Portable Puppet Theatre #2 This folding hand-puppet theatre is designed to unfold and bolt with wing-nuts onto a custom-made wooden folding table.  It has draw-string curtains and a plain black back-drop.  The whole assembly folds flat for storage and transportation. Lionel made the "hamburger" puppet from a plastic pet's squeaky toy purchased at a discount store and cut in two, and then added a body, a tongue and ping-pong-ball eyes.  Backing tracks were pre-recorded with sound effects and narrated scripts written by and read by Lionel and others. Photos and description courtesy of Lionel Hartley. Posted with Lionel's permission by The Friends of Lionel Hartley . 

Ruler Stops   Lionel has made several of these useful stops for various rulers of different lengths and types both for his own use and for others to use.  They are useful for both measuring and rememebering measurements. They can also be used to rule parallel lines along the sides of a workpiece or for marking out tenon joints. They consist of two pieces of wood, one of which has a groove down the centre the width and thickness of the particular ruler.  In the centre of this groove is a threaded nut and a hole right through.  The two pieces are then bolted together and a bolt with a knob is fed through the hole and screwed into the threaded nut.  Then it is tightened enough to protude into the groove where it will lock itself to the ruler. A few stops he also made out of a thick slab of aluminium simply had a threaded hole instead of a threaded nut. He also made a wedge shaped one (for marking out dovetail joints) with the groove cut at a 7.5 degree angle on one...

Project-a-sign As a fundraiser in the 1970s, Lionel invented Project-a-sign .  This was a resource for enabling sign-writing, making stage scenery, cycloramas, murals, plywood Christmas displays, posters and banners etc. without the actual user having the need for any artistic skill.  The hand-drawn illustrations, mounted in projection-slides were simply projected onto the posterboard, plywood sheet, canvas flat etc., the user then traced around the outline and painted the article as appropriate. The Project-a-sign project consisted of 2,650 hand drawn original pen-and-ink illustrations that were photo-reduced to the size of a 35mm film slide, printed on transparency film, cut and mounted onto plastic slide mounts. These were then sold in sets of 20 (Sign lettering, traffic signs and subjects such as hobbies, transport, cartoons, music, religious graphics, people, occupations, seasonal illustrations, etc.) The sign lettering slides had the full alphabet on each slide in a dif...