Excess Postage

 If I ever have a nemesis, I'll need their postal address. Then I'll send them letters and parcels but without paying the right postage.

My sister is generally not paying attention. She once received a wonderful letter from her bank that said something like "Thank you for your change of address notification. Unfortunately we have been unable to action this as you didn't include your name or your account details".

When she visited me recently she somehow accidentally took a radiator bleed key with her when she left. She texted me a photo of it and asked if I wanted it back. Yes Please. A couple of weeks later I got a snotty letter from Royal Mail about an item addressed to me that didn't have the correct postage paid. About a week after I paid the excess (and a handsome handling charge) I received my own radiator bleed key through the letterbox. Poor value - would not buy again.

Richard "Amazon Composite" B

Better than the R.A.C.

 In the late 90's I didn’t own my own car or a mobile phone. One weekend I borrowed my mum's car and drove to Guildford to meet my friend. I broke down a few miles short of his house and had to walk to someone's house, ask to use their phone and call him. He dutifully came and towed me back.

Last weekend I drove in a car that I inherited from my mum to visit the same friend in a village near Guildford. Again I broke down a few miles short of his house, again he dutifully came and rescued me. I believe that as soon as he got off the phone with me he said "this is the second time he's done this now".

The first time it was an alternator fault. We misdiagnosed it and bought a new battery, and while it did get me home it had to be fixed properly once I'd got home. This time it was the clutch and while we tried to put a new clutch in ourselves we ran out of time (we had dogs to walk, birthday parties to attend, stag nights to go on) and I had to come home in a recovery truck.

Richard "we couldn't get the drive shaft out" B

Swarf

 I'm learning to use my lathe from Youtube, and there are quite a lot of videos about what your first turning project should be. My first one was just making some chips off a bolt head to see if I could get the thing cutting. My 2nd project was to make a handwheel for a friend's watchmaker's lathe. He's also recently become a lathe owner and his lathe is too small to make its own handwheels. I didn't make a very good job of it. I've now thrown myself in to job 3 which is to make a strong and airtight catchtank out of aluminium.

A good friend of mine acquired a lathe a few years ago. It came with the house he bought (my mum once got an elderly pet rabbit in the same way). As he's a few years ahead of me in self-taught turning I asked him what he'd done on his lathe. His answer was poetic and honest. "I've turned valuable stock into piles of swarf".

I'm close behind him. Every operation I do my proposed catchtank design gets smaller and thinner.

Richard "CCMT06" B

Treasures

 I'm now the proud owner of a lathe, and various boxes of junk/treasure that goes with it. It belonged to the father of a good friend of mine. Sadly he died between agreeing to sell it and completing the deal. Even worse the roof of his workshop had failed and everything was rusty/mouldy/mildewed (I did get a steep discount).

The lathe itself is from Warco, so it will have been a Taiwanese import, but fettled in and delivered from the home counties. It's small. 9 inch swing and 20 inch between centres. 3/4hp motor. You need to put it on a bench and it only weighs about 100kg. It is sadly rusty and in need of quite a lot of restoration. With the original owner being dead, it's quite hard to know what's what. There are boxes of tools and accessories, a lot of them damaged, and it's hard to identify all of them.

I think I've mentioned "yak shaving" before. You can't do job A until you've done job B. You can't do job B until you've done job C. Eventually you need to have shaved a yak before you can finish what you started. I want to use the lathe to make part of a catch tank. I need to use the 4 jaw chuck to grab the stock because it's too big for the 3 jaw. I need to use the dial indicator to centre the stock in the 4 jaw. I found dial indicator, it's clearly ancient and has been repaired many times over the years. It has got wet and seized but I managed to free it up. The "glass" seems to be homemade from acrylic and it has gone yellow and cloudy so that you can't actually see the needle. I found myself polishing a dodgy bit of acrylic as a necessary step in cutting some 4 inch aluminium tube. I wouldn't have been surprised if the polishing had had to be done with freshly shaved yak hair.

Richard "Mitutoyo" B

D.I.Y.

 As I have previously mentioned my car has old fashioned wheel bearings with conical races and tapered rollers – and a big castellated nut with a split pin.

I was able to drift out the old races but try as I might I couldn't find a way to press in the new ones. I thought I could use my hub puller in reverse, but there wasn't enough room to fit any kind of tool under it. I thought I could use my vice but it wasn't big enough. I thought I could use the stub axle and the hub nut but it wasn't long enough. I eventually gave up and took the hubs and the new bearings to my favourite garage.

When I picked them up they refused to take any money. Instead I got quite an insulting lecture about how easy a job it was and that I could definitely have done it at home without bothering them. The races weren't a tight fit - "I could almost have pushed them in with my thumb" and I had the old races to use as a drift. Apparently they went all the way home with a couple of taps from a hammer.

Richard "But at What Cost?" B

Perfect Pitch

 My car has an old fashioned front axle with double wishbones and uprights with a stub axle. The hub is supported on the stub by tapered needle roller bearings which need to be repacked with grease every 4 years. How quaint!

I have played with some very skilled musicians over the years, but I now consider that none of them had as good an ear as the mechanic who did my MOT this year. He gave me "noisy wheel bearing offside front" as an advisory. When I took the bearings apart to grease them one of the bars on the cage that holds the rollers in place had broken off and probably been crushed in the bearing. The outer race was slightly discoloured but I saw no other damage. As far as I was concerned it ran smoothly and didn’t make excessive noise.

Richard "He's the Alan Jeffery of Chasses" B

 Stihl GH370 Chipper/Shredder review

Overall I'm pretty disappointed with the machine, but with coaxing I've managed to get some useful work out of it.

It wasn't cheap and it's made by a good brand. It also has a nominal maximum capacity of 45mm dia branches, so I was expecting a lot from it. In fact it requires ridiculously careful preparation of the branches to get it to chip anything anywhere near that thick, and when it does it goes quite slowly.

The good points:

It's nice and sturdy, it starts easily, the automatic choke, governor and drive system work well. It's quite easy to wheel around.

Operation: It's an "impact" type chipper. There's a heavy belt driven flywheel with two blades. Material is fed into a funnel and drops down a feed shoot towards the blades. The blade strikes the material, chips off a piece and then centrifugal force (yes I know) flings it into the output chute.The feed chute is more than 500mm long and somewhere between "letter box" and "side plate" in cross section. If a branch is bent or has lots of sideshoots it won't fit into the feed chute, let alone fall under its own weight. The same goes for leafy material, vines and creepers.

Tips:

The tab on the output chute is stiff. It needs a good thump backwards to lock it into the open position.

It only works when the blades are really sharp. As soon as you start producing warm sawdust rather than chips you're completely wasting your time until you resharpen it. The blades are ground at 30 degrees on a flat stone. As far as I could tell there was no microbevel at the edge.

You can block it up by letting the output chute fill up with chips. It needs to be moved or shovelled out regularly.

There is a black rubber gaiter in the funnel. This reduces noise, stops rainwater from running down the feed chute and arrest pieces of debris that get flung off the cutting wheel. I do not recommend that you remove the rubber gaiter. However if you do you will require a 5 lobed security star bit. You should also insist that the operator then wears eye and ear protection. Without the gaiter you can see what's going on and clear blockages with a stick before they bung up the chute. You can also learn what it does and doesn't like to eat, and see when it's ready for his next meal.

I think the same person should be preparing the branches and feeding them into the machine, that way they can learn what it will accept and prepare them accordingly.

The GH370 was by far the slowest bottle neck in my project to thin out my hedge, but two people did get about 600kg of wood through it in a day and a half.

Richard "Mr Creosote" B

Dyton and the Land Girl

 How was your long weekend? It was like hell on earth - if the bars, restaurants and canteens in hell are really exquisite.

On day one I was supposedly going on a long seaside walk with some slightly fitter friends. It was actually an 8 mile route march through mud. But it was punctuated by a really good English breakfast at a beautiful seaside cafe. My brother was driving to Plymouth but his journey involved a flat tyre, a broken radiator cap, gridlock at Bridgewater and the A38 closed due to an accident. Neither of us was in particularly good humour when he arrived - heavily delayed.

We then ate really excellent food from a charcoal grill and drank superbly in a luxurious cocktail lounge.

The purpose of the weekend was to thin out my hedge. The work was physically harsh, frustrating, loud, dangerous and prickly. It was started early and with a hangover. I got really angry with brambles, ivy and plastic netting. We were too tired to leave the house in the evening but I managed to home-cook a very good meal (Kensington Fried Chicken and Hard Pressed Potatoes) and we had all the makings of French 75s to drink.

I didn't bother showering which seemed luxurious at the time, but it meant that my bed was then filled with really sharp sawdust for the rest of the weekend.

Day three was just as hard work, just as early, just as hungover, but it was even more frustrating. My woodchipper (I call him Mr Creosote) wasn't manly enough for the task, and I lost a small part which we had to remanufacture. We were completely delayed by trying to gently feed individual, carefully prepared sticks down his throat and the job didn't get finished.

Tea on day three was just Freezer Surprise – Chilli Con Carne, but it was served with an excellent bottle of red wine (a very generous gift) and followed by decadent cream cakes (another gift)

Richard "Better to Drink in Hell than to Serve in Heaven" B

PIR Sensor Modify Field of View. Infra Red Mirror

 For the past few weeks I have been over-engineering the replacements for the security lights outside the front of my house. They are now screwed into reclaimed teak pads which should have a service life of 80 years. The cable is armoured and secured to stainless steel bases. The PIR sensors are wired together so that either sensor will light both lamps. 

The most interesting bit is the infra-red mirror in front of one of the motion sensors. The sensors have a wide field of view, but it's not quite 180 degrees. What this means is that when you approach my front door the lights will come on, but when you leave the house, you're in the sensor's blind spot and you're left in darkness until after you've tripped down the stairs.

The sensors work on infra-red emitted by warm objects. Polished aluminium will reflect infra-red radiation. I just happen to have some aluminium foil tape from another project, but the shiny side of kitchen foil should work just as well. I've put a little plate covered in foil tape in front of the sensor at 45 degrees. Instead of looking out the front, some of its field of vision is now pointing directly at the front door. The most amazing things are that 1) it works perfectly. 2) I managed to get it working without a thermal camera, so I couldn't see what it could see, or whether the tape was actually reflective in the infra-red.

Richard "Let There Be Light On The Stairs" B

Goodheart's Law

 When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric.

I discovered last year that I had put on an unwanted 5kg and I have been slowly removing it, except over the Christmas period when I put some weight back on. This year my progress has been much faster and I'm currently within 400g of my target weight.

It turns out that the easiest (but probably least productive) way to lose weight is to stop going to the gym. I usually go to a rock climbing wall twice a week, but in recent weeks I've been lucky to get there once a week. These calendar issues coincided with my most rapid weight loss. I worked out last night that I'm losing muscle rather than fat.

So it sounds like I still need to feel a little bit hungry most of the time AND do all my exercises.

Richard "Thanks I Hate It" B

Cure Hiccups Every Time

 For about a decade I've been telling anyone who will listen that there are two different (but very similar) bows that you can tie shoe laces into. Only one of them is secure. I don't think I'm responsible, but the knowledge is becoming a lot more widespread and there are multiple web pages and videos about it.

I will now share my family's method of curing hiccups. It seems to be little known, but more effective than most.

The "patient" is issued with a glass of water. The "doctor" gives the commands "Sip!" and "Swallow!" repeatedly in a random order. When commanded to sip the patient sucks a little bit of water from the glass into their mouth (but does not swallow) even if there is already water in their mouth. When commanded to swallow the patient swallows even if their mouth is empty. This procedure continues until the glass is empty, or it's clear that the hiccups are cured, or you're both bored. It doesn't work if the doctor becomes predictable so its best for the doctor to repeatedly toss a coin as quickly as they can and shout "Sip!" for heads and "Swallow!" for tails.

Richard "it always works" B

Bad House Guest

 I believe that one of the things that make holidays enjoyable is that you take a break from worrying about things. You're not thinking "I really must make the cable entry for the security light watertight" while you're on an Atlantic cruise.

As such I was a terrible houseguest over the Christmas period. I stayed in my friend's lodge on a holiday park in North Devon. If you're not familiar with a lodge, it's much nicer than a static caravan, but you could move it somewhere else - if you had a large crane and two lorries.

We visited his father and I gave my friend some advice about dealing with the finances of the elderly - adding massively to his New Years To Do list. I went outside in the morning and came back inside to tell him that his gutters were blocked and that the downpipe was disconnected - adding massively to our Before Lunch To Do list.

I was also partly responsible for some pretty shocking hangovers, but they seemed to appreciate the cocktails that preceded them.

Richard "ghost of chores yet to come" B