Seven Days: Twenty Nine Eleven Fifteen

RIBA House of the Year 2015 We wrote about the culmination of this competition earlier this week but for those who missed it ( click here ...

RIBA House of the Year 2015

We wrote about the culmination of this competition earlier this week but for those who missed it (click here if you did and have a couple of minutes), spotted it but really couldn't face another of our "wall of text" posts or just want to jump straight to the conclusion:

Flint House by Skene Catling De La Pena for Lord Rothschild was the winner a decision all at bokoshoko agreed with. It was the stand out from the competition representing something genuinely fresh, new and will be seen as a landmark home in the future.

RIBA House of the Year 2015 Winner - and rightly so!

Black (eye) Friday

The relentless pressure to push prices downwards for all and sundry continues as our retailers respond to peoples "need" to have X widget for less than the cost of making it. We're ambivalent about this "tradition"; on the one hand we'd be lying if we claimed not to take advantage of it but on the other we recognise the harm that the relentless downward pressure on pricing is doing.

You want to know why children are being scared for life by faked Frozen merchandise? Why that ready meal may or may not contain more than the one four legged animal it's supposed to? Why that electrical widget you bought stopped working after 3 months shortly after letting the smoky pixies out? It's not all the fault of the Chinese, organised crime or because "things weren't like this in the olde days" - we need to see our own culpability in this.

Tools of the Trade

If you visited our workshop you may be surprised to find a "lo-fi" environment. There's no 5 axis vertical machining centers, no gang tooled, dual spindle CNC lathes and no automatic bar feeders for our bandsaw. Instead you'd find people turning handles on old manual machines, measuring things with micrometers or calipers and not a CMM and surface finishes being applied by hand rather than 30 minutes in a dosed media rumbling tank.

The bokoshoko workshop yesterday....

For simple parts like many of our bespoke fixings, adapters we draw the design on old fashioned paper but sometimes we need to get a little more accurate; particularly where material costs are high, the time investment is substantial and or we're integrating other, manufactured, components.

In these cases we model pieces in 3D using CAD software, we were early adopters of a a product called Alibre which then became Geomagic but year on year price increases were becoming increasingly hard to justify.

The big player in this market is Autodesk (most people have heard of AutoCAD for example) with Solidworks coming in next. Both are very capable, very shiny and sadly very, very expensive but Autodesk has taken the Cloud paradigm and run with it and released a product called Fusion 360.

For a company that will happily relieve you of the equivalent of a small car for the "base" version of their software to turn around and offer something with the functionality of Fusion 360 free (yes free) to those who meet certain qualifying criteria is something quite extraordinary.

The bokoshoko workshop sometime in the future?

You'll see us put a project through the Fusion 360 process shortly as we work on a complicated design that combines MK 3 pin 13A chassis mount sockets with bespoke machined housings to create some unique power sockets for a kitchen.

Show me the Photos!

As we promised last week we finally addressed the gallery on the site replacing the one interim version with two new; The Big Box and The Chosen Ones.

The Big Box gallery is a simple collection of all the images used across this blog (and some others). It provides a taste of what we do, what we talk about and the things we like.

The Chosen Ones is a collection of our current favourites, deliberately small in number, each image link backs to the article that references it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, a processed one is even better!

Don't forget that all our articles that talk about projects will have a link at the bottom of them that links to a "warts 'n' all" project specific album. These albums contain all the raw images and other media we collect during a project. We don't hide our mistakes (of course we never make any), we don't hide our methods and we don't process these ones.

This Week's Obsession: The Landmark Trust

Those of you watched the unfortunately formatted but ultimately revealing documentary, Restoring Britain's Landmarks, will have seen the great work this organisation carries out. Most of us are familiar with, or have at least heard of, The National Trust or English Heritage but the Landmark Trust, for most of us, was an unknown quantity.

There are some good reasons why this organisation deserves your attention; they have a pragmatic approach to preservation, you can stay in their properties and they even have an entire island...

Take a look at Astley Castle which not only won a RIBA award in 2013 but you can stay in it, your own castle but then when you see what they did with it it gets even better. Here's a charity that has all the warning signs that puts you in mind of intractable insistence on ancient building techniques and materials and then they dispell that stereotype in one step. These people know how to make a realistic case for preservation...

A castle, yes a castle - pragmatic, workable, preservation (award winning as well)

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• Seven Days? You What? I mean, pardon?
• These posts give us a chance to recap on the last week at Bokoshoko and give you a glimpse of what's happening. Many of our projects take time to come to fruition or our customers would prefer we did not share so these posts also show we're not just sitting around!