Unusual Museum Visit - Cambridge

My daughter Catherine invited me to visit her over at Sawston, and I had been alerted to one aspect, the introduction to her School’s 3D Printer to help her with a project she was planning for her young charges now that it was up and running. I should own up here, that although I have ‘dabbled in a bit of programming’ I would definitely consider that my past experience was firstly ‘in the Past’ and secondly, somewhat primitive and simplistic, but I was game, and always tend to ‘push the envelope’ and run before I can walk! She wanted to create a nameplate, and a rectangle or square simply did not feature in my repertoire as a base. My immediate thought was to indent all four corners, it would be a plaque as a base. The base was therefore to have a fair depth, so instinctively I knew that at each corner, I was going to subtract a cylindrical post from a rectangle, a scallop. However, I knew nothing of the program that was to perform the task I had in mind, but intuitively knew the task I had in mind could be considered as one routine repeated at all four corners, by my telling the machine to repeat the cylindrical subtracting at each of the other three corner co-ordinates. However, here my input ground to a halt! At this point in the English language I described this to Catherine, who then used a series of jigsaw panels into which I then fed the circle instruction with the four corner co-ordinates into individual groups, going downwards, since the process was top-down. We had earlier defined the depth of plate upon where we were going to build our 3D letters, so the cylindrical subtraction would be the same Z-component as the depth of that plate. Each instruction was applied singly, rendered and checked before building the next program jigsaw instruction.

I am absolutely certain that the instructions I was building individually could be entered in a Step & Repeat function derived from simply the corner co-ordinates of the initial rectangle, but we just created another jigsaw piece with those new co-ordinates using basic principles! Also we did a Refresh render at each step! This, simply to verify we had made no mistakes, we were still a long way off feeding this to the printer.

Having arrived at a point where we could let the Printer work it’s magic, Catherine ensured that the heater was up to temperature, she set it going, and the alarms, and we headed off for a speedy shopping trip. Later we returned to see the fruits of our labours

before a trip to an ex-Water Treatment facility (read: Sewage Works) which has become a Museum which houses other technologies such as printing presses. 

           As we walked down towards the entrance, I was surprised by the sight of the boughs of trees overladen with an abundance of berries, generally considered as a precursor to a harsh Winter.

           One room on the site was locked on this occasion, but my daughter’s conversation with a volunteer at the entrance had inspired her to ensure the room was specially opened for us, allowing us to get a brief inspection. I only managed a single shot of a block of type as we chatted with the person who had generously opened that room just for us to take a look.

The very first image that had caught my eye as we descended the slope to the entrance, was a striking, if rather simplistic depiction of Concorde at takeoff, painted on the side of a Container. Later we saw the complete view of the tall chimney, scaled at one time by the irascible character, Fred Dibnah.

I do not know how long this Museum has been open; my impression was that it is early days, but I enjoyed the visit, and was impressed with the garden bar and the welcoming atmosphere, I hope my images have captured this favourably.