This part of the Chestnut Pens website is for anything non-pen related. A number of the pages are re-workings of some older web pages I developed several years ago and had up on the Yahoo Geocities site prior to Free Geocities being closed down. They are mostly maritime in origin as I had hopes of building my own yacht at one time, and had intended to take it to Antarctica one day. Unfortunately we moved house and went from no mortgage to a huge one that means a boat has become an impossible luxury. Anyway, some of the projects were too useful to be allowed to disappear. I know my sextant design is the only free sextant design anywhere, so it's worth having available for that reason if no other.
The downloads include both CAD drawings of the Projects and some PC software I have written, both for home use and work use. The jewel in the crown is a full blown 3D modelling studio that can take you from a blank screen to a full blown Finite Element Stress model that is ready to be analysed by either NISA or MYSTRAN FEA packages. The modelling studio has other uses too - it can be used to create models for 3D figure animation packages too. There are other bits & pieces too, like a graphical piece of software to calculate the loads in bolts when you have a group of them together. This is both useful and very unusual.
Some of the projects are inspired by poverty, some by ingenuity and some because I just have to make things. Anyway, I invite you to look & enjoy.
You may well be wondering why there is a page on 'Cats'. Well, the explanation is really too convoluted, but I'll summarise by saying 'Our cats threatened me with pain or worse to get them on the internet, because everyone knows cats own the internet & they wanted their bit. And now they're happy.'.
Mad? Maybe...