Back in 2007 I was based at BATUK, a British army base in Kenya. I ran the Metalsmith bay, and was tasked one day to make a prize for some kind of event that I don't recall. What I do recall is being busy, but this prize was to take priority, because whoever was asking for it outranked me. "It didn't have to be big" he said "just a little Maasai statue to hand to the winner". So i decided to make it life size, because I'm an asshole, and that kind of shit amuses me!

🛡️ May I Present... Metal Maasai! 🛡️

 

Here he is taking form in the workshop, which, as you would expect siting right on the equator, was usually hotter than Hell's kitchen in a heatwave. Add to that welding coveralls, and lots of hot metal... it made for sweating the kind of sweat usually reserved for people who have just received a whole life sentence with no parole. However, that six months in Kenya was one of the greatest experiences of my life!

I wish I had more photos of Metal Maasai, but the fickle God of Hard Drives destoyed them as a lesson to back shit up!

I basically used myself as a template for the frame - traced around my feet, cut the tubing to the size of my torso, arms, and legs. Then I adopted the "spear and shield" posture to get the angles I needed for the joint sections. In the end it stood upright, balanced, no baseplate needed - once it was painted and finished it actually freaked some of the local guys out! It was only 12mm tubing welded together (with a rudimentary face), but it had a posture that gave it a kind of... momentum... it looked like it was about to move! Metal Maasi came out far better than I expected.

I wonder what he's up to now!

Here you see Metal Maasai stalking his prey, notice how oblivious his target is, utterly unaware that he is about to become another trophy in Metal Maasai's trophy cabinet.

Here Metal Maasai accepts a direct challenge from an overconfident rival. Metal Maasai is utterly unfazed, his posture is unchanged, despite the blatant bravado of his arrogant challenger.

Here Metal Maasai celebrates his easy victory with a devotee. As you can see Metal Maasai has graciously adopted his hunting stance at the request of his young fan.

I plan on putting some other stuff up here when I've got this website how I want it. I've got some pics from Ganners that people might find interesting - IED blast protection we prototyped on our trucks to see if it would save some limbs and some lives (it did!), a re-furb we did on a 14.7mm russian anti-armour gun that had been taken out by one of our Apaches, some tools I made using blacksmithing, and if I get off my arse, some arty stuff that I'm planning to make - I've deliberately left some blank space on the wall in my lounge as a motivator!

Heeeeres... a bit of pencil art!

Now I haven't drawn a goddamn thing in years. I can do the "technical" kind of stuff, but I've never been "arty". So after looking at all the cool art people have on their websites here on Neocities I thought I should have a go too! It's not great, but something about this effort amused me, so here it is!

It's a depiction from the 90s of my now departed Father inquiring as to why I hadn't "Done the fucking pots!".

A fair request - it was my turn to wash up!

Never gonna give you up!

Maybe I should! Pencil Rick Astley looks like he's seen some shit!

 

Someone ran around and deserted him, I'm sure of it!

The Metal Smith

I was just gonna plonk some other projects up here that I was involved in when I was a Metalsmith, but much of it requires some kind of context, so I shall attempt to add some! Riiight... where to begin... In 2001, some guys thought it would be cool to totally fuck up this time-line by crashing a couple of planes into the Twin Towers. We are all still living with the repercussions of that event — the hopeful vibe at the end of the last millennium was smashed to pieces, and America Lost. Its.. Shit...

The western world was dragged into a protracted "War on Terror" - and younger me thought "cool, I'll have a bit of that!" - so I joined the army... Roll forward a few years and I found myself in Afghanistan... Now younger me wasn't completely stupid - I'd joined up as a Metalsmith in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, so I'd learned to weld, fabricate, and blacksmith — I wasn't just cannon fodder!

I know... war is bad (and I do feel bad saying this), but I loved it on tour... The strife resonated with me on some fundamental level - it was Reality-Plus - vivid and intense, everything has seemed kinda grey ever since... just a series of ripples receeding away from the main event. It seems weird looking back, but the glorification of war is a big part of UK culture - I think it's just been bred into us over the centuries by the British class-system. Most counties still need conscription or national service, not old Blighty, they've trained their "working classes" well!

It is well documented that Afghanistan has been used for centuries as a proxy-battleground where Empires clash without directly going to war. It is terrible for them, to be located on a cultural and strategic fault line, a huge misfortune of geography - and it is about geography most of the time. Look closely at the terrain in any warzone and you can get a pretty good idea of what is actually being fought over - often it's water, and who controls it. The fact we can just "turn on the tap" in the west insulates us from how precious that stuff is!

In 2008 (after 7 years of war) our main push was to assist the long delayed construction of a Hydroelectric dam on the river Helmand at Kajaki - to bring more stable electricity to Helmand Province, and to improve supply to the Kandahar Air Force Base - from which America projected regional strength. If you look at where Afghanistan is located, you will see its strategic importance - butted up against 3 major nuclear powers - India, Pakistan, China; plus it borders Iran, and is deeply in Russia's "back yard"... Initially we may have been there to stem the opium trade that funded terrorism, for "hearts and minds", for Bin Laden - but missions do creep...
and Afghanistan became too good an opportunity for exerting pressure on our geopolitical rivals... and they're not stupid... that's why it dragged on for so long,
and got so fucking nasty!

My part in all this was a small but unique part — I was a member of a mixed team of 3 soldiers, 3 marines, and 3 Tajik welders tasked with the design, manufacture, and fitting of IED blast protection to many of the vehicles in theatre... We had all kinds of other jobs come our way over the duration of the tour - anything from repairing kitchen equipment for the cooks, to assessing the airframe of an Apache Longbow that had developed structural cracks. There is a lot of metal in the army, and when supply chains are stretched...

Thou must rely on the "Blue Wizards" to make whole what was once broken!

We make the Modern World! There is so much welding and fabrication in everyday life that people don't even notice it... but... when shit goes wrong, and things start breaking down, it becomes apparent pretty quickly who the actual important people are, and it isn't Colonel Rupert Farquar-Kuntz, Third Earl of Twattlington... oh no... it's the ordinary "little" guys in blue coveralls who weld all that broken shit back together!

You see... in the British army, many of the people in charge are "posh numpties" born to massive hereditary privilege! Not all of them — some officers are from ordinary backgrounds, or have come up through the ranks and earned their commission the hard way... but many of them have wacky double-barrelled surnames, and speak with accents that make your ears want to crawl down your face and throttle you! Add to this the "promotion-oriented" nature of the military (you want to get promoted quickly, so you're not the gimp at the bottom, doing all the graft!) and this leads to the military being very "top heavy", i.e. "all Chiefs and no Indians!".

Now these "Chiefs" like to strut around like they're super important, and the world would collapse without them — shiny boots, marching, parades - Ganners turned all that bullshit on its head! We had two sets of hierarchy — ours (the army) and the marines (navy) - we barely needed one of them! I loved that the tables were turned, that these "Ruperts" who were oh so important back at barracks were now about as much use as tits on a fish - "Going for another run, are we, sir? Because you've got fuck all of use to do, sir. That's right, sir — jog on!"

So yeah... Within a couple of months most people at Bastion had worked out that it was us "little people" who actually got things done - so they just came directly to us!
I mean shiiit... one time we had a team of American Spec-Ops guys from Camp Leatherneck come to our bay asking us to mod their fucking Hummvee! HA.. it seems absurd now, but I shit you not... They wanted us to put "suicide" doors on it - so when things got fruity they could pile-out like the fucking Untouchables! ha, HA... Americans... thinking we were like "Pimp My Ride" or something! Jesus... I felt like a white B.A. Baracus... "I ain't puttin' no stupid doors on yo' truck, sucka!".

Another less ridiculous one was helping the armourers prototype a Picatinny Rail modification for the SAS! I mean, some of the stuff was just fucking wild — a gnarly old Colonel, with a "Who Dares Wins" cap-badge cutting about the compound with a big grin on his face, having a brew and talking shop! His troopers wanted to be able to put a SUSAT 4x scope on their AK47s when they were on covert ops — I don't know if it ever worked properly - those rails have got to be accurate or the scope will not zero correctly, but AK47s aren't exactly well-known for their long-range accuracy, so it probably didn't matter. Plus, on ops, you mostly don't use your scope for shooting — you mainly use it for basic tactical awareness, i.e. "scoping" things out!

Anyway... in light of our newfound usefulness our bosses went from contempt...
to pride!... Because we were making them look good — and they knew it would be them who'd get the fucking MBEs! "Bones", the sergeant of our small team (he looked perfectly normal, not like a skeleton or anything), got a Queen's Commendation!
He was a good guy, and we liked having him in charge - he was hands-off and laid back... he knew we were solid (despite our flaws) and let us do our thing - as long as the problems got solved he was happy. That's not to say he didn't get his coveralls on and graft like the rest of us - we were a small team, so it was "all hands to the pump"!

I was never truly cut out for the army: I don't like all the marching around, the pomp and circumstance, and I "bend the knee" to no one (except dogs, and sometimes cats) — how I lasted as long as I did amazes me! I said shit how it was with absolutely no filter, which obviously annoyed some people, but I could think outside the box, work hard, and make problems disappear - and in a warzone that goes a long way. When you're one of the "go to guys" people will just suck it up because they need you! I wasn't the greatest welder; on paper I was an average soldier, but I had a knack of being able to "step to one side" and see what others had missed. The army breeds conformity and obedience to military doctrine. I wasn't a kid when I joined up, so I never bought into that bullshit, and out there in the chaos it gave me an advantage!

Wow, that's turned into a bit of a "wall of sweary rant!", but fuck it, sometimes things just flow better that way! I am torn over this stuff - there are so many dark and dubious grey areas about the "war on terror" it makes my brain spin... but that's reality - the kind of reality that makes you sack it all off, go home, and make steampunk keyboards with your brother! It's nice to at least have that option, unlike most of the poor fuckers on this planet! But however grim reality can be, it can still surprise you, and throw up all kinds of profound permutations...

Last year (Nov '25) I met an acquaintance of my mum's at Telford Shopping Centre while I was taking her to the opticians. He was selling poppies for Remembrance Day; we got chatting, and it turned out that he was on the same tour as me (Herrick 9). At some point during the tour the truck he was driving hit an IED, and the blast protection saved his life - directing the main force of the explosion and shrapnel away from the cab - as we'd designed. He'd walked away physically unharmed, though not psychologically by the sounds of it... His little girl read a poem she'd written, with an intense wisdom far beyond her 11 years... it was all a bit surreal to be honest... but kinda wholesome. Time for some pics of "Project IED":

Yup... it looks pretty fuggly doesn't it, but looks aint everything. Believe me - you'd much rather have this ugly-ass mod on your Leyland than nothing, because the floors on 'em are made out of fibreglass... yeah... the same stuff they make canoes out of, and canoes aren't exactly known for their high resistance against explosions and shrapnel! They'll barely protect you from a swan... though in fairness a pissed off swan is kinda like an aquatic IED... "oh shit, we just hit a swan"! Anyway... to protect peoples limbs, lives, and more importantly... genitals - we came up with this!

This was the first truck we did... it's real purdy ain't it! Aaaand... then we took it away and blew it up - with a crash test dummy inside to see how it performed - you'll be pleased to hear that the dummy's genitals were completely unharmed! The main bulk of it was 8mm steel plate, it may have been 10mm, but I seem to remember 8mm being tried first to see if it had enough resisitance. Shrapnel is jagged, so doesn't penetrate like a heavy caliber bullet would, plus the metal would deform more, sending the blast outwards - which was the desired result. During blast-testing I seem to remember that the long strap snapped away from the bumper at the front end, and the main plate had curved and bent upwards against the hull - the wheel had come rocketing off about 40ft into the air, landing 60 or so feet away - a bumpy ride, but you would walk away from it, well, stumble!

The ground clearance of the bigger vehicles was their main protection against IED's - the further away from the blast the safer you were, unsurprisingly! You were probably safer going over an IED or anti-tank mine in this modded truck than in a pupose-built Armoured Personnel Carrier like the Warrior or Viking - because in a tracked APC the hull is so low to the ground the blast just hits a lot harder, with no sideways deflection. The floor takes the full brunt, and even if it held structurally, guys were just getting launched upward and crushed against the ceiling when they hit a big one. That's why the switch to tall, wheeled APC's like the Mastiff was made. Then that leaves them more susceptable to attacks from the side with RPG's, so then you fit bar-armour, to "catch" the rocket before it hits the hull, and on and on the arms-race goes!

Notice the continuing "blown-up" motif? I have repaired a lot of blown-up stuff!

Anyway, everyone was very happy - so we did it again on over 100 trucks... or thereabouts... a hell of a lot of trucks anyway, all on a tight schedule: 12-16 hour days, welding, grinding, cutting. Sometimes getting dicked for duties like guarding prisoners, top-cover on ops, or manning the guard towers - not to mention those batshit officers of ours trying to "train us for war"... er... sir, we are in Afghanistan - we don't need to train, we're here doing it right now!

I used to volunteer to go out on CLP top-cover just to get away from them!

Aaaand... relax... I may get blown up, but rather that than more "training" with Major Painintheass! Plus, I trust the guys who fitted the blast protection!

Seriously... having us run up and down a big pile of sand for "phys" first thing in the morning when we've got a day of hard graft ahead - marching us all around like we were still a bunch of fucking recruits! No-one else was doing that stupid shit - guys from other units used to point and laugh! I mean if you're that keen, go grab your gatt and your helmet, and get out on ops! Chance of a lifetime to actually do some real soldiering, and they'd rather stay back at Bastion playing at being soldiers! To be fair they were good at training us, but this is what we had trained for! It was like they didn't know how to switch out of training mode - that training was their job! There was real work to be done, important, life-saving work, and they were just getting in the fucking way! After all these years it still gets my goat...

Aaand... we're back in Rant-istan again! Ahhhh... Wooosaaah! Anyway... Speaking of goats, here's some Nomad herders! I kinda envied them, in a way...

... living out there in the desolate beauty of Afghanistan. I mean I doubt it's everyone's cup of tea, but there's a kind of... grandeur to the place, you can see why it's never been tamed - you've got to bend to the land, not the other way round.

No.1 strange experience in Afghanistan

About 3 or 4 months into tour, a group of high ranking officers were leading a delegation of VIPs around our compound at Bastion, mostly UK politicians. The most senior was the Defense Secretary, a man named Bob Ainsworth - the most over-promoted man I have ever met - a man holding a position so far above his actual capabilities it was astounding to behold!

Anyway... Among this delegation was Dianne Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Her chosen "tub to thump" for a while had been the inadequacy of the Snatch Landrover (something I remember her raising often on the news), due to its light-armour and "flimsy" design - and how it needed to be replaced. I mean there are far worse hills to die on: she was raising issues that needed to be raised, but some things just aren't that simple - there are always compromises on the battlefield: speed and agility over heavier armour — those "gaming-concepts" are not gaming-concepts!

 

The conversation with her came about as I was working (funnily enough) on a snatch landrover that had been hit by an RPG. The rocket had simply gone straight through it and out the other side without exploding — I was repairing the two (surprisingly small) holes in the aluminium chassis! As the delegation moved about, I noticed that Dianne was kinda being sidelined and avoided - the brass had obviously been "Yes Dear"-ing her for hours, and she was belligerent by that point! They were posh white-boys,
"old school tie", they were trying to be civil, but they just had the look of...

"Oh my Lord Jesus! An Empowered Ethnic Woman!! God. Please. Help meeee...!!!"

...all over their posh little faces — it was fucking hilarious, she'd obviously been terrorising them for a while!

She spotted the landrover I was working on and gravitated toward it, then gave me her spiel, and I explained the pro's over the American Humvee (her suggested alternative): if this had been a Humvee that RPG would've exploded, most likely killing or injuring the occupants - the landrover had simply "bent around it", like Neo out of The Matrix! The landrover is small, quiet, fast, and mobile - making it harder to target. It is a very capable off-road vehicle - you can go places in it most other military vehicles simply cannot go! Its light chassis is much less likely to trigger anti-tank mines and IEDs. It is a less hostile-looking vehicle, making it a better fit with the "hearts and minds" ethos of the tour. It is cheap, reliable, and easy to maintain - many of the alternatives are much more expensive and much higher maintenance, often spending more time in the workshop than out on the ground!

And a big, often overlooked factor - the Humvee is the symbol of American military dominance, it is a highly coveted trophy-kill, it has an instantly recognisable silhouette, making it a much easier target to spot - in a nutshell - you're just more likely to be targeted in the first place driving a Humvee!

Sometimes high-profile mass-marketing can be a right "Sword of Damocles"...

She listened, and asked what other measures could be taken, I gestured at the hole in the landrover and said that out here wether you lived or died often depended on pure luck - the only way to truly protect us is for us to not be here in the fucking first place!

My boss, Major Sackville-Baggins [real name redacted], had been repeatedly looking over his shoulder with an increasingly alarmed look on his face the whole time we were talking - "Oh God... what is he saying to her?! What other evil thoughts is he cultivating! How many times has he said the word "fuck"??!". But I saw him acquiesce as Dianne wandered back over to them with a thoughtful look on her face...

All they'd had to do is just give her a basic "pros and cons" breakdown to save themselves' hours of misery - maybe they had, and it just sounded more genuine coming from a grunt... I dunno. But I swear, I almost got a "namaste" from the Major as they all walked away with a now becalmed Dianne Abbott!