer to bring it, say yes as it’s very good. Make sure you set aside about 30m2 of space though as it’s gargantuan. I was a little worried we’d not fit it all in and I was forced to move both Ciseco (sorry boys) and HACMan out of the room to accommodate the craziness. Matt Edwards from Build Brighton brought along the excellent RoBoXylo which annoyed everyone all day. We put Martin Raynsford and his laser in with the superb Rolls Royce RB211 engine. Martin was able to bring his laser and was cutting all day which was exactly what I was hoping we'd have at the Faire. At one point Jake from Instructables was working with Martin on a Raspberry Pi case. 

I was really pleased to see so many visitors. There were about 550 in total and about 70 Makers and their hangers on. It was a super weekend and I was delighted with all the Makers. Same again next year?