[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.17] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.04] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.04] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.02] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor & Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you for joining us.
[00:00:23.08] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:23.26] - Gordon
It's been a busy week for me, performing-wise. So this week I've had lots of shows for Christmas, and it's - normally when I do shows, especially for children in particular, it's weekends, mainly. Maybe Friday afternoon after school. But this week has been weekends, I've been doing clubs, I've been doing Brownies and Rainbow groups. I've been doing corporate parties, which are having Christmas parties at pubs and things, socials, that sort of thing. And so it's been pretty full on. I haven't had a great deal of time in the office, which is fine because what I do is to make sure I go out and work. And when the shows are in, that's when I'm out working. But that leads me into my topic. Shall I go first today?
[00:01:20.05] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:21.01] - Gordon
So this week I had a new 3D printer delivered, which is great. I'll come back to the actual printer itself in a minute. The delivery of it was actually very good compared to my last delivery.
[00:01:40.21] - Gordon
If you were watching our episode or listening to our episode two episodes ago, you'll know I was having a bit of a rant about Yodel, who I still think are incompetent. But anyway, that's for another time. But the printer was delivered by a company I'd not heard of before called DX Delivery. And they were very good, but their tracking wasn't great. All it told me is that it had been put onto the delivery vehicle, and they told me that on Friday, but nothing arrived on Friday. And then I didn't know if they delivered at the weekend, so I didn't know whether to make sure someone was here or not, but it actually arrived on the Monday. Now, the reason I was concerned about making sure someone was here is because it's a very expensive piece of kit, but more importantly, it's 44 kilogrammes. What I didn't want was for it to be tossed about when it came off the lorry, I wanted to make sure I was there to watch that. I also didn't want it to be left outside the front door because it's been raining a lot recently, and that would have just deteriorated all the packaging, and then it would have started affecting the printer.
[00:03:04.11] - Gordon
Plus, I didn't want anyone to actually try and carry it too far because it's 44 kilogrammes. You need two people for that, and the rest of the people in my family, I didn't want them to have to deal with it and for the company to dump it on the front door, ring the doorbell and run, and then for someone to try and drag it into the house because we've got quite a big step into the house. So it got delivered on Monday and it was fine. I decided to take off the packaging that I didn't need before I took it upstairs so I could get rid of stuff I didn't need to take up because there's not much point taking it up there and then bringing it back, all the bits you don't need, back down again. I did all that and then discovered that I still couldn't manage it. I didn't want to roll it up the stairs on its edge because that wouldn't have done the printer any good. So I called you, didn't I?
[00:04:05.27] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:06.20] - Gordon
And you came over, which was very kind, and helped me to take it upstairs, but more importantly, take it and put it onto the desk and make sure that everything was there. You actually waited while I unpacked everything to make sure that it would turn on, which is very kind because if that hadn't happened, I'd have had to bring it all the way back down again, put it all the way back into the packaging, and then sort out sending it back and getting a new one. So Taylor was very good. He stayed until I'd managed to make sure it turned on. And it looks really good, doesn't it?
[00:04:43.06] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:44.16] - Gordon
I've already spoken about the printer, so I won't go into too much detail about the actual printer itself, but it's a Bambu H2C. It's got two nozzles, which is very good. It's got lots of element choices. The right-hand nozzle has the option of six different nozzles, so you can change the size of the nozzle automatically. It will just pick the right size that you've got installed. It will also take different colour, filament, and it basically reduces all the purge waste that you have, or, filament poop, as we call it, mainly because it sends it out of a hole in the back down onto the table.
[00:05:28.20] - Gordon
So one of the first things I printed. In fact, the first thing I printed was a knife. It's not really a knife, it's a scraper. You get a blade with the package. And the idea is you print a scraper, and then if anything is a little bit stubborn not coming off the build plate, you can use that to scrape it and you're not going to damage the build plate, and you're going to get the print off all in one go, which is great. I did that. I already had one that I designed for, not I designed, I found for the previous printer and that was just great. So I reprinted exactly the same one. And then the second thing I printed was a poop shoot because the way that my printer is in the room now, it's got a wall on its right-hand side and a wall on its back side, so I can't easily get to either of those, and the poop comes out the back. So I needed to just bring it round to the left-hand side so that I can empty it nice and easily. So that was the second thing I printed.
[00:06:31.17] - Gordon
And the third thing I printed is a box, which is really cool. I showed you earlier. It's a two-colour print, this one. So first time of using two colours. The other two were single colours. And it's basically a box which I have here. If anyone is watching, you can see it's got the Bambu H2C name on the top of it. It's very beautifully made. I had to get some M3 nuts, not nuts, screws to put in. Then inside, it's got two layers. The first layer holds all the nozzles, and then the second layer holds all the other bits, including the grease and the Allen keys and all the other bits and pieces that came with the printer. And so this is a really nice box to keep everything in so that I don't lose anything. And it's nice and hard wearing, so it'll protect them all, which is great. So I haven't really spent a lot of time playing with it yet, mainly because I've been out doing shows, but it works really, really well. I'm keeping, I've got a previous printer, so I've now got two printers, one in the office, one upstairs, and I can now print all sorts of things.
[00:07:52.19] - Gordon
And if I've got a big project that I'm working on, I can actually print with both printers. What I have discovered is that I need to get some duplicates of the filament I've got. I've got two blacks, which is fine because I can put one upstairs and one downstairs, but I've only got one white. I have a feeling white is going to be a colour I'm going to use a lot, so I'm going to need to buy another white so that I can put one on each machine, possibly even getting a couple of them just so I've got spares ready to replace so I don't get to the end of a white without being able to replace it and finish a print. I think my next job is going to be looking at putting filament shelving up. So it's brackets with doweling that you can then put the filament onto, on the wall so that you can keep it out of the way, but you can very easily see all of the different colours you've got, and they're all heat sealed so that they will keep nice no matter what the humidity. So, yeah, I will come back you and let you know once I've got a bit more experience with it and let you know how it goes.
[00:09:06.23] - Gordon
What would you like to talk about today?
[00:09:08.11] - Taylor
So this week is full of tournaments. So I have three tournaments this week, a squash tournament, a tennis tournament, and a padel tournament. And it wasn't supposed to be three in one week. It was only supposed to be two. The padel tournament got moved. It was originally about a month ago and it got moved to this week. And it's three different sports. I love playing all of them. But it's really interesting because when I look back at how I played when I first started these sports, all three sports I picked up in the past four years, maybe. Padel being the newest, squash being the the oldest, and tennis soon after squash. And I played somebody on Monday night who is a really good player. He actually plays for the David Lloyd Club and basically goes and competes in a league against other squash clubs in the area. And I had a really good game against him. He said many times, "really good shot," which is really nice to hear from somebody who's a lot better. I don't know if he was playing to his absolute maximum and actually gave a proper game or he tried to make it close.
[00:10:32.27] - Taylor
The scores were relatively close. But if I had looked and played him two years ago, even a year ago, it would have been a completely different game. There are people now that back in the day, I had not very close games. Then they became a lot closer, and now they're not really games because I've improved a lot. And a lot of that comes down to playing people that are better than me. For a long time, I was playing in the beginner's squash, mainly, and I made a lot of friends there, really enjoyed it. But I found that I soon hit a point where I wasn't really getting any better. I was just playing, I was just having fun and stuff. And I was never improving. Even when I was playing tournaments, I think I still wasn't improving. It was only when I started playing these better people that I actually started getting better. And I did get beaten a lot and quite badly for the first six months or so. But the trajectory of my skill improvement and level just increased dramatically. Over those six months, people say, "you're pretty much out of my league now," in terms of the skill level.
[00:11:50.05] - Taylor
And it got me thinking that that's one of the things that we need to do in all areas is that if you're not challenging yourself, if you're I don't know what the phrase is, you want to be the dumbest person in the room kind of thing because you always want to basically be with people that are smarter than you because you're always going to be learning and things like that. So yeah, put it into perspective and I was trying to think of other ways I could apply that to other areas, both personal and business and things.
[00:12:17.25] - Gordon
Yeah, it's very good. I totally agree with that. The problem I have now is that I've been doing it for so long. It's very difficult to be the dumbest person in the room. And I find that quite often I'm the one that in Magic, for example, our local Magic Club, I've been doing it for so long that people will come to me and they'll ask me a question that more than likely I can answer about how this move is done or how this trick is done or if there's anything similar. And it's actually quite nice to know that I've got to a level where these people can learn from me because I'm giving back a little bit because I obviously learned from older people and more experienced people in the beginning. So I've now got to the stage where I'm giving back, which is really nice.
[00:13:10.15] - Taylor
Yeah, it takes a different role. I have this in the WordPress and the software communities where when I first started out, I probably asked very dumb questions, what I would consider dumb and basic questions now. But at the time, I had no idea. And there were people that were kind enough to offer me their time and their skill for free. No, nothing in return, no obligation or anything like that. And they didn't see it as stupid. They didn't belittle me. They just said, "Hey, this is how I go about it," or "this is what I would do" or pointed me in the direction. Sometimes they just said, "Here, read up on this." And that's where I got into reading documentation and actually learned a lot quicker because I was actually learning how to understand documentation, how to read it, and how to use it. And they didn't have to give me their time. They didn't have to take time out of their day to answer. And when I got to that point, that's when I was like, "Okay, well, now I'm at that point where I can give the people advice. I can give feedback."
[00:14:17.20] - Taylor
I want to because if it hadn't have been for the people that gave me the time, a day, then I would never be where I am. I see it as a way to give back, like you said, in a way that people do come to you and ask for advice because you're more experienced. And it's nice because you're basically repaying it further down the line in the future.
[00:14:41.23] - Gordon
And we've got lots of different areas that we have in our daily lives. So even though I'm where I want to be as far as magic goes, 3D printing is still very new to me. So I'm still looking up to the people who know a lot more than me and are more experienced. I'm waiting for their guidance and asking them questions and so forth so that I can get better. I'm now teaching a drama class, which I've only been doing for just over a year now, and that was completely out of my comfort zone. I never taught a class before, not on a regular basis, anyway. So it's good to push yourself, and it's good to try and do everything you can get better at it, whatever it is, and everything that you turn your hand to. If you've got that want to get better at it, then you will, you'll get better. And it's a really good motivation to have, I think.
[00:15:47.11] - Taylor
I think one thing to take away is that whenever you see something that you think may be a stupid comment or maybe a basic, just stop and think and go, "Was I in this situation in some other point."
[00:16:01.22] - Gordon
"That was me at one point."
[00:16:03.13] - Taylor
It's very easy to go, "Oh, you're such an idiot. How do you not notice it's so basic?" But then a mechanic would say that to me when I try and change a tyre or try and do something very, very basic, oil change or whatever, because it's not my area. And so, yeah, just have a bit of compassion and think about how you would like to be treated and helped for something you didn't know.
[00:16:29.01] - Gordon
I think to sum up, push yourself, listen and take note of what experienced people say and keep them around you so that you can get better. But also, if you have got to a point where people are coming to you with questions, just listen to what they say and answer them the best you can.
[00:16:53.06] - Taylor
And pull them up with you. Yeah.
[00:16:55.13] - Gordon
That's everything from me today. And me as well. Thank you so much for joining us. Just before we do the outro part of this, we are coming up to the end of our year, which means January is a brand new season, Season 7. We're going to have a brand new colour. We don't know what it is yet. We haven't discussed it, but if you have any suggestions, look back at the colours we've already used for our seasons. Make a suggestion, and you never know, we might even use it. That's it from me. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe on YouTube.
[00:17:32.10] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:17:37.04] - Gordon
If you would prefer to listen to us instead of watch us, we're on all the major podcast platforms and also your smart speaker. Just ask to listen to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next week, getting very close to Christmas. We may have a couple of weeks off over Christmas, but we should be with you next week. So all being well, we'll be with you at 1pm next Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:18:29.13] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:18:29.26] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:18:29.28] - Taylor
Bye.
