Lockdown Projects

[Grey Fox]

For the first 6 months of lockdown my project was mainly don't spend money & wait. Since mid september that has failed. While some of it is due to my father passing away & not vanity projects but I've spent (or commited to) 20 large.

[Pedrito]

I've been digitizing hundreds of old old photo negatives. Working from home does have some benefits.

It's something I did several years ago, and I digitized some a couple hundreds of rolls, 36mm and some 120 
Now, I want to digitize all the old rolls my dad shot when we were kids, should be a nice nostalgia trip.
Are you using a dedicated photo scanner? And which software?

Oh, and my half-lockdown project is refitting the laundry room to a temporary darkroom and starting some B&W printing again 

L.

OMG, that's both neat and rather cool.

...and being the darkroom a land of endless tinkering and experimentation, I've decided to try electronics and programming - both fields I know zilch about - and in the last couple of weeks I've built an Arduino-based programmable timer for the enlarger.

I did not start from scratch, naturally: several people on different photography forums tried their hand at it, with different degrees of success. I was lucky enough to find someone who published not only the Arduino sketch, but good documentation too, so I only needed to get the components and put them together.
Easier said than done, for sure, but I've learnt a lot of things about electronics - mainly to keep my fingers away from the tip of the soldering iron -, and have yet to test my mettle with the programming part.

I am frankly surprised to say that the thing works perfectly 80% of the time.

L.

[mongers]

I've been digitizing hundreds of old old photo negatives. Working from home does have some benefits.

It's something I did several years ago, and I digitized some a couple hundreds of rolls, 36mm and some 120 
Now, I want to digitize all the old rolls my dad shot when we were kids, should be a nice nostalgia trip.
Are you using a dedicated photo scanner? And which software?

Oh, and my half-lockdown project is refitting the laundry room to a temporary darkroom and starting some B&W printing again 

L.

OMG, that's both neat and rather cool.

...and being the darkroom a land of endless tinkering and experimentation, I've decided to try electronics and programming - both fields I know zilch about - and in the last couple of weeks I've built an Arduino-based programmable timer for the enlarger.

I did not start from scratch, naturally: several people on different photography forums tried their hand at it, with different degrees of success. I was lucky enough to find someone who published not only the Arduino sketch, but good documentation too, so I only needed to get the components and put them together.
Easier said than done, for sure, but I've learnt a lot of things about electronics - mainly to keep my fingers away from the tip of the soldering iron -, and have yet to test my mettle with the programming part.

I am frankly surprised to say that the thing works perfectly 80% of the time.

L.

Damn, Pedrito you're putting some of us to shame; that's a real neat project. 

[Sheilbh]

This is (a) wonderful and (b) rather puts my "projects" to shame:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/01/michelangelo-of-middlesbrough-hailed-for-27000-hour-model

'Michelangelo of Middlesbrough' hailed for 27,000-hour model project
Lockdown hobbyist painted 1m tiny cobbles for scale model of Yorkshire town's demolished St Hilda's district


Steve Waller spent the last nine years working full-time on his scale model. Photograph: Richard Rayner
Alex Mistlin
Tue 1 Jun 2021 18.35 BST

Lockdown has inspired many of us to take up new hobbies, but for one Middlesbrough man, the pandemic just meant more time to devote to a mammoth project already nine years in the making.

"It was business as usual," says Steve Waller, 61, a model artist and historian known affectionately as the "Michelangelo of Middlesbrough" who has spent almost a decade recreating the town's historical St Hilda's district in his bedroom.

Since the project began in 2012, Waller has spent an average of 12 hours a day carving and hand-painting the model village which he calls "a labour of love and hate".

The model features 50 municipal buildings, including Middlesbrough's first town hall and 300 terrace houses, all hand-carved from balsa wood and glued together with resin from Waller's local pound shop.

While Waller's obsession predates Covid-19, it was born out of similar circumstances. Having suffered a slipped disc after diving for a cricket ball, he was unable to leave the house.

"I know lots of people have struggled for purpose over the last year, so it's been nice to have that clarity," he says. "I was always fascinated with my great-uncle, who was killed in the Somme. I was laid up in Middlesbrough and started thinking about the town as he'd have known it, the way the streets would have been then. I started to plot routes he'd have taken and it mushroomed from there."

Waller says he never set out to model the entire town, but once he started – first with the town hall, and then with Ayresome cemetery (now Ayresome Gardens) – he found the process of carving and painting the models to be too therapeutic to stop.

"My magnum opus started out with a grim determination to say 'I can do this', and then it becomes a bit like an addiction, a drug. I have terrible days with it where I have to admit defeat but when you're having a great day and your hands are working like magic I try and keep going because the next day you might not have the same touch."

The model is based on exact plans from the 1830s for the now demolished district. But the scene itself is not of the town then.


Steve's labour of love has recreated the area out of balsa wood with every building made and painted by hand including a million individual tiles and cobbles. Photograph: Richard Rayner

"I've tried to make it a cross-section of different eras in Middlesbrough," says Waller. "There's always a measure of artistic licence with this sort of thing and I can't work miracles, but I've tried my best to capture Middlesbrough the way it was so it will never be forgotten."

Waller is retired now but for the last decade he's worked on the model while caring for his mother full-time. She died in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, but he says he continues working on the model in her memory.

"Poor old mother didn't live to see it finished but she knew it was going to be a winner. I said to her in the care home before she died of Alzheimer's: 'We're going to be famous.'"

The sprawling project forced Waller out of his bedroom and on to a camp bed in his kitchen, but he's excited to be getting his space back soon – the council have found him a studio in town where he can complete the project.

Waller is especially thankful to have had the support of the Middlesbrough mayor, Andy Preston, and he says he can't wait to donate it to the council when it's done.

Lauding the "incredible" scale model, Preston said: "When it's finished, I would like it to be the centrepiece of an exhibition and gathering to celebrate that amazing part of Middlesbrough – an area that was so savagely demolished."

Waller has spent 27,000 hours on the project and painted over 1m tiny cobbles and roof tiles and his dedication has invited comparisons to another old master, Michelangelo.

But while Waller's endurance could rival the man who painted the Sistine Chapel, his ultimate aim has never been that grand. "I just got my head down and kept going. The back injury makes it hard to lie in, anyway."

[Malthus]

My project has been to clean out my basement and organize the stuff down there. It was in a shocking, hoarding-house like state, so very necessary.

To do that, I had to first clean out and organize my garage, so I had some place to store stuff - I have a double sized garage in the back yard (a legacy of having a 90 year old house) so, in theory, lots of storage space - which had become cluttered with tons of worthless clutter.

The bikes took up a lot of room - I got wall hooks for them. To do that, I had to learn how to properly drill holes into brick. While I was at it, I installed tool mounts as well.

Cleaned out the cold room, and put in a simple wine rack - we had been storing bottles of wine in cardboard boxes, a less than ideal solution. Then cleaned out the furnace room, the laundry room, the corridor ... just have the rec room to do.

The amount of clutter I've gotten rid of is incredible. Problem is that there are certain things I can't get rid of until the pandemic is over - I have lots of electronics that have to go to a special disposal/recycling site, and lots of books to donate.

[Valmy]

From January to May I labored to turn this:



into this:



Granted my wife was the management team, I was just the muscle.

[Malthus]

Woah that's a lot of hard work!

Are you going to grow vines on that metal trellis archway thing? That will look awesome.

[Admiral Yi]

Travis in the west bastion and Crockett in the east?

[Malthus]

Speaking of yards - I put up a gazebo in mine, and put together a table setting. For flooring, I just used some bamboo mats, which seems to work okay - I was not willing to do actual hardscaping, as that was too much work for me!

https://i.imgur.com/3wOwiZC.jpg

[Valmy]

Woah that's a lot of hard work!

Are you going to grow vines on that metal trellis archway thing? That will look awesome.

Oh yeah it was insane. Every part of that project was absolutely a pain in the ass.

The plan is for those two flowery herbs to grow around the trellis thingy. I obviously don't have much to do with the actual gardening part

Travis in the west bastion and Crockett in the east?

Damn right. We will have a wooden stockade and a cannon emplacement across the open entrance.

[Malthus]

Heh a couple of tons of stone blocks and gravel to haul I see - this is exactly why I did not want to do hardscaping.

I looked up how to install a flagstone flooring for the gazebo - the first step was to dig up a few binches of the yard area, and put in landscape fabric, then several inches of gravel, tamp the whole down, level it ... that was too much work for me. 😄

[Valmy]

Heh a couple of tons of stone blocks and gravel to haul I see - this is exactly why I did not want to do hardscaping.

I had to rent this horrible horrible sod cutting machine to cut the sod out, damn thing practically broke every bone in my body. Then I had to cut the sod pieces out with a landscaping knife and haul the pieces away with a wheelbarrow. Then I laid down landscaping fabric. So that all sucked. And let me tell you once the grass was gone the place turned into a place reminiscent of Passchendaele every time it rained, well without the dead bodies and machine guns and barbed wire and lice and stuff.

Then a company came and dumped a huge pile of locally quarried gravel on my front yard which I hauled back there one wheelbarrow at a time. Once that was done another company deposited three massive pallets of locally quarried white limestone on my front yard which I had to haul back there one wheelbarrow at a time. And after that was done a company dumped a massive ton of garden soil on my front yard which I then hauled back there one wheelbarrow at a time. So...gardening sucks.

But hey I did this thing. So that's nice.

[Valmy]

Speaking of yards - I put up a gazebo in mine, and put together a table setting. For flooring, I just used some bamboo mats, which seems to work okay - I was not willing to do actual hardscaping, as that was too much work for me!

https://i.imgur.com/3wOwiZC.jpg

Nice! You have a nice backyard for having an urban home as well.

[Malthus]

Heh a couple of tons of stone blocks and gravel to haul I see - this is exactly why I did not want to do hardscaping.

I had to rent this horrible horrible sod cutting machine to cut the sod out, damn thing practically broke every bone in my body. Then I had to cut the sod pieces out with a landscaping knife and haul the pieces away with a wheelbarrow. Then I laid down landscaping fabric. So that all sucked. And let me tell you once the grass was gone the place turned into a place reminiscent of Passchendaele every time it rained, well without the dead bodies and machine guns and barbed wire and lice and stuff.

Then a company came and dumped a huge pile of locally quarried gravel on my front yard which I hauled back there one wheelbarrow at a time. Once that was done another company deposited three massive pallets of locally quarried white limestone on my front yard which I had to haul back there one wheelbarrow at a time. And after that was done a company dumped a massive ton of garden soil on my front yard which I then hauled back there one wheelbarrow at a time. So...gardening sucks.

But hey I did this thing. So that's nice.

My back hurt just reading this. 😄