About Me

I was born in 1963 in North London, England.
My interest in all things electrical and mechanical started long before I left school. My favourite subjects were Physics, Metalwork and not a lot else !

In 1982 I married a wonderful person and we now have three children, six grandchildren and a west highland terrier !

I started work at 16 as a printers mate and soon learnt to operate and repair the machines myself, I also started doing the factory wiring, repairs and so on. After a few job changes, all in printing, I started working for my brother and his wife in their craft oriented greetings card company “Craft Creations Ltd”, again in the print side of the business.

Thirteen years later (2007), I am now the production manager in the same place and run a large print room with eleven staff and a vast range of machinery. I have now progressed to building custom machines using PLC controls and compressed air drive with four successes to date, a twin-head bag sealer, a massive ten station suction feed collator, a sheetfed inkjet barcode printer for coding the reverse side of their range of peel-off stickers and a card creasing machine.

I enjoy building things that do not have clear-cut designs. They require the maximum use of my ingenuity and resourcefulness which leads to great satisfaction when complete.

I discovered Tesla Coils some time ago but it was only recently that I became interested enough to try and build one. They are fascinating devices because there are no real plans for them, you can’t realistically buy all the parts for one off-the-shelf, you have to design most of the stuff yourself around the materials you can get hold of.

If made correctly, the end result is that they make utterly ridiculous amounts of high-voltage electricity !!

I also have a keen interest in digital photography and used to run my clubs’ web site which was very satisfying, naturally it has been taken over since we moved and I left the club but it was a highly respected project in those days.

After acquiring a nice Boxford lathe and a small milling machine I could finally indulge in my all-time favourite pastime of making things out of metal. Checkout my engineering projects to see what’s going on. I have a strong interest in live steam as well and that seemed to fit well with the new workshop, you can see the results in some of my many projects.

In 2007, we moved house, the children moved out, and I now have an excellent double garage for my home workshop – a home business was also started – DD Metal Products Ltd.

More machinery was installed and I can make pretty much anything now.

It’s now 2021 and I retired from full-time employment at Craft Creations Ltd in 2019 as the company closed. After 12 years of running my own business both part-time and later on full-time, I have now decided to close that down due to ongoing health issues which the work was not helping. DD Metal Products Ltd was a very successful little business and has allowed me to retire a little early, I had many hundreds of customers and a vast amount of orders, If I had kept it going it would have needed moving to a small unit somewhere local as it was outgrowing the garage.

In retirement, I have rekindled my love of target shooting with airguns, I did try clay pigeon shooting for a while in the 90’s but it can get very expensive and I gave it up when we moved house. I also collect replica rifles and pistols of historical note or film/tv notoriety.