[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.10] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.25] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.27] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from the Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.26] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:24.09] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:24.28] - Gordon
It's been an interesting week for me. Has it been good for you?
[00:00:29.06] - Taylor
It has.
[00:00:30.00] - Gordon
Excellent. Well, I'm sure we'll get straight into that. Any news before we carry on?
[00:00:34.04] - Taylor
No.
[00:00:34.26] - Gordon
Okay, let's get straight into our topics. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:00:39.01] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:00:40.05] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:00:40.29] - Taylor
So this week, or the end of last week, I took off about two and a half days of work, which felt really nice. So I went to watch the Formula One at Silverstone, and it was my first time going to watch Formula One live. It was really exciting. It was great fun. We were there for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so the whole weekend. And it was really nice. I took my laptop with me up to Northampton, where we were staying with some friends, and I had it with me just in case something went wrong. And I just tried to not use it as much or as little as I could. And I think I used it on the Friday. I think that was about it. I checked my email when I was back home in the evening, make sure there wasn't anything that was going wrong or anything like that. But I didn't do any work. And it just felt really nice. It was nice to relax, enjoy the time, enjoy the moment, watching the cars go past. I didn't really go on my phone much. There was just enjoying the experience, really.
[00:01:52.25] - Gordon
Yeah, I didn't go. When he says we, he doesn't mean me. He means a friend of his. And yeah, I watched the Grand Prix race on the Sunday at home with my feet up while you were getting a little bit wet.
[00:02:08.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:08.26] - Gordon
Yeah, it did rain quite a bit during the race. It was a bit on and off, wasn't it? Because half the track was in sun, and the other half had heavy rain. And so none of the teams knew what tyres to use. It was really, really unusual race. But big finish. Who won?
[00:02:27.18] - Taylor
Lando Norris won the the Silverstone British Grand Prix, which was good. They had a McLaren one, two, and also a first-time podium for Nico Hulkenberg.
[00:02:38.24] - Gordon
Yeah. What was it? 200 and...
[00:02:41.19] - Taylor
39 or something?
[00:02:42.10] - Gordon
39, something like that. 93, something like that, starts without a podium. So this was the charm. And you got to see it.
[00:02:50.21] - Taylor
I did.
[00:02:51.09] - Gordon
Amazing.
[00:02:52.07] - Taylor
And one thing that I did find really interesting was there was, over the course of the weekend, I think just under 500,000 people that attended. I think the Sunday for the race, I think there was roughly around 200,000 maybe on that one day. And the way that they had everything set up to manage that number of people was actually quite interesting. They essentially had hired out pretty much all of the buses that existed in probably a 50-mile radius. So you had all the different bus companies, all with branding and advertising for that local area. So you had things like Milton Keynes, Northampton, all of the local stations. And people would park and basically park and ride. So you parked in a local town, and then you got a bus into Silverstone, and they dropped you right outside the gate entrance. And one thing that was interesting is that they closed the main dual carriageway A road by Silverstone. And so what happened is we actually were going back towards Northampton. We were going on the wrong side. So we were actually going backwards on the road. So the dual carriageway, you had basically both vehicles, both the buses and then the cars on the other side going in the same direction.
[00:04:26.11] - Taylor
So we looked over to our left and we could see the cars going in the normal direction, and we were on the right-hand side or the left-hand side going backwards. And they basically closed the entire road so that you could basically get as many buses and vehicles back towards the main town to then go wherever they needed to go. I thought it was a great idea. It's something that obviously they've done many, many times over the years and perfected a way to basically get a massive amount of people out of a small vicinity, especially when you have pretty much one road in and out of the venue.
[00:05:06.26] - Gordon
Yeah, logistics for that sort of thing is really interesting, especially when you think of things that maybe you hadn't considered before, like getting half a million people into a venue and out of a venue. I mean, that's just a huge number of people to move about safely. And that's the important bit, the safely bit, isn't it? Because if you have any problems and you've got to move people quickly, there are going to be systems in place, and those systems, hopefully, will never get used. But I bet you they've rehearsed and practised it like you would a fire alarm at an office block. So yeah, having those systems in place is something that we've always said you should do; have systems for everything. And they've just taken it a little bit further for things that are going to be things that we haven't even thought about. It's fascinating. I mean, the other thing is, how do they feed that number of people? Because if you've got 500,000 people and you've got maybe two hours before the race and people are hungry, how do they manage that without you having long queues?
[00:06:21.16] - Taylor
Well, so there are lots of vendors, independent vendors that basically will bring their trucks and food trucks and things like that. It was 500,000 across all the weekend, essentially. So it wasn't 500,000 on a single day.
[00:06:38.10] - Gordon
Right.
[00:06:38.27] - Taylor
There were long, long queues. They still probably weren't enough, but again, they pretty much had all... They used pretty much all the space that they had available, so they couldn't have added any more safely and any more food trucks or any more drinks places. They did have a lot of self-service stuff, so you just go up, grab it, and you go and pay. Saving having to have queues with people serving, you just went up and served yourself with some things. So yeah, there was just so many different vendors, so many different things to do. But also because the track is so big, you have both outside, around the track, but you also have inside, which has a lot of people who have paid extra to go inside, who are either inside the paddock and have been invited. So that does include those people as well. So you've got people inside and outside of the track.
[00:07:36.05] - Gordon
And is there a way to get from the inside of the track out while the race is on? Or are you stuck in there? Is there bridges?
[00:07:44.08] - Taylor
Yeah. What you'll see is you'll see Pirelli signs and things like that that they go underneath, and that's basically a bridge that cars drive over, and you can obviously walk over. They had internal buses. They actually had two London buses that would go back and forth, basically between the entrance and the paddock, where people could hire... If people had private venues, whatever, they'd hired out for their company or whatever. Basically, it would take them from the paddock to there to then see different parts of the track.
[00:08:18.19] - Gordon
One of the people we watch on YouTube was there, weren't they?
[00:08:22.12] - Taylor
Many people.
[00:08:23.13] - Gordon
There were lots of people there, but we found out today that Colin Furs was there on the Sunday for the race. And Colin Furs is a nutter, really. I mean, he's just got some weird, wonderful ideas and has the ability to make them as well. He's currently building an underground bunker. Well, he's done that bit. He's currently building an underground garage for his car, which is going to have a Batman-style lift that's going to raise his car up to street level so he can drive off and then drive back in again. It's going to go down again, and then it's going to have a turntable to turn it so he's ready to go back out again. It's just fascinating watching the build of this. He's been doing it for several years now because it's a huge project. But yeah, I'm going to put a link to his channel because if you haven't seen him and what he does, he's got some brilliant, brilliant videos to watch. His Wall of Death was really good with the motorbikes and things. But yeah, he was there as well, as were, as you say, lots and lots of people.
[00:09:39.04] - Gordon
The guy who was in Formula One alongside Brad Pitt was the one who ended up doing the chequered flag, which was really cool.
[00:09:50.03] - Taylor
Yeah, Gordon Ramsey was there.
[00:09:51.16] - Gordon
Yeah, I saw that.
[00:09:52.12] - Taylor
You had Tom Holland.
[00:09:53.02] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:09:54.06] - Taylor
Yeah. Lots of celebrities were there. Jeremy Clarkson. Ian Wright.
[00:09:58.09] - Gordon
It's the place to be, isn't it? Really. Formula One race to be seen down by all the cars as a guest of Mercedes or Red Bull or whatever. That seems to be the trendy thing to do at the moment.
[00:10:14.22] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:15.11] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say about your trip?
[00:10:17.14] - Taylor
I don't think so. It was just really good fun.
[00:10:19.09] - Gordon
Yeah, and it's nice to take time off. So the two things that I've taken away from that is, one, make sure you have time for yourself. Make sure you take a break from work because otherwise it just becomes one long work life, you see, and you never get time to relax and enjoy yourself. One of the reasons we go to the cinema on a Wednesday, it takes us away from the office. We know we've got that time when we can just relax and enjoy something that's not work-related. So that's really good. And the second thing is just looking at other people's processes. If you go to... I find I do this a lot. If I go to a restaurant or I go to a company or a shopping centre. I'm looking to see how they do certain things. I'm one of those curious people. I like to know how these things work. Go to the theatre and I'm looking to see the lighting and the special effects and things. That's part of the enjoyment for me because I like to know things and I'm curious about how things work. And in today's era, you can go on YouTube or you can go on the internet and just do a search for something and go, "how does this work?"
[00:11:31.16] - Gordon
And you're likely to find a video that someone's made explaining it all. And it's great to learn these little bits of information. And sometimes you'll find that you'll be able to use them for your business and in your life. And that's really exciting for me.
[00:11:48.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:48.17] - Gordon
So my topic today is going to be about the new 3D printer that I have. So a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd purchased a new 3D printer. I've gone for the Bambu X1 Carbon, which is an all enclosed printer, and it's a big upgrade from what I had before. I went from a £350 printer up to a £1,200 printer. So it's a huge, huge difference. But also we're talking three, four years worth of, no, maybe not quite that many, 2-3 years worth of technology advances. And just like in AI, 3D printing has come on in leaps and bounds over that time. The precision and the software and the build quality of all the printers have just significantly increased over that period of time. And materials, of course. What I'm finding is that the prints that I am doing at the moment are much higher quality than the ones I was doing before.
[00:13:00.17] - Gordon
But more importantly, they're much quicker. So the print head, oh my goodness. The first time I saw it printing, it was going all over the place really, really quickly. And it can print up to 300 millimetres a second. I mean, just think about that for a second. 300 millimetres a second, 30 centimetres it can print every second. I mean, that's what? That's nearly one and a half times the length of a normal size ruler in a second. I mean, that's a huge amount of printing speed to be that accurate. And accuracy is very much part of this. Also, bed levelling. The bed levelling on the printer I had before was a manual process. I had little turny knobs on four, five parts of the bed, and you had to turn them. And actually it would bring up the backside a little bit or the frontside. It's all done by the printer itself now. It's got a LiDAR to see how close the level is. It's very, very precise. If there is a slight difference, it can either fix that or it knows about that flaw or that error, and it can change the print settings to accommodate for that.
[00:14:26.22] - Gordon
I'm having a lot of fun printing other people's models, and there's lots of really, really cool prints that I've been doing recently. Something I did this week was a Connect 4, which is just for me, really. It's just a game, a toy. I like looking at how other people have approached a challenge or a design; something that they're looking to design and how they've approached it, how they've managed to find solutions for various things. And this had a great solution. It's got the pieces are spirals and each piece, so you've got two sets of pieces, both pieces are mirror images of each other. So one spiral is clockwise, one spiral is anticlockwise. And as you put it into the board, it will spiral its way down. But because it's going a different way to the other piece, even though it's going in the same slots, it's been designed so that when you lift the board, all of the different pieces will automatically separate themselves into the two sides for the correct pieces. So you haven't got to sort them manually. It's all done, automatically, which is such a cool... Oh, pardon me. Such a cool idea.
[00:15:45.08] - Gordon
And I just printed it because I wanted to play with it and see how they'd approached that problem. Now, one of the things I wanted to print was a replacement for a trick that I've been doing for a long, long time. And it's a trick that was was invented by a gentleman called Ali Bongo, who was a very good friend of mine, and you knew him reasonably well as well.
[00:16:06.21] - Taylor
I did, yes.
[00:16:07.23] - Gordon
He was a lovely, lovely guy. He was one of the magical advisors on 'The Paul Daniels Magic Show,' which was a TV show when I was younger, and he just spent his whole life in magic. He was great. It was a trick that I had that was made out of cardboard, which is fine. Carboard worked well. It was a bit of cardboard and it had gold foil effectively wrapped around it to make a block of gold. It's one of these things that I've had for maybe 30 years, 25 years, that sort of length of time. I think that's how long I've been performing it. And it's getting a little bit tatty now. I thought, "wouldn't it be nice to 3D print these?"
[00:16:51.07] - Gordon
But that required design abilities, and I don't have those design abilities yet. Taylor has already started learning Fusion 3D, which is a great application to learn, especially if you have a 3D printer. But a big shout out here to a friend of mine, Liam Ball, member of The Magic Circle, another magician. He has a reasonably good knowledge of Fusion 3D, way more than I have. I mentioned it to him and explained that I was having a bit of a problem, and he went, "Oh, yeah, I can have a look at that." So there's tolerances that are involved because you've got a box and you've got this block of gold that needs to go into the box and it needs to fit quite snugly. And there's a lid and then there's panels that are different colours. And there's a few different problems in there. And he pretty much, on the first try, figured all of those problems out. I had to reprint one bit once because of a tolerance issue, but that was it. And the rest of it came out first time really, really well. So thank you so much to Liam for that. One of the problems that we had is by putting a block into an enclosed box, the air that you're pushing down is then trapped and it has to have a way to come out.
[00:18:18.19] - Gordon
Otherwise the box won't go into, or the block won't go into the box. And he found a really clever solution to that by having the inside corners of the box, square, and the outside corners of the block, circular. So there was a very, very small gap on each of the corners, which is enough for when you put the block in for it to basically sink down and force all the air to come up around where the corners are and still allow it to come out, because that's the other thing. Getting it in there is one thing, but you've got to have enough weight on it or it's not right up against the sides of the boxes that it's then fixed and you have to try and force it out with a special tool or something. It has to come out on its own. And those corner air pockets allowed it to do that. So, I've now finished printing it. I have now finished the assembly of it. And by the looks of it, from my initial looking at it, it's going to be perfect for what I need. Another shout out to Richard Pinner, another magician friend of mine.
[00:19:41.21] - Gordon
He's very good at consulting. He does a lot of shows and TV and all sorts of things where he builds specific props for that. So he's a perfect person for this. And I think it was myself who showed him 3D printing and what it was capable of that made him go out and start looking at that. I had a good conversation with him about the project, and he came up with the glue that I needed for the panels. So, I had a base with panels that went on the sides. And he recommended EMA, which is a plastic weld, which I'd never heard of before.
[00:20:23.22] - Taylor
Neither have I.
[00:20:24.17] - Gordon
So basically what it is, is you paint it onto the plastic, and it melts the plastic, just a very small surface of it. So when you put another bit of plastic on, when it touches it, it melts that one as well. And then the the liquid will evaporate. So all you're doing is you're basically welding them together. You're melting two surfaces of plastic to a point when they then will cool down and the melting of it will become one weld. So it's not adding glue, which would also add an amount of space, sorry, like an extra layer, which could then mess up my tolerances for putting the block inside the box.
[00:21:12.23] - Gordon
It's not doing that. If anything, it's bringing the material together more because it evaporates. And that was a really, really good shout. I found one issue where the painting on this material, this liquid, would create a little clump of melted material. And what I needed to do was just to brush it all around so that it wasn't in one space, because that then gave me a couple of spots on two panels, which are sort of annoying me. But if I need to, I can reprint that, having learnt that that is the case and making a note in Evernote so that when I use that liquid again, I'll remember that that needs spreading around.
[00:21:58.16] - Taylor
That'll be good.
[00:21:59.17] - Gordon
But yeah, that's my adventures in 3D printing recently. It's printing something right now. It's been used a lot and I've bought lots of new filaments, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun creating new models for the 3D printer that are all custom and letting us do things that just aren't possible without a 3D printer. My renewed love of 3D printing has come back to me. I was having a few issues with the last one, and the new one has reinvigorated me.
[00:22:39.29] - Taylor
That's good.
[00:22:40.24] - Gordon
So that's everything. You can tell that Taylor is getting annoyed now. It's like wrap up. He said, "That's good." That's his... "Right, you're finished now. Let's get on with it. Let's wrap this up." So let's do just that. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe if you're on YouTube.
[00:22:57.23] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.
[00:23:04.08] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms. Just use your normal podcast app to search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and you can also ask your smart speakers to "play This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and you'll hear our latest episode. We will be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:23:31.02] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:23:59.26] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:23:59.28] - Taylor
Bye.
