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Last night I was kept awake by the idea of buying an old treadle-sewing machine/table and removing/rigging the sewing machine with swappable grinding/polishing wheels.
Don’t know if it’s mechanically feasible or not. Seems obviously doable. I have a few kitchen knives and a selection of penknives/multitools. But it’s not like I’d be sitting in the street sharpening knives for useful moneys. I could just buy a bench grinder from toolsRchinese but it doesn’t attract me.
I’d also quite like a (similarly manual) pillar-drill and scroll-saw. And also a ‘resin-station’ (for resins both known and unknown!)
Just the same ambitions as everyone else really.
A central heating system powered by a tandoor oven so you can make naan bread while waiting to run a bath
a three tap kitchen sink - hot water, cold water, mains hummus.
that latter project is obviously contingent on Ramona’s Kitchen hummus becoming a nationalised utility.
A hand powered shredder,integrated into the plastics recycling bin lid.
I would be amazed if a treadle polisher wasn't made in the past
After all you get treadle metal working lathes and scroll saws etc. I have a hand cranked bench top drill press it's very basic and very clever.
an old treadle-sewing machine/table
I have an old Singer one,maybe I could link it to the bin lid shredder idea?
🤣🙃
That's how it was done in the olden days.
Note the wheel is relatively massive, (in the true physics sense of the word) so you'd need to make the large pulley on the sewing machine base a lot heavier to maintain some inertia. Sewing machines don't need much of that.
I've just painted my newly installed loft hatch and ladder.
I fancy a 'roof bath'. I'd need to install a kind of dorma into the roof of course. Then install a nice bath. Sitting in the tub on top of the house, looking out over the city with a glass of wine seems a splendid way to spend one's time.
Currently mind planning a boot rack and seat for the back hall.
Thinking about using materials I can get my hands on cheaply. Looking at a uni-strut frame, a length of 300mm wide basket tray for shoes and a scaffolding board for the seat!
Sooo many of these.
First I want to route the hot shower waste water to defrost the car windscreen and pre warm the engine block rather than just go down the drain. How much hot water is wasted going down the drain? Must be a way to recover this energy.
Solar light switches and light fittings seem an obvious idea. 😉
Gutters that collect ALL the rain water for gardening / filling the tank on the toilet. I can add water butts for gardedning but filling the toilets flush tank is harder
A bath cistern. Takes ages to run a bath and if you don’t pay attention you can over fill it. A house with a bath should be able to fill a bath with bath-temperature water on demand.
pull the chain… spla-doosh! Baths ready.
My friend, who is a top flight engineer, has been converting his house to utilise rain water over the last couple of years following a stint in Africa leading to an appreciation for conservation. The system now includes eight butts that feed into a 5 ton container buried under his patio. It seems a lot of work to flush the toilets (not allowed to use it for dishwasher etc) and the filtration system alone is rather convoluted. Keeps him happy though.
How much hot water is wasted going down the drain? Must be a way to recover this energy.
You think that's bad. We extract water, we pump it to treatment plants, we UV radiate it, filter it, chlorinate it, sometimes we even de salinate sea water. We pump it to storage, then distribut it through infrastructure that which loses something like 15% as acceptable. Slowly but surely it arrives in our house where we take a massive shit in it and flush it away.
We literally shit in drinking water.
Rainwater harvesting and grey water harvesting really should be a priority.
A bath cistern
Similarly the other day I was thinking, toilet cisterns should have two chambers. One flush in each so you never have to wait for it to refill before you exit.
Filled with grey water obviously, I'm not a monster.
Gutters that collect ALL the rain water for gardening / filling the tank on the toilet. I can add water butts for gardedning but filling the toilets flush tank is harder
I've done that😁
My house is perfect though, double story main bit with a single story bit out the back where the bathroom is.
So water comes from the top gutter into a header tank in the bathroom loft. This header tank feeds the cistern with rain water. What used to be the mains feed into the cistern now goes into the header tank with a ball cock on it. It therefore mostly flushes with rainwater but if the header tank drops below a certain level if it doesn't rain then it tops up to that minium with mains water so I can still flush. I'm in Scotland so that is rare.
Having a gutter a story higher than the bathroom loft helps a lot though, everything is done by gravity.
Gutters that collect ALL the rain water for gardening / filling the tank on the toilet.
Back in the day when I went to the office (3 weeks ago?), the very large building that I work in had that. Facilities kept getting complaints about the colour of water in the bowls and ended up putting signs up explaining how the toilet cisterns were filled. I think there's still some treatment before use, UV perhaps?
The building also gets most of its cooling in the summer from pipes in the ceiling connected to heat exchangers in two small artificial lakes or by automatic opening windows at the top of the structure. Not bad for a 1997 construction.
Saw a toilet in a cafe that the sink was the cistern top so the washing of the hands filled the toilet up. Very simple and effective
Saw a toilet in a cafe that the sink was the cistern top
You see them in prisons too 🙂 (won't elaborate on why I know!)
I keep coming up with daft ideas for bike racks. Ones that don't hold the frame. From scissor types for the outside to rails that would allow you to slide it into the boot on its side.
Tried making one. Way way too heavy
BTW I looked into gray water a while ago. It's a damp sight more expensive than getting it from a tap.
I have invented a reverse entropy lego machine. It fixes the probelm of buying expensive lego kits that, over time, get subject to entropy and end up a jumbled mix of pieces in with all the other expensive kits you bought.
The idea beind my invention is that you drop all your jumbled lego into a hopper, select the object that the pieces originally made (from an intereactive screen) and then the machine sorts and bags all the pieces into that kit. Spare pieces are bagged separartely and any pieces missing are presented to you via the display with the option to buy them as part of the service.
Sadly the prototype I built (also from lego) got broken into pieces and now I cannot piece it back together.
BTW I looked into gray water a while ago. It’s a damp sight more expensive than getting it from a tap.
Yep, there was a report done that looked into attitudes to rainwater and gray water harvesting for a section of the population of London.
Cost and space were big issues against and a frightening percentage considered it unhygienic or dirty. And London tap water is rank aswell.