Update ... Making a chochin style paper and cane shade

1. First, make a form that can collapse inwardly from something stiff, ie not pvc waste pipes.

(Something like the above will do. Made from 12mm mdf, cut up at B&Q by the man with the big saw and roughly assembled together with glue and corner blocks in half an hour. A helpful woman also suggested velcro is useful for temporary structures. It is, stuck and stapled.)

2. Wrap a long piece of cane around your form in a spiral. A long piece can be made by splicing shorter pieces together with glue and then tying with thread. Proper chochin lanterns join their canes with little paper wraps.

3. Get ready to put glue on the outside of the cane, but realise that this will also glue the cane to the form.

4. Attempt to slide some long lengths of baking parchment down between the cane and the wooden form. Be amazed that this actually works, but inwardly appreciate that this is clearly not the best way to do it.

5. Spread glue on the canes one one side of the form. Halfway through, realise this is taking a really long time and that the glue at the top is going to be dry by the time the canes at the bottom have been covered.

6. Lay on a sheet of rice paper and be amazed that the glue is still sticky enough at both ends (more or less). Press the paper gently onto the canes, around round the corners.

7. Start running out of glue halfway through the opposite side and water it down.

8. Switch to diluted pva for the other two sides, using a wide sponge to apply it, and start idly wondering how you'll apply any pressure to the paper inbetween the cane. Accidentally tear some of the paper because you've put too much glue on. Develop irritation.

9. Put the final side on, and be amazed that it looks as good as it does. Most of the canes are glued. Leave the glue an hour or two to dry.

10. Lightly spray the paper all over with water, half expecting it to dissolve into a mess. Be amazed when it shrinks exactly as expected, and goes tight and even.

11. Try to figure out a way of cutting off your waste paper. Remember that on the videos, it came off directly after gluing by slicing with a razor. Try a scalpel and a craft knife, and mostly just mangle and tear the paper. Settle for scissors

12. Remove from the form. This is terrifying and takes two hours. The form was a little misconceived and causes a number of "o I hadn't thought of that" moments. Make many mental notes.

13. Collapse!

As easy as that. I finished up the top of the shade with a few wires to keep it in it's shape, and lots of glue. Actually amazed it looks as good as it does, for a first go. Next version needs a bit more thought put into it, but this, I think, is a proof of concept.

For future reference:

• Make sure have enough glue, of a kind that doesn't dry too fast, and use a tool that can make wide sweeps.
• Make the form more easily collapsible. This one got hard to collapse once it was done up tightly.
• Make the cane contact the form on edges only. No flat panels. Chochin lanterns are like this for a good reason.
• Where the top layer of the paper needs to be sealed to another continuous layer of paper, make sure there is a hard support to press down on. On this one, the seams were unsupported, and so couldn't get glued very well. Also made it hard to trim waste paper off.
• Trim paper before sticking on. Much easier to do it this way, particularly if not doing the above.
• Plan for the top. The top is actually quite tricky. It needs some rigid/tensioned frame to keep the shape, as well as a hard handle to actually pull and push. And some way to fasten it to the underlying scissor structure.
• Plan for the bottom.Not really sure what I'm going to do with the bottom. It needs to be fixed/clipped onto the structure somehow, or have weights or something.
• The shade is surprisingly non-springy. It stays quite where it's put. I expected it to exert more of a downward pull on the scissor, when it was fully extended and held down to the ground. It doesn't. Very encouraging.
• Find out what it is that gets painted onto the edges of the real chochin lantern forms to prevent the glue from sticking. Wax of some sort. Also, what kind of glue do they use?
• Still need to think of some way of letting air in and out of the shade when compressing and extending. This is a bit less of a problem than the old pleated paper shade because the form is strong enough to withstand pressure changes. The old one would just get sucked in against the structure, or have the pleats blown out.

In conclusion

Really quite pleased with this. It looks great, and the execution, while not great, was at least more or less what I was expecting. Takes up a lot of room, and causes some temporary friction with wife.

Update ... Play mode madness.

Not quite perfect then - I got in touch with Revo about how to use the other play modes on this radio, in music player mode. As standard it's on repeat, so your playlist (or contents of the folder) just starts again as soon as it ends, but I wanted shuffle, or just play once. But there aren't any other play modes! It's repeat only. So that's not very good, especially since it seems to have been a design decision based on not having enough buttons on the remote control spare. Less do-everything models of the pico have these functions, but they also have fewer buttons on the remote. I think with a software based product like this, there's no excuse for disabling functionality, crippling it.