Supawood

The young unemployed (2)

2011-12-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

A great tragedy of our time is the failure to recognise that education is more than book-learning. Boys in particular need to DO things. Engaging them is crucial. Not everyone is academic, and giving them hand/eye skills while they are enjoying themselves has probably more value in turning them into useful citizens than compelling them to stay at school while switched off from learning: The sad current state of affairs for many.

We shouldn't underestimate the ability of our children, but we must fire them up. My father (or your grandfather) probably left school at fourteen, possibly knowing more arithmetic and better able to read and write than some of those we see coming out of too many of our schools today.
In Lithuania, one specialist aviation school teaches nine-year-olds to fly gliders - using the highly adventurous solo method. The kids lap it up, and most go on to become proper engineers.

Day-release from work to go to college worked for my generation. Why not day release to go to work for fourteen-year olds? Working hands-on as, say, an apprentice joiner soon shows the lad (or ladess) the utility of geometry when they help set out their first circular bay window, or wreathed and scrolled handrail: An aspiring mechanic (fitter, more like) needs to appreciate the difference between a force-fit, a running fit, and slop, in a mechanism.

We need to see a return to vocational training at school as another route into industry, as a stepping stone to better things. That's the REAL advantage of an apprenticeship.

Youth unemployment

2011-12-15T01:45:00.000-08:00

My younger readers won't perhaps beware that we've been here before: the present situation is a repeat of the early eighties (heard of the YOP scheme) and again of the late eighties.

I was building a joinery business through those years, and while skilled labour was increasingly hard to find, the growing pool of unemployed youth was becoming increasingly hard to employ. Why was that?

1. Bad attitude was all too common. Resentful and truculent is never good, especially when you want a job. Attacking your employer (physically or verbally) does not go far in securing your employment.
2. Lack of ambition. All too often the ONLY thing in these lads minds was "football".
3. Too high in expectations.
It was so sad to see these young men, the flower of our nation, desperate for jobs, but virtually unskilled despite years of useless government courses one after the other, expecting the wages of a skilled man. The competitive demands of the business made it impossible to accede to their demands.

Perhaps one in twenty, when asked "where do you want to be in five years time" would point to one of the skilled machinists and say "I want his job". Needless to say, these were the ones who got the job, and invariable made a success of it.
Those days were HARD for anyone in industry, as our government was intent on exporting jobs. We said so at the time, but no one was listening. Now, everyone recognises the folly.
Guess what! We told 'em so.

I have to do some work now, but I have more to write on this subject.

Demolish or rebuild

2011-11-26T00:25:00.000-08:00

There are many hundreds of thousands of old sub-standard terrace houses across the UK in many of the big cities, all waiting demolition thanks to the the policies espoused by the last Labour government. Earlier this week, Charles Clover wrote a great piece in the Sunday Times suggesting that rather than "demolish and grass-over", the councils should give these blighted properties to individuals to refurbish at their own expense.
This proposal immediately rang a bell with me, as it echoed a similar policy espoused by speakers at the Building Research Establishment three years ago. One company was doing a deal with local authorities and renovating, not one house at a time, but whole streets. The effect was brilliant: Marooned owners suddenly found themselves with new neighbours instead of boarded up wrecks: First-time buyers found themselves with affordable homes in perfect condition with all mod-cons and insulated to a high standard. The LA saw its income restored and shared the profit on values with the company.
What happened? There's no sign of this happening now. It's likely the collapse in property values and the drying up of mortgages killed it in the intervening period. Whatever, this idea needs reviving, and Charles Clover puts a new spin on it.
Read Charles Clover's full article at www.supasash.com ("Affordable homes" link on the left). It deserves shouting about.

What I HATE about my i-Phone

2011-11-19T03:10:00.000-08:00

The way the text prompts are automatic instead of optional drives me MAD!
I know I can turn it off, but that's NOT what I mean. it's the assumption that I want the alternative word offered, and have to say "no" if not. I seem to have a wider technical vocabulary than Apple. That means, if I'm writing fast I'm constantly having to go back and correct the "corrections".
Maddening. Grrrrr!

It's not the spelling function I'm concerned with. That works well. The thing that drives me mad is the feature that offers an alternative word and asks me to say "no" if it's not what I want. It means that most of the time I get it whether I want it or not.
The obvious solution, of course, is to offer a choice of protocol from "auto replacement" to "optional replacement".
If it thinks it knows better than me, it should have the courtesy to let me ignore it. That's what I call "product development".
Simples.

It's the assumptions wot get you.

2011-11-18T04:33:00.000-08:00

No one doubts the mathematics underlying subjects such as engineering or particle physics, but the assumptions on which they are based sometimes turn out to be flawed, and thereby wreck the consensus of the standard theory. The historic belief in the existence of phlogiston - a mysterious substance or property of elements that enabled combustion - was sunk without trace once modern chemistry explained the true state of affairs.

So, what lies behind the shocking discovery that neutrinos can travel faster than light (if true). Does the assertion underpinning all of modern physics - that nothing can travel faster than light - fall? If so everything changes. Genius Fred Hoyle was ridiculed for standing by his Steady State theory, but what if the red-shift explained by receding galaxies has another explanation: Some 80% of the mass in the universe can't be found: the so-called Dark Matter. Light travels more slowly through dense material than through a vacuum. If this dark matter is spread uniformly throughout 'empty' space, however thinly, could the red-shifted light from distant galaxies show not that they are receding, but that the light from them has travelled through something less than a perfect vacuum. Dark matter perhaps?
Will someone explain why not, please.

Quad glazing: the next big thing? Or not.

2011-11-11T20:41:00.000-08:00

There's a new kid on the block: Quadruple glazing. It's been around for years in curtain-walling systems, but is now being presented as the next development for the domestic market.

However, efficient though it is in preventing heat-loss, quad glazing is not without an environmental cost: Glass manufacture (melting sand at very high temperature) takes a great deal of energy. A member of the West Midlands Manufacturing Advisory Group once described premature sealed-unit failure as "an environmental disaster". Quad glazing will, at a stroke, double the environmental cost.
Somewhere, there is a point of diminishing returns, and my gut feeling is that that quad glazing is over the top. I tend to prefer the Heat Mirror approach which achieves much the same result for a far lower environmental cost. I would be very interested in seeing the embodied energy cost of the two systems set against notional energy savings.

The best energy-saving measure is still another layer of clothing with the thermostat turned down, and there's vast scope for the future in intelligent heat-mapping and distribution inside buildings.

Would You Believe It? Nos.1 to 3

2011-11-05T02:51:00.000-07:00

In a week that has seen the arrival of the seven-billionth inhabitant of our planet, I found myself pondering some of the astonishing coincidences that I have seen in the last thirty years, in a population of mere millions.

No 1
In 1976 our family was dispersed around the world. My parents had been visiting us in Mallorca, and were six hours late leaving for England with their flight delayed by violent storms. My sister was living in Dubai, and made an unscheduled trip back to England on the spur of the moment. In an age without mobile phones, and without any knowledge that the others were travelling, they bumped into each other in a crowded Terminal 4 at Heathrow.

No. 2
In the 1980s I had a woodworking business in the centre of Birmingham, and took on a new member of staff from a Skill Centre. (Remember them?). This chap had been a navigator in the rapidly-shrinking merchant navy, and had re-trained as a carpenter/joiner. He lived in Walsall, some seven or eight miles to the west of the city.
On the way over to his first job in Solihull, some seven or eight miles to the east of the city, I gave him strict instructions to keep his mouth shut: I did not particularly want the client to know that he was new to the business. Not good for confidence, you understand. The job was a timber conservatory roof, round at the back of the property. While I was showing my new man what was required of him, the client - a chap in his early forties, I guess - stepped out of the kitchen door, looked at my new employee and said "What are you doing here? You were in the merchant navy last time I saw you".
Said client was an insurance salesman, and my new chippie had been one of his clients. Would you believe it? There were seven million inhabitants in the West Midlands conurbation, and I picked two that knew each other, despite living fourteen miles apart with England's second-city between them.

No. 3
A few years ago my wife and I were walking the Coleridge Way in Somerset with friends. At one rural B&B we were joined at breakfast by another couple from somewhere down south, and exchanged some polite conversation, during which our home town came up. "Oh!, I lived there once." said the chap. "I used to keep my horse in K**** H*******." (a village just south of the town). "That's a coincidence." says I. "We lived there, too, until a few years ago". He then mentioned the name of the chap from whom we bought our house. To cut a long story short, it turned out that our new acquaintance had kept his horse in the stable of the barnyard of the house we had bought twenty years before.
Coincidence, or what?

On Guarantees

2011-10-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Most window companies and installers look to their glass suppliers for their guarantees. (I am not here thinking of the insurance-backed guarantees that many home-improvement companies offer the householder. According to some industry specialists, they are a mixed bag, and all too often, not what they are cracked up to be). No, I look to MY glass supplier to guarantee ME against having the units he supplies fail on me, 'cos I know that while he may supply replacements at no cost, he is unlikely to reimburse ME for the considerable cost of inspecting, re-ordering, removing, and replacing even one failed unit. I learned this lesson early in my business life when a valued client had nineteen of his twenty-five sealed units fail just three months before the guarantee expired (long, long ago in the 1980s). Thankfully, the SUPAWOOD System saved my bacon, and a complete houseful of new DGUs were delivered Free Of Charge, thanks entirely to the properly drained and vented glazing system I could demonstrate to their surveyor.
However, it was Muggins here who had to send a team of fitters out at his own expense to do the actual replacing. Perhaps I'd do things differently now, and ask my supplier to cover the base labour cost, but thankfully, in the twenty-five years since, it's never happened again. That's why I'm happy to offer my own customers a full ten-year guarantee WITH CONFIDENCE, in the knowledge that we'll do better than twenty-five.

Setting out on your own

2011-05-14T01:22:00.000-07:00

Starting out in business can be a daunting prospect. Some folk just slide into it, perhaps part time, working from the back bedroom or kitchen table. For others, perhaps rudely thrown out of a well-paid job and with a family and mortgage to support, it can be quite a scary prospect, even if they have a saleable skill-set (Ugh! Horrible expression).
I started my first business as a single man (albeit with a girl-friend to support). Ignorant of virtually every aspect of running a business after some fifteen years of secure employment, 1974 found us almost penniless in a foreign country (Mallorca) and we simply had to find a way of providing a roof over our heads and putting food on the table. With good DIY skills (and a liking for woodwork picked up from school and my master-cabinet maker-turned vehicle-body-builder father) I swiftly found someone willing to pay for my services as a sub-contractor and very soon moved on to find my own customers. In those very easy-going times, hand-to-mouth it might have been, but we ate very well, and never either starved or made much money.
Later on, after our return to England with a small child, it was rather different. The constant need to pay a never-ending stream of bills meant constant risk-taking as the business simply HAD to grow to produce enough profit. That's where a better grasp of running a business rather than just working to make a living would have come in useful. Nevertheless, we must have done something right 'cos that first business - the ground work, so to speak - lasted twenty-five years, only foundering after a Dash For Growth (always a risky tactic) in an attempt to speed up the climb to the next level.

To get to the point, building a business from scratch can be a hard, slow process. I now know that, unless you have a clear idea at the outset of how to make money with your route to success already mapped out - and a certain amount of good luck to go with it - it's much easier to buy into an existing business and take a short cut to success by building on someone else's efforts, rather than doing it the hard way.
Had it been available all those years back, buying into a Franchise is a route that would have quickly given me the knowledge and support I lacked and which took so long to acquire.
The only issue these days is, with so much choice, which Franchise is the one for YOU?

On Conservation

2011-04-27T05:33:00.000-07:00

Having spent much of my working life trying to reconcile the triangle of innovation, traditional craftsmanship and conservation (and trying to make a living within the constraints) it's been clear to me that there are many idiotic aspects to 'Conservation'.

There is an assumption that craftsmanship died sometime in the past. So timber-frame buildings in the custody of such as English Heritage are ugly patchworks of old and new, as if they had never been repaired before EH came along. It seems to me that a piece of oak patched in by a craftsman today is no different to one patched in in, say 1880. So why not blend it and stain it (traditional materials, of course) as any craftsman would do. Craftsmanship is still very much alive if you look for it, and should be celebrated. Personally, as a craftsman working in oak, I would be offended if I were required to leave such unsightly blotches behind for future generations to scoff at.

It's the same with windows. I have spent a working lifetime developing technically efficient and architecturally sympathetic glazing to bring old housing stock into the twenty-first Century while preserving the visual aspect, and find the assumption by many Conservation Officers that the inhabitants of our green and pleasant land are expected to live in museums - expensive ones at that - quite offensive.

Certainly there is a place for true "conservation". In the 1960s I saw the old timber-framed and jettied 14thC Silhill Hall pulled over and burned (by an idiot contractor who could have dismantled it and sold it for re-erection on a new site if he'd had any brains) to make room for three detached modern boxes. On the other hand, once the fire-officer had won the battle over fire-doors in a private Cotswold hotel I was working on, why was the CO insisting on choosing the style of doors? There was nothing left to conserve, and I was astonished the owner didn't tell her to get lost. It's as if the rest of us have no good taste and historical perspective of our own.

No one would suggest that a beautiful crown-glazed window in the Crescents of Bath or Tunbridge Wells should be torn out and thrown away, but there are millions of windows in less sensitive areas where substituting modern, technically superior versions - virtually indistingishable from the originals - shouldn't be used to upgrade what is substandard accomodation by the standards of today. I would like to think that in 100 years time, others will look at my work and approve. Who knows, it might even get listed.

There's a new thread on the subject started on Philip Rougier's site. Why not join in the fun.
Here's the link: http://forum.expertexpert.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=55

More on the history of the rising sash window

2011-04-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

Sliders of one sort or another have been with us since the dawn of time. Unglazed openings were shuttered with wood boards, and a sliding version survives to the present day as the horizontal Yorkshire Slider. As glass became available, solid boards were simply replaced with frames, and further improved over time. Simple, economical, and uncomplicated.
The invention of the rising sash will almost certainly have been prompted by the fashion among the wealthy for Palladian-style buildings where window openings are taller than they are wide. This style was introduced in the late sixteenth century but was not widely adopted. It became fashionable in the late seventeenth century, during Robert Hooke's lifetime. But whether he, or some unknown but enterprising joiner conceived the idea of counter-balancing the sashes with weights concealed in cased boxes, we may never know. The story is further confused by the fashion, from time to time, to give houses complete make-overs, throwing out the old and replacing with new. (So what's changed?)

There are clues, though, when dating a particular window, as styles and construction techniques changed over the years. This is not an exact science, however, as alterations, copies and even the possibility of downright fakes all have to be taken into consideration.

In general terms, the early sash windows were constructed with solid, plain glazing bars, perhaps relieved by a slight bevel, glazed with hand-made 'cylinder' glass. It is these imperfect panes, with their inevitable undulations, pits, and reams, that give old windows a sparkle when seen from afar, as the light is caught and scattered.

Initially the window frames were generally inserted directly into the structural opening to leave the cased box completely visible from outside. This feature on its own is not a sure sign of antiquity, as an old-ish window may be inserted in a new-ish building in just the same way. However, the cased box hiding the weights is a bulky item and it must have soon occurred to a builder that concealing the box in a rebate built into inside face of the (solid) brick or stone wall would greatly increase the amount of light for a given structural opening (and, also, solar gain on a sunny winter's day in an era without central heating).

Over the years, architects and their joiners competed to improve their designs over those of the neighbours. Frames became lighter, and glazing bars became elegantly moulded and ever slimmer, culminating in the slender lambs-tongue profile which is the ultimate development of the ovolo mould. (Many modern replacements, of course, can be instantly spotted from the far side of the room by the rounded moulding at the junctions, where the ovolo was applied by a power-router after the frame was assembled. Ugh!)

As technology produced ever-larger panes of glass, glazing bars became fewer in number, (except where they were used for purely decorative purposes) shown by the proliferation of Victorian houses with but a single vertical glazing bar. By the turn of the century glass was available in large rolled or drawn sheets, and many elegant sash windows of the early 1900s have no glazing bars at all, relying on delightful proportion for their merit, and decoration, if any, being provided by arches and
curves in the main structural components. The chief driver of this process being, as always, first-cost, bringing a fine product to the mass market.

The aim of the designer is generally to achieve the most pleasing balance of proportion and economy. Ostentatious display may be recognised in the inappropriate proliferation of glazing-bars and arched rails used simply to demonstrate the wealth of the client. Wherever you look, you should be able to recognise these features. In general, the rising sash window forms a major part of our British architectural heritage, and deserves every effort to preserve and improve it for the benefit of future generations.

Useful links:
www.supasash.com
www.rugbysash.co.uk
http://forum.expertexpert.com
www.roberthooke.org.uk

The History of the Rising Sash Window

2011-04-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

The origins of the rising sash window are obscure. Most commentators place its origin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there is good evidence to place it rather earlier. Carol Davidson Cragoe, in "How to Read Buildings" (Herbert Press, London) suggests the invention might be attributed to Robert Hooke (1635-1703). There is certainly a good case to be made (of which, more anon) and he was certainly an inventive and creative mechanic, engineer, designer, and architect with the capability of doing so. As curator of the Royal Society and, simultaneously, laboratory technician to the eminent physicist Robert Boyle, he demonstrated a prodigious ability to design and build mechanical and scientific apparatus of all sorts. He later became an assistant to the great architect Christopher Wren, and, as Chief Surveyor to the City of London, was responsible for overseeing more than 50% of the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire of 1666.

An architect in his own right, few of his buildings survive today, but a drawing in 1858 of his Royal College of Physicians (completed 1678) shows rising sashes in every visible elevation.

A diary entry dated Feb 2nd 1680 refers to sash windows in Montagu House.
This is the earliest known reference to sash windows.

Copyright KJN 2011
www.supasash.com

Fire safety at home

2011-04-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago we bought a Victorian attic-farmhouse, and within minutes of visiting it for the first time, our young daughter had 'bagged' the large attic bedroom for herself. This gave me a real headache: With no fire doors anywhere in the house, the two-storey stairwell would become a 'chimney' in the event of a fire, and escape for someone on the attic floor would be impossible. The answer proved to be a Davey Descender - a braked reel that allows a body of any weight to descend from a high place at a steady speed. It sits tidily and unobtrusively on the wall above the window until it's needed. In that sad event, you slip the harness over your shoulders and under the armpits, throw the other end out of the window, then follow it down yourself. As you go down, the other end comes back up, ready for the next escapee. A brilliant answer to allay my fears.
The main concern was whether it might become the main attraction at some wild party, one day - a sort of drunken bungey-jumping. (If it ever did, I never found out about it).
I found it here - http://www.lymore.com
Highly recommended.

Theo's second bite

2011-04-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

For his second bite of the cherry on You and Yours (see previous post) Theo Paphitis talked about running a small business. As usual, full of great common sense. He reminded us that the great majority of new businesses fail within two years. (My first business lasted twenty five years, failing after an abortive dash-for-growth. My current business is now in its fourth year, with great prospects for a franchised future. (The pilot is doing just fine, thanks).
Theo didn't suggest it, but, surely, unless you have a great idea and the confidence to follow it up, buying a franchise - joining a successful business with a track record and support - has to be a good route into business for the novice. I did it the hard (slow) way, making mistakes and learning from them. Probably not the best route, but thirty years ago there was not much choice.

For a while, back in the early eighties, I gave woodwork instruction at night school. One of the class told me he had just bought a busy post office (for £60k, a vast sum at that time). "Crikey!" says I. "That's a lot of money. I'm building my business up for myself." "Maybe," came the reply, "but I'm making money NOW!". Hmmm! That shut me up.

If I were setting out today, joining a franchise would quite possibly be my preferred option..

Theo P on Radio 4

2011-04-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

"You and Yours" Radio 4, Monday 11th April 11. Theo Paphitis was given two bites of the cherry, both worth a listen if you missed it. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0105vtw)

Either he's been reading my blog, or Great Minds Think Alike :-) The reality is, the obvious stares you in the face when you are in business, but our Lords and Masters can't see the truth even when you stick it under their noses.

Theo's first point was that Government has done almost nothing worthwhile to encourage businesses to employ more. See MY letter to my MP in my blog below (22nd October 2010, item 2). Theo suggests Tax incentives. For me, they would have to be generous.

Onward and upward

2011-04-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

New Twitter for i-Phone solved the clogging-up, but I still have to work out how to update this blog from the phone. More investigation required, I guess. Its quite likely that my website platform (BlueVoda) has a blog facility. Must check it out today. Any suggestions?

Catching up.

2011-04-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

I've just been reminded that my I-phone won't allow me to post in this blog. It only allows me to enter the title. If anyone can explain this, please explain. # It does explain why I got out of the habit of blogging, as I have become addicted to my i-Phone. It does have a few down-sides, tho', such as this. It's become a real pain to have to boot up the computer just to blog. To make things worse, from a Social Media Management view, my i-Phone has become very slow on Twitter. I have tried re-booting, but I suspect that the i-Phone might be clogged up with photographs and old mail. I shall have to go and plug in to I-Tunes (another pain) and sort it out. I read that Android is now outselling Apple. Maybe time to trade in and move on. Any advice is welcome. Otherwise, busy, busy. Two new patents filed; lots of new business for my new partner (Keith James at Rugby Sash - kj@rugbysash.co.uk ) who's picked up the business and is running with it. Promising business prospects in several other directions, also. (Something must be wrong: It all seems to be going right!) Starting to brush up properly on Social Media. Determined to get to the bottom of it and do it right. Suspect that finding a better platform than this will be crucial as part of the over-all plan. Nuff for now.

More on the Education theme

2010-11-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

The decision to go private was helped along by two earlier bad experiences with the State Education System: I was disappointed at my young daughters ignorance of her times tables during her spell in Primary School. Imagine my shock when, at a Parents Evening, her elderly teacher told me that she was "no longer allowed to teach times tables". How the hell are our children expected to go through life? Counting on their B****y fingers?
Of course, it goes without saying, they were taught at home.

Later on, in Junior School, daughter came home and told us that the old (stern, respected, no-nonsense) Head Master had retired, to be replaced with a young 'touchy/feely' bloke to whom the children had all taken an instant dislike. (They saw through him immediately. It took us parents a bit longer). His first act was to rearrange the furniture so that the children all sat round interfering with each other, copying each other's answers, and kicking each other under the table. The ones with their backs to the board had to screw their heads off constantly to see what was going on. What a great idea!

The old-fashioned Private Grammar School we chose for her secondary education had all the desks facing the front, as they had in my day. If parents can choose their children's schools, they can make their own minds up, but in Africa, with the pupils facing the front, one teacher can educate 150 in one class - under a tree, probably. And get a better result than some of our own poor deluded teachers get with the vast sums poured into their training.

Huh!

Education, education, education

2010-11-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

Where have I heard that before?
I was pleased to hear a government advisor repeat, yesterday, that it should be pupils and parents who choose their education or that of their children. Emphatically, NOT government, local authorities, or, worst of all, teachers.
I have to ask, "What was wrong with my education?". It was MY generation (and the one before it) that built Concorde (an astonishing collaboration itself) and put a man on the moon: Without much aid from computers, at that! All done with slide rules and log tables.
My first computer - a Sinclair Spectrum with booster - with 32 kbytes had three times the RAM of the computers used to help design Concorde and control the moon landing module.

When we saw how dire the local secondary schools were - the state choice for our child - my dear wife went out and got a job to pay for a private schooling. During the sales pitch to the assembled parents (this is mid-80s) the Head said "We know what you want from us, and we will have to give you what you want so that we can all pay our mortgages" (or words to that effect). As a result, said child was given the sort of education that was given to me by the state thirty years earlier, was given a sound base of maths, physics, chemistry, and languages, and went on to obtain an Honours Degree in aeronautical engineering. This would NOT (COULD not) have happened had she gone to the local-authority-run state school, for the simple reason that said school didn't do physics as a separate subject.

Sad, isn't it? All those children let down by the state and militant teachers.

Funny how "Power to the People" has been turned on it's head by the Socialists, isn't it? What they really mean is "Power to the State".

How VAT damages trade skills

2010-10-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

It's barely understood how VAT has been a factor in the destruction of the skills base of this nation:

To the retailer, the introduction of VAT was a godsend, sweeping away a mess of purchase taxes, replacing them with a simple one-stop tax that the customer barely notices - if at all. (How many people ask the shop assistant at M&S "....can you do something about the VAT"?)

To the wholesaler or industrialist, VAT is of no consequence, as it simply passes through unnoticed, improving the cash flow in the process, but impinging not at all on the price of the product. All prices are quoted 'Excl VAT'.

The VAT registered tradesman, however- the guy at the end of the line charged with prising this no small additional sum of money out of the customer - finds himself in competition with the unregistered tradesman who's decided to work on his own and remain below the VAT threshold. The effect on the marginal tax rates is simply staggering, and a simple calculation explains why we have seen a collapse in trade skills over the last thirty years. No one in trade dealing direct to the public would willingly take on and train staff when their main role becomes that of a tax collector. In order to compete, the middling business has to either swallow the VAT or risk prosecution for tax evasion. Yet there isn't a policeman, tax inspector or politician in the land who doesn't say "Can we do something about the VAT? The chap down the road doesn't charge it."

Locked into a lease on premises and hire purchase agreements on expensive machinery, the only way to compete is to avoid the direct sales business altogether. This explains, of course, not just the demise of the small joinery company, but all trades from PVC windows to car repairs. VAT favours big business, and puts an enormous obstacle in the way of small businesses to grow organically. When, in those dark days of 1985, I told my bank manager that VAT was going to be put on home improvements, he said "Oh good! It'll improve your cash flow". That might have been true had I been selling to the trade - when VAT is indeed of no consequence, and DOES improve cash flow - but selling direct to householders I knew that it would be ME that paid the VAT, as no one would stand a 15% hike in prices overnight. Worse, the government decreed it uneconomic to police individual tradesmen, and allowed a gap for the competition to seriously undercut the slightly bigger business employing a few staff, lumbered with plant and machinery, and locked into an overhead. As materials make up only a modest part of the cost, for the tradesman, VAT amounts to a tax on his labour. Hardly surprising then, that to this day, the individual tradesman wants to work on his own, as he can make around eight times the income for perhaps half the effort.* As a result, for ten years I simply handed my quarterly profits over to the VATman and watched the growth of a generation of shiftless young men denied the opportunity of learning a trade while subject to the discipline and example set by their master.

This is why we have a desperate shortage of skilled labour, a great unemployed pool of our own children and rely on cheap Eastern european neighbours to fill the gap.

When will we learn?

*If you don't believe me, e-mail me and I'll send you the figures.

How to wreck Small Business

2010-10-24T09:40:00.008-07:00

Hello Mark

Perusing the economics commentaries in the business pages this Sunday morning: The lack of growth in employment is clearly the principal concern of the powers-that-be on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet having personally seen the clear correllation between excessive taxation and job destruction, I find it difficult to understand why this obvious truth (obvious to me, anyway) is so difficult for our politicians to understand.

The first (and best) example of this was demonstrated by the introduction of 15% VAT overnight on home improvements in 1985. I had an innovative product with growing sales, a factory, a growing workforce, and export potential. Had the status-quo been maintained, the Exchequer would have received growing income from steadily increasing income tax, corporation tax, and property rates (and also from the rents from my local authority landlord) along with reducing welfare payments from those new employees coming off the dole. In the event the overnight bombshell of VAT killed the business stone-dead. In April I had a full and growing order book but took not a single new order between then and August, when I sacked the remaining staff and changed the direction of the business with a dramatic downsizing (to just me, again). It was four years before the payroll reached the same level, but sales of the innovative product range were damaged for a generation by the inability to grasp the moment in 1985. Such is the damage wrought by the greed of big government.

Regards

Keith

PS And that was a Tory government!

A letter to my MP

2010-10-22T23:45:00.000-07:00

Hello Mark,
You must have been pleased with the masterly performance from George Osborne on Wednesday, putting a great spin on what is a rather depressing message. After thirty five years in business, and having now weathered five recessions since starting out in self employment (as a carpenter/joiner in Mallorca) just as the economies of Europe took a dive in 1974, I have become rather more sanguine than some. After all these years of New Labour 'growth' we are seeing some chickens come home to roost.

I returned to England in 1978 just in time to experience Labour's Winter of Discontent, and another nosedive in the economy. As I turned up one morning to install a porch for my very first UK customer, I met her setting off to the ATV studios to take part in a hand-wringing discussion about the dire economic future and the death of UK business. "What do YOU think?" she asked. I told her that I thought the increasing productivity promised by modern computerised manufacturing would bring on a Golden Age freeing us from wage-slavery, with a flowering of small businesses in trade crafts and art and food production. I rather think I was proved right in the fullness of time, although the look on her face told me she thought I was mad.

The one thing that was missing from George's performance, though, was anything to encourage these small businesses to take on staff. After struggling with ever-growing laws biased in favour of the employees, five years ago I grabbed an opportunity to get out before the roof fell in, and shut the business with the loss of twenty two jobs. I swore then, for the second time, as it happens, to never employ anyone again. Although I am now drawing the state pension, and (as Gordon stole my company pensions) I have to work for a living, this time round, with business booming following a phase of innovation permitted by not having to battle the staff on daily basis, I intend to outsource and licence my way to a pension.

Two questions:
1: Are you aware that private individuals have to pay VAT on the costs of developing their Intellectual Property?
My patent agent charges VAT that I can't reclaim as an individual. This amounts to a substantial imposition on a pensioner, even if (with a fair wind) I hope to live long enough to see the fruits of my innovations some years hence. What value-added does the government see in taxing my innovations? Is this designed to encourage us as entrepreneurs? Or is it just one of those silly things that HMRC slipped past everyone thinking that BIG BUSINESS is the source of invention? Ask George to give us a break, please.

2: I recall pointing out to your father (ed - then local MP) some fifteen years ago or more, that small businesses had the capacity to soak up most of the unemployment of Margaret Thatcher's time. The problem was, much of the time employing more staff wasn't worth the hassle, or the risk, and wasn't sufficiently rewarding. Regrettably, the suggestion fell on deaf ears, and I guess Euro Employment Law took precedence over sanity.
So,the question is - what plans does the Coalition have to make employers WANT to employ more staff? Surely, as I put it to Frank Field MP in 1992, during another economic nose dive, tax-breaks for employers MUST cost less than welfare payments.
It's frankly too late for me, but as George says, it's time for some radical thinking.

Yours ever
Keith

What an exciting day!

2010-10-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

The BFRC window rating scheme is getting it in the neck big style. Here's the link to read the full stories: http://renegadeconservatoryguy.co.uk/category/energy-rated-windows/

On top of that, the issue of external misting of these efficient windows has prompted a flood of complaints from the public now that autumn has arrived. Those of my readers who have been paying attention will know that this issue was highlighted on TerryTheWindowman's website (RIP) around ten years ago when I first encountered the problem in my own office window. I did ask what the public would say when they found they couldn't see out of their nice new windows. I seemed to be in the minority then, but now we know. Here's the link: http://renegadeconservatoryguy.co.uk/a-rated-windows-problem/

Where have you all been since then?

Recession? What recession?

2010-10-05T01:38:00.002-07:00

Phew! Grabbing a few minutes to catch up! Recent weeks have been hectic, with business piling in, the creative juices flowing with answers to long- standing problems appearing out of the blue, and dealing with all the issues that both business and leisure have been throwing at me. In particular, the unfolding (and predictable) shambles over the new Window Rating Scheme (particularly in view of the dodgy science involved): Predictable in the knowledge that it could never be more than a marketing ploy - in the same vein as the 'Secure By Design' label owned by the Metropolitan Police - and that those, like me, who view the whole thing as a well-intentioned job-creation scheme, would continue to stick with the entirely justifiable U-value calculators from truly independent sources such as the highly reputable BRE at Watford.

I never completed my treatise on DGU fabrication, started here in August to explain why these new- f angled slim sealed units for Georgian-glazing-bar windows are distinctly dodgy. That's 'cos it seemed superfluous while a full discussion was in full flow on Philip Rougier's ExpertExpert site. Here's the link to the relevant page for those interested: http://forum.expertexpert.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=42

So much for retirement, too much to do. must fly. More later.

Back to work

2010-08-31T02:44:00.000-07:00

Back from a great week gliding in Yorkshire. Sharing Janus A Delta 31 with a great team, Brian and I managed to stay in the top half of the entrants in the 25th Two-Seater competition at Pocklington. Just three great flying days saw us complete more than 700km from Newark in the south to Thirsk in the north, via Driffield and Knaresborough in the east and west. The English countryside at its best, with air like crystal clear champagne.

Back to find lots of great business prospects on all fronts, and a really nice e-mail from a past client expressing delight in the ease of maintenance and wanting more windows.

I must catch up with the dissertation on slimline sealed units soon.

A diversion

2010-08-11T02:43:00.000-07:00

I'm currently talking to other businesses about outsourcing a great deal of business to them, and have been surprised at several who have turned away the prospect of very simple profitable repeat business without even considering what's required. It's led me to reflect on my earlier experiences in manufacturing, and the constant struggle to get the staff to follow the laid-down procedures to the letter, without gradually omitting the bits they have difficulty with. Even the managers were complicit, and it was a constant battle to prevent them doing their own thing. I'm sure McDonalds don't have this problem (or do they?)

It strikes me that part of the problem was (and still is) the fact that employees generally are no longer terrified of losing their job, these days. Not that they should be expected to lie awake at night with their eyes sticking out like chapel hat-pegs (as many small business-owners do, as they wonder how they are going to pay the wages at the end of the month), but they ought surely to be concerned that if they don't do their job properly they might be shown the door. It's so time-consuming getting rid of unsatisfactory staff these days - difficult and fraught with danger - that quality and output may suffer to the detriment of the whole business. Call me old-fashioned, but hungry staff are going to be very much more diligent than those with a couldn't-care-less attitude. It's why I avoid employing anyone at all these days.

In my first week as a trainee metallurgist with the Heat Treatment Service of the then nationalised West Midlands Gas Board in 1961 I was told " Don't worry, lad. They can't sack you whatever you do." It shocked me even then, that such attitudes could prevail.
It got better under Maggie for a while, but we lost a lot of ground under New Labour. I suspect that our dire economic position with the lean and hungry Indians biting at our heels might require a change of heart, again.

Back to the double-glazing.

2010-08-09T22:52:00.000-07:00

Gas filling is the last step (to date) in achieving a small but significant improvement in U-value, (according to the published U-value calculators) but is perhaps the most difficult to explain. Air is a wonderful insulator - generally accepted to be the best of all - but three of the inert gases are reported to have better insulating qualities still, despite being heavier (and therefore denser). Logic might suggest that they might conceivably be better sound insulators but worse thermal insulators. Clearly there's more to this than meets the eye, as I have seen it claimed that these heavier gases - which also convect, of course - are at their best at successively smaller glass spacings. On that basis, it appears that an argon-filled DGU with a 12mm spacer ought to perform better than one with a 16mm spacer. Not according to my BRE U-value calculator it doesn't. I rather think that the benefits are questionable. However, for my preferred 20mm DGU (12mm spacer) argon confers a demonstrable and affordable reduction of 0.2 in the U-value of an average-size domestic window installation. Whether it's cost effective is arguable. Whether the use of expensive krypton or eye-wateringly expensive xenon is ever justified is highly, highly questionable. The claim that either (or, most puzzling of all, a mixture - in just what proportions?) of these two gases miraculously tranforms a 4mm gap into an efficient insulating unit is emphatically NOT borne out by the published U-value calculators from our most reputable authorities.

On a cheering note: Yesterday, a passing trio of canvassers for a national pvc window company told my wife (working in the front garden) that they wouldn't bother to pester her, as our wood windows were clearly excellent, and she wasn't going to be interested in what they were pushing. Knowing that pvc salesmen never have an option up their sleeve for those they encounter who really do want wood, I suggested they point such leads in my direction. They jumped at the opportunity. Other canvassers, form a queue here, please.

More digression

2010-08-04T02:21:00.000-07:00

I have spent the last few days completely re-writing the website, which along with an ongoing discussion on rising damp on Philip Rougiers forum (http://forum.expertexpert.com/index.php) hasn't left much time to continue the thoughts on slimlite DGUs. I'm now busy with preparing a new pitch to a potential big client, so it'll have to wait a bit longer.

A digression

2010-07-30T02:23:00.001-07:00

Just returned from a spell in France which exposed a few weaknesses in Apple Technology. Don't get me wrong, modern technology is great, and I just luurve my i-Phone. However, when it goes wonky it doesn't just drive me crazy, the lost time and wasted effort in finding (and sometimes failing to find) a fix negates so much of the benefit it bought in the first place.

If you haven't got one, the beauty of the i-Phone is its almost permanent connection to the internet, with instant results from on-line searches without having to lug around a laptop and boot it up every time one thinks of something. So taking it to France and using my family's Wi-Fi was a no-brainer. Except that the i-Phone doesn't appear to be able to deal with hexadecimal password encryption, so three days were wasted for several people trawling the internet for an answer. (At least it proves that hexaD really IS effective, I suppose!) It seems we were not alone, and no answer was found. How did Mr Apple miss that one?

So for ten days I felt as if I had had an arm cut off. Never mind, it WAS supposed to be a holiday.

To really put the lid on it, on my return, it dropped the phone connection, and after two days of tearing my hair out, the problem was only solved by swapping the phone (on guarantee) for a new one. Have you ever tried to back-up to i-Tunes then re-load to a new phone...?

Phew! Five or six wasted days in all. I need another holiday....

Yet More Basics....

2010-07-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

The third big factor in DGU thermal performance is the coating (if any) on the glass. Put simply, thin coatings act like a see-through mirror, letting visible light through but reflecting selected long-wave radiation (heat) back into the room (or out again if you live in Dubai and want to keep the heat OUT).

There are two main classes of coating: Hard-coat and soft coat. Hard coat films are 'baked on' during the process. The hard-coat film is less efficient in keeping heat in than soft-coat, and also suffers from a reputation of leaving the glass with a dirty appearance in certain lighting conditions. It has a major advantage for small manufacturers in that it requires no special handling techniques in the construction of sealed units. So it's often pushed, not because its the best, but because its cheap and easy to use. Buyer beware! (It IS more effective at GATHERING heat from outside - the so-called solar gain. In the UK winter this is hardly likely to be a reason to use it, and in the summer it's likely to be a real pain.)

Soft coat films are becoming very sophisticated. A still-developing technology, they are capable of being 'tuned' to maximise their performance. Early issues with tinting and colour changes upon toughening are a thing of the past, and generally I consider them far superior to the hard coat films. As much as anything because I hate arguments, and will not take the risk of supplying my customers with what appears to be 'dirty glass' even if it isn't.

Soft coat films require special handing during the manufacture of DGUs, so they tend to be more expensive and are rarely available from the back-street fabricator. However, used in conjunction with warm-edge spacer separating the two sheets of glass, it is difficult to conceive a more efficient and cost-effective way of providing insulating glass.

Next I'll discuss the fine tuning with gas-filling: Another hornet's nest.

More Basics

2010-07-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

The next big factor is the air (or gas) space. Air is a great insulator, but is prone to transfer heat by convection. Remember, hot air rises, so, if there is room for convection currents to develop, heat is transferred from the warm inner pane to the cold outer pane. If the airspace is kept below about 18mm, the viscosity of the air tends to limit this convection, so the insulation improvement to a sealed unit increases with the airgap to around 18mm, after which it falls off. In reality, the curve is very flat from 12mm to 20mm, so the improvement beyond a 12mm airgap is pretty small. 16mm is probably the peak in insulation terms, beyond which any improvement is doubltful or unlikely. To complicate matters further, the failure mode of sealed units is generally via moisture permeation (at molecular level) through the edge sealant, and the wider the airgap, the shorter the life of the DGU.

So sealed unit design, as with almost everything else in life, involves a compromise. In my considered opinion (borne out now by some thirty years of experience) a 12mm gas-gap is a good balance of the factors involved, and for timber windows a 20mm DGU (4/12/4) allows an economy of framing material while still achieving the desired insulation values and long unit life.

On the face of, the 4mm airgap (gas-gap) of Slimline units - with its reduced insulation value - might be offset by a reduced expectation of moisture permeation, and a thus enhanced unit life.
Regrettably, it's not as simple as that.

More next time.

Back to basics.

2010-07-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

The idea of slim DGUs is - on the face of it - very attractive. The day someone invents a single sheet of transparent material to replace existing double-glazing will signal the end of a massive industry. However, until that day, double-glazing is a developed technology that looks simple but has a great deal of Technical Know-How behind it to make it work. Getting it wrong leads to tears, and there are more than fifty years of often-painful experience to look back on.

Let's start at the beginning:

The most important (and effective) bit of double-glazing is - by far - the second sheet of glass. Obvious enough, but the problems arise in keeping those two panes clean and dry for twenty- five years or more. Glass is not cheap, nor is the labour involved in fitting them, so prematurely failed DGUs are a disaster in every sense: For the customer: For the installer who has to replace them at his own expense, and may even be chased through the courts: For the reputation of the industry, which has a poor reputation at the best of times: and - not least - for mankind, now that the sheer COST of energy is understood. Glass is expensive stuff, made from molten sand, and perhaps coated with exotic and complex films. DON'T WASTE IT!

Back to the Future

2010-07-15T23:36:00.000-07:00

It's almost surreal... After thirty years of proving that draining and venting is the ONLY sure way of preventing premature sealed unit failure, we seem to be faced with a resurgence of the very cause of the problem - solid-bedding in oil-based putty. (And/Or NO drain and vent plus insufficient sealant and edgecover, all of which will almost GUARANTEE early failure.

It all stems from this new love-affair with so-called Slimlite double-glazed sealed units, characterised by the use of a 4mm gas space (rather than 12mm or 16mm). The logic sounds OK but is deeply flawed on several counts. I'll develop the theme over the next few weeks, but I predict a return to screaming headlines of the 1980's - "DOUBLE GLAZING = TROUBLE GLAZING" (Sunday Mercury 198?) once the complaints start to flood in (as they will).

More on ‘GREEN’

2009-03-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve been pondering the issues raised by Super Spacer’s ‘Energy Efficiency’ seminar at the Ricoh Stadium, last week. Ostensibly it was all about using the available technology to raise the window efficiency and gain a higher rating. Call me a cynic, but in reality, it was about ‘marketing’ and gaining more business for all concerned than about being ‘GREEN’: More business for fabricators, suppliers, test-houses, anyone involved in handing out energy ratings – the GGF/Carbon Trust – and marketing people.

I have always been uncomfortable in the company of people who want lots of money for confirming that my products are as good as my customers claim. Having been through the test house on many occasions (and learned a lot, at considerable cost) I cannot see any real reason to repeat the process on an annual basis just to line someone else’s pocket. If the client demands it, then I suppose I’ll have to spend the money, but it puts the cost up to the client and to everyone else, and creates another mound of paper. It undoubtedly creates work and jobs for the non-productive element in society, and I suppose that it is something that we have to live with.

The light really lit up when I heard the excellent speaker on ‘Marketing’ tell the assembled throng that “....we should call our old customers and suggest they upgrade to the latest model.” in much the same way that the car dealer calls you to tell you that the new car you bought last year is now obsolete, and you should consider trading it for this year’s model.

Now, this might be good business practice, but ‘green’ it ain’t.

Glass requires a great deal of energy to manufacture. Sealed unit failure is an expensive tragedy in ‘green’ terms. Replacing sealed units in less than 25 years is not energy efficient under any circumstances.

The best way to ‘go green’ is to turn the thermostat down two degrees, put on a woolley jumper, and then make the most effective improvements to your insulation to make the house as comfortable as possible. That means loft and cavity wall insulation (if you have a cavity) the best double glazing system you can afford, replaced only when necessary, and then floor and wall insulation if practical.

Modified plantation softwood or plantation hardwood (European oak) is the only real long-term low-energy frame material with no impact on the environment. Combine it with a glazing system that will last 25 years or more, and then you can call yourself ‘green’.

For an unbiased report from the University of Wales, visit www.wvnet.co.uk/rep_abr_bangor.html

Spacia (vacuum) units

2009-01-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

An enquiry today on The Windowman Website about these. I chased this one up early last year. After a very long silence, in the summer I received a call from a Pilkington Business Manager apologising for the delay in getting back to me about Spacia units, and we had a long discussion about them. Briefly, they were to be available this spring: The cost was likely to be very high, and sales were likely to be restricted to those conservation projects where there is little alternative and funds are available: They did not expect to sell them in great volume. This was before the economy melted down. He expected the price landed at Tilbury to be in excess of £100/m2. With the depreciation in the currency since then, I would expect, all things being equal, that this would now be closer to £150/m2. That implies a retail price in excess of £300/m2 if the whole project doesn't simply collapse. Presumably, there would be a minimum price for small units, which makes any Georgian window with separate sealed units more expensive than the price/m2 leads you to expect on first sight.
I concluded that they would be no threat to the established double glazing industry for many years to come, on cost grounds alone. I am pleased to report that while my new friend failed to sell me Spacia units, I did sell him a loft-conversion full of Accoya windows. The first time I have turned the tables on a salesman. Very satisfying.
In my view there are better ways of getting a good result without spending a fortune. The pictures alongside show how good a modern timber rising sash can be. My customers love them!

The best of everything

2009-01-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

If you want to maximise light and thermal efficiency with privacy, you can do worse than use acid-etched glass - perhaps with a pattern in it to make it more interesting. You can find suppliers who will actually acid etch the glass before it's made into a sealed unit of whatever sort, or you can use a stick-on film that does the same thing. People who supply stick-on Fablon signs for vans will supply the stuff. I have a local supplier in Rugby whose front door is done in the stuff, and I can't tell the difference from my own front door which has the real thing. A 5mm line as a pattern acts pretty much as a secret viewer if you stick your face close to the glass, although it does work in both directions if your visitor does the same. It certainly works for me: U-value 1.3 centre pane, bright hallway and a high degree of privacy.

More on U-values

2008-11-24T23:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't yet started to plot any results, but some early observations appear: Outside, the surface temperatures are always higher than the OAT. The insulated panel is performing best - by far - and the glass is just a tad colder than the solid wood. The glass margin is almost a degree warmer than centre pane, even with Super Spacer. Inside, the glass feels much colder to the touch than either the insulated wood panel and the solid wood rail. This may be a Thermal Capacity issue, but the effect does not change with prolonged touch. The glass always feels colder than the wood. The dawn OAT has been steadily declining for the past week (3 degrees now) so the temperature gradients are becoming significant.

2008-11-21T10:03:00.000-08:00

Annoyed with myself today to learn that I had missed the ST advertising deadline for this week. Time then, perhaps, to revise the ad. for the following weekend. It's interesting swinging the changes and watching the changing response in the website analysis. Not enough data yet to make firm conclusions, but enough to consider some changes, perhaps.

Good news, though, on the refurb market front, with a new prospect in view for a big breakthrough. We'll see. On the one hand we have the GREEN agenda: On the other, the economy. Personally, I think the refurb market will benefit, and that brings us full circle, with the windows system designed for just that market in the first place.

2008-11-19T23:40:00.000-08:00

The first interesting observation arrived within five minutes of the arrival of the thermometers. With a mild 10 degrees outside and a cool 18 degrees inside, the wood was one degree colder than the inside surface of the glass, but the wood was warmer to the touch. Perhaps I am seeing the difference in thermal capacity. Glass takes heat from the hand more rapidly than from the wood, and the effect of the air in the sealed unit as an insulator is not immediately apparent. I could observe no difference between solid wood and insulated wood panel. With the arctic blast expected tomorrow, and forecast to last for a few days, I should have better numbers to work on.

( PS. I didn't like the small font, so let's try this one)

More on U-values

2008-11-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

Infra-red thermometer now ordered, hopefully it will arrive just in time for the coming cold spell forecast for this weekend. A few days of low temperatures outside should give time for temperature gradients to stabilise. Must pop down to Wilco and look for a couple of cheap thermometers to measure inside and outside air temperatures.

The more I think about this, the more I believe I might be on to something. Coated glass may well reflect energy back into the room, but if the internal surface of the glass is colder than the air in the room, (it is) the air in contact with the glass will be cooled by contact, and advect. (Opposite of convect - means cooling by contact with cold surface, and flowing downwards under its own weight. Cold air is heavier than warm, and sinks to the floor, leading to cold feet despite heating set high. It also might properly be described as a katabatic flow - cold air flowing from the hilltops and filling the valleys overnight). Is this loss properly accounted for in the calculation?

Coated glass undoubtedly reduces the energy loss through the glass, but I will still be surprised if more energy is lost directly through the adjacent wood frame which is warmer to touch than the glass.

Franchise enquiries still flowing in. Website analysis shows a growing number of visitors to the site.

More on U values

2008-11-14T23:26:00.000-08:00

It's just dawned on me that I already have a 'hot-box': My own home will work perfectly for the purpose. Both front door and back door have almost equal areas of Low-E Superspacer double glazing, insulated wood panels, and solid wood stiles and rails. Daily observations of inside and outside air and surface temperatures should build up a useful database of thermal gradients from which to calculate some correlations (not absolute, but indicative, nevertheless). Not exactly laboratory conditions, but the facility of being able to take multiple frequent observations is a great benefit. I am starting from the assumption that the temperature gradient is directly related to the thermal conductivity of the material or assembly. The steeper the gradient, the lower the conductivity (ie the better the insulation value). This morning, the empirical measurements (the only ones I have until my IR thermometer arrives) tells me that the steepest gradient is in the wood. Am I wrong? We shall see! If I am, then at least I will have a better understanding of the issue if I can see the figures.

2008-11-14T11:09:00.001-08:00

RE: Relative thermal properties (November 14, 2008, 06:42:51 PM)

I have a CD with the BFRC prgram on it, but I simply can't be bothered to gather the obscure data needed to fill all the boxes. These estimation programs were supposed to replace the hot box method, which really needs months of painstaking work to build tables from different samples. I suspect your technique would require a grid to sample many points from which your calculation would produce an average. The relative proportion of frame/glass is a hellish complication, which is why I use the BRE calculator. I might suspect its accuracy (I think it's pessimistic) but it does deal with the frame issues.I have found several sites offering hand-held laser/IR gauges for under £30 with claimed accuracy of 2%. Should be good enough for my purposes. I think I will build a box around a redundant doorway in my workshop and use it this winter to run my own experiments. Steady-state temperature measurements with a small lightbulb in the box should produce useful data over a few months. I am only interested in the fundamental (probably gross) difference between a Low E sealed unit and a solid or insulated wood panel using the same glazing method. Should be interesting.

Part of correspondence with Philip Rougier of Fenestration Associates: Follow the whole thing in The windowman forum http://www.double-glazing-web.info/

2008-11-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

Progress! The ST ad is bringing in a satisfying number of enquiries to the landing page at www.wvnet.co.uk. in its first week. We already have viable applicant for the Master Fabricator Franchise for Northern Ireland. Early days, of course but heading in the right direction.

I have also started a correspondence with Terry the Windowman's forum about the U-values of timber-framed windows. I find it difficult to believe that wood is a worse insulator than a double glazed unit. My early enquiries appear to show that I might be on to something. I shall dig deeper.

picking up the thread

2008-11-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

How did that happen? What happened to September and October?

The Hargould exhibition at Derby was worth a visit for the seminars on 'Green Building'. The commitment of this government to reduce the carbonfootprint of the building industry was made clear, but not how it was to be achieved.
Switching back from pvc to wood wherever possible is likely to become a 'must'. I bet the pvc brigade will do their best to see that it doesn't happen.

I suppose taking a few weeks off saw a good deal of October pass by, and the rest of it was spent with a customer who was one of my first almost 25 years ago. Two failed units and the need for a complete new window in the bathroom gave a good reason to re-glaze the whole front of the house with the latest in Low-E softcoat / Warm-edge units plus new handles to freshen the old windows up and match the new. After all those years, even I was impressed with how easy it went. The Mk I frames came out without too much of a struggle. The glass likewise, after cutting the gunned silicone with a Stanley blade. New sealed units fitted like a glove using the latest SupaKlip locators and knock-in wedge instead of gunned sealant. A fresh coat of Venetian Red to match the new frame in the bathroom, and the front of the house looks like new, at a fraction of the cost of all-new windows.

Onwards and upwards. The next item out of the workshop will be a mix of casement and rising sashes in SupaWOOD, painted white. I can't wait!

The "greening of England" 4

2008-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Apart from its ‘natural’ origin, timber as a construction material differs in one fundamental way from both plastic and aluminium: That is, of course, the finishing process.

Aluminium is anodised before it is cut into components and assembled into frames, whilst pvc comes out of the extruder as a finished product.

Much of the focus of the production process for the latter materials is in preventing damage to the finish, as repair is always difficult and expensive, requiring that elusive skilled labour again.

Timber, on the other hand, is traditionally worked in the raw, and the final finish is applied to assembled frames, sometimes after the hardware is fitted. Most unsatisfactory.

To complicate matters, there has been a sea-change in the way wood-finishes themselves work. Although micro-porous finishes have been around for more than forty years, until about twenty years ago traditional oil-bound paints were still predominant and in common use. These were impermeable, sealing the timber and to a great extent limiting the seasonal movement of moisture in and out of the timber. They were usually applied on-site by a decorator who might or might not remove the hardware first.

The main drawback was their tendency to split and flake, letting water in. That couldn’t get out, and once in, it encouraged fungal growth in the wood under the paint, which blew more of it off. When micro-porous translucent finishes became common during the 1980s, they stopped all that, and transformed the maintenance requirement. The downside was that seasonal moisture changes led to massive dimension changes, too. The designs had to accommodate this. No problem with modern styling, but more difficult to retain a true traditional appearance.

The next big change was from solvent-borne finishes to water-borne, for Health and Safely reasons. Like all things in life, there were advantages and disadvantages.

The one big advantage of water-borne finishes is the short drying time. Minutes or hours instead of days (especially in the winter). Another is the thick film-build possible in each coat. The downside is the relatively poor stain penetration, so the underlying colour of the wood influences the final finish. This can vary from piece to piece, or even from place-to-place in some timbers. Water based finishes don't "wet" the surface of the wood as well as white spirit, and can leave the open-grain hardwoods with a fine pitted appearance. In reality, they are fine air-bubbles that need heavily overcoating to close.

Although the technology is improving all the time, it is true to say that the first five years of the change-over period of the mid-90s were a continuous nightmare. Frames sticking to each other, even a week after they were sprayed: Little runs and sags that simply could not be touched-up, but needed stripping and refinishing: Blotchy, uneven colours, and much, much, more.

I am very pleased to report that these problems are now a thing of the past, but, believe me, it made staying with wood windows difficult at times.

Recent developments make it all worth while…..

More next week.

The 'Greening' of England (3)

2008-07-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

Why SupaWOOD?

The SupaWOOD system was designed to be a complete departure from traditional joinery in all but appearance. Trade skills have been declining for decades. In a technological age, hand/eye skills have not been fully appreciated, and the failure to allow schools to teach vocational skills have meant that the traditional apprenticeship all but died in the latter half of the 20th Century. The cost of running a traditional joinery shop just rose, and rose again as the prevalence of good tradesmen steadily declined. I decided that the way forward was to design a framing system that treated wood as just another engineering material. Fully finished components should be assembled by fitters in much same way that a motor car production line works.
No glue, no careful trimming and fitting. Just screw and snap accurately made and finished parts together. The manufacturing process relies on Production Engineers rather than joiners. Once the tooling and machinery is set up, repetitive production is simple in comparison with the traditional model.

The pre-finished, pre-glazed cassette system de-skills the installation process, and sets wood windows on a par with pvc. Fitters of the SupaWOOD window need no woodworking skills, just as fitters of pvc windows need no plastic working skills.

That’s it.

The whole range started with one small window and ended up as a complete range of interconnecting frames to form bows, bays, and conservatories, with inward and outward opening residential doors, french doors and sidelights, inline sliders, rising sashes, in almost any combination you care to use. They all share one characteristic: The 20mm sealed units are dry channel glazed into ex 2” (50mm) profile to preserve a traditional appearance suited to the vernacular architecture of the British Isles.

For more than twelve years, the inline sliding patio doors were supplied to a competitor in flat-pack form – two doors, three doors, four doors, overdoor lights, almost any combination in standard sizes and made-to-measure. I am particular proud of the low (all but zero) call-back rate. Those few call-backs out of thousands of units were mostly due to failures in the assembly or adjustment process, although until a proper piece-rate bonus system was set up in the factory, I confess we did manage to sent out incomplete kits from time to time. A system of rewards and penalties for the workforce soon stopped that.

Sliding patio doors fell out of favour during the 1990s, to be replaced by a love affair with french doors, which continues today.

More next week.

The "greening" of England (2)

2008-07-26T01:37:00.000-07:00

A big problem with traditional wood windows is that they do not take sealed unit double glazing well. Even when heavily modified to accept sealed units, the edge cover or the drainage (or both) is often inadequate, or the frame is excessively bulky. That doesn’t stop manufacturers making them and customers buying them. By the time the problems show up, the seller is often long gone. I have stood in the lounge of the very expensive home of a retired Captain of Industry who was apoplectic with rage because he couldn’t see out of a single one of his large picture windows. All of them fogged up just one year past their 5-year guarantee, and the manufacturer (not me) had shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

The problems first became evident to me many years ago when I was asked to replace a neighbour’s 1930s bay windows. I made them out of untreated softwood, primed the frame, then bedded 14mm sealed units in butyl mastic (I said it was a long time ago) leaving the customer to paint the topcoats himself. Not ideal, I decided.

A year earlier, I had been building loft conversions as a sub-contractor, and had discovered that an aluminium window went in, fully finished, in about two hours, but next day the customer was bending my ear about the gallons of water all over the floor (from condensation, of course). (PVC hadn’t yet arrived in the UK, although there were rumours of them appearing on the continent).

A wood window, however, (usually a stock item from the Boulton and Paul catalogue) glazed with stepped units looked horrible and took days to install, glaze and paint. Out on a 45 degree roof, in the rain or snow it was no fun at all, and I soon decided there must be a better way to make a wood window.

After the experience with the softwood bay, I sat down with a sharp pencil and a clean sheet of paper and designed the first prototype of the Supawood window.

I decided from the start it had to be:
· a good-looking product that would sell to my customers in traditional Warwickshire cottages
· technically excellent
· fully finished in the factory before glazing.
· glazed in the factory before installation
· capable of being installed in a flash in all weathers.
· Guaranteed zero-callback (ie no jamming, warping, or swelling to deal with)

From the start I concluded that channel glazing was necessary to get a 20mm sealed unit into a traditional 2” profile, and mechanical fixing was necessary to allow the glazing to be replaced if necessary. The early versions still involved carrying heavy glazed sub-frames up ladders, but that was soon changed in favour of an inside fitting version, and it fast became clear that there was no way I would ever want to return to carrying glass up a ladder in the rain.

The development of the present version took many years of continuous refinement, with some useful ideas coming up along the way. It’s a long story with many twists and turns, but it does look as if, with the advent of this new miracle timber, the SupaWOOD window is about to truly justify its name.

More next week.

The "Greening" of England

2008-07-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone who truly believes in making the world a greener place will welcome the latest brilliant development in timber technology.

Just imagine a miraculous discovery of the 21st Century:

A timber that :
· Is more durable than teak.
· is a plantation crop with a growth cycle of just 35 years
· can be recycled, burned, buried, or otherwise disposed of with no nasty consequences

better still...
· machines better than any hardwood
· takes a better finish than pine, as durable as pvc
· has no knots and comes in 6m lengths to minimise wastage.

A material such as this would be truly miraculous, and who could doubt its advantage in “green” terms over any plastic or metal: Just plant a seed and stand back for 35 years.
The small amount of energy required to fell, transport, convert, and machine it into useful products would pale into insignificance compared with the energy required to extract, smelt and refine aluminium, or to produce the chemicals from which pvc is manufactured.

Well, believe it or not, that material is here.
This wonder material of the 21st century actually exists.

And guess what: The ancient Romans understood the basic process, even if the technology to make it work in economic terms had to wait almost 2000 years.

The fundamentals are simple:
Soak any timber in vinegar to improve its rot resistance.

A more sophisticated process to impregnate softwood with commercial acetic acid was first proposed in 1928, and the race has been on since then to develop a commercially viable process. Only in recent years have the Dutch succeeded in bringing a commercially viable product to the market. They have branded it as a new species, and it certainly behaves like no timber I have ever previously encountered in a woodworking career spanning more than 35 years.

Because extensive trials with these acetylised timbers have been carried out over many decades, there is a massive database to back up the claims. The Building Research Establishment (BRE) for example, will back a 60 years lifetime, even in the most demanding wet and heavy applications. Treated timber used for canal lining has, after ten years in service, not shown the slightest deterioration.

Of almost as much interest to this joinery designer is the fact that it just does not absorb water at all. After extensive soaking of test-pieces, the swelling I have measured is less than 0.5% (yes, that’s less than half of one percent) compared to the usual expectation of between 5% and 8%.

That means the annual winter swelling/summer shrinkage of windows and doors can be consigned to the past.

Having beaten my head against the brick-wall of consumer resistance for more than two decades (we prefer zero maintenance upvc, dear), the answer is here:

SUPAWOOD WINDOWS DOORS AND CONSERVATORIES MADE FROM THIS WONDER MATERIAL OF THE 21ST CENTURY ARE EVERY BIT AS DURABLE AS PVC, AND INFINITELY LESS POISONOUS TO OUR PLANET

More next week.