Stuff What I Made

I got this bike during university, probably 2002, using my student loan (obviously, what else is it for?). It’s a Giant MCM-D 990, an eBay find (£500!) and clearly about 2 sizes too small for me, but it was quite a distinctive thing and always got lots of questions and comments out on the trails. The front triangle is carbon fibre, which was very unusual at the time. [Read More]

In the final year of my degree, we were required to do an individual project chosen either from a prescribed list of possibilities or optionally your own idea (staff approved). The ones I fancied on the list were taken by other students so I ended up choosing my own. At the time I didn’t really know my way around graphics (who am I kidding, I still don’t), so as a vehicle to learn a bit about OpenGL I endeavoured to write a tool that would render the call graph of an arbitrary application in real time. [Read More]

I’m not really sure why, but aged 16 or so I got it into my head that I’d make an electric guitar. Somehow I ended up with the book Make Your Own Electric Guitar, by Melvyn Hiscock. I genuinely can’t remember if the book ownership or the idea came first, but regardless even at that age I could be single-mindedly stubborn when it came to making things, and the seed had well and truly been planted. [Read More]

As a cash strapped electric guitar playing teenager, one of my hobbies was making effects pedals. Many of them were made from plans in those cheap paperbacks that you could buy in the high street electronics shop Maplin. In the age of buying almost everything online, it seems almost absurd now that there were such shops, but I digress. Anyway the paperbacks in question (invariably penned by the prolific R.A. Penfold) contained all sorts of weird and wonderful gizmos, many of which I took a crack at, but the only device that I really needed and have hung on to,... [Read More]

While this wasn’t my first mountain bike, it was the first one I put together myself, and the first that I paid for (insofar as you technically pay for anything when it’s through pocket money). The frame was aluminium, the hot new material at the time, purchased from one of those multi-page Merlin Cycles ads in MBUK. It was some kind of mass produced no brand affair, will no frills at all and probably on the heavy side, but at the time it felt pretty special. [Read More]