About As a child I loved making things out of old electronic and mechanical scrap. It was the time when people were replacing their huge valve driven TVs, gramophones and cast iron household gadgets with new brightly coloured compact plastic transistorised versions. I provided the neighbours with a popular alternative to the council dump. Thank goodness for understanding parents. I continued developing my knowledge of design and electronics in school and went on to study Industrial Design and Engineering at degree level, which the careers advisor thought to be the most appropriate choice for someone with so many interests. Having completed the degree, I set up a small design consultancy and quickly found myself very popular with inventors who wanted their rough ideas worked out and presented as drawings and prototypes. Whilst this was very enjoyable, the common theme was “I can’t pay you now, but I will when it takes off.” Not a sound business model, hence the next amazing twenty seven years spent teaching Design & Technology. A few years ago I gave up teaching and returned to designing and making things (having first taken the kids to school and completed filling the dishwasher). Since then I have devoted more of my time to designing and making steampunk ‘machines’. Steampunk is brilliant, as it combines my love of old machinery, especially innovative Victorian inventions, with my hobbies of making Gothic styled furniture, engineering, electronics and computing. Having made a couple of bespoke steampunk creations, I realised there were very few steampunk machines that actually worked and could be bought by enthusiasts. To address this I designed the Barometric Prognosticator III which proved popular and spurred me on to design the other inventions on the website.