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That calculator looks great. I always wanted a Curta mechanical calculator then I looked up the price of them!
My maths class at school had a binch of similar mechanical calculators on top of some cupboards this was 2000ish so way way way out of use.
I regret not stealing one or two.
I'm aways hoping we get a the stw tech team posting here saying forums fixed
Yes, would love a Curta, but as you say, a bit expensive.
The boot release switch on our Mazda5 stopped working 3 days before a camping trip last weekend. Typical poor timing as always. Replacements look to be hard to come by and ship from Europe so going to take ages. So I took it apart to have a look if there was an obvious problem. Inner boot panels came off nice and easily without breaking any clips. Whole tailgate handle was then easy enough to get off. Disconnected the switch and it looks a little bit corroded inside. So, sprayed both sides with some contact cleaner and plug/unplugged a few times to scratch anything off. And it magically came back to life!
All done and fixed within an hour and no money having to be spent. That's my kind of repair. Worked fine all week so all is good.
My carbon kayak paddle - left it leaning against the back of the car whilst I loaded the kayak onto the roof - reversed back and ‘crunch’. Fortunately it was only split along the shaft - was able to get some suitable sized carbon tube off eBay to stick up the middle. Really impressed with MMA adhesive to glue it back together - stronger bond than epoxy and more flexible.
I made this a few year back and it has been great for displaying my art.
The upright bits are squeezed between two bits of 2x4. One 2x4 is screwed to the bed of the trolly and the other clamped to the side of this with enough force to keep the picture wall upright.
This Saturday I got hit by a gust of wind and was suddenly less upright as the big screws holding the 2x4 got pulled through the base of the trolley.
I figure some M8 bolts, thick penny washers and steel spreader plates should stop that happening again.
Okay, how do I get the image link shared by google photos the actually show a picture?
This broke : https://photos.app.goo.gl/4sVW4gw3y9MyD4Uk6
Here it is broke : https://photos.app.goo.gl/KhqsxCBTYZz3oon56
Here is the repair : https://photos.app.goo.gl/79d5wngjkfKTqPF86
Desperate times when the coffee machine broke on Tuesday.
Parts arrived for it at lunch time today and it's up and running again.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54038994787/in/dateposted/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54040311380/in/photostream/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54039862991/in/photostream/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54040116693/in/photostream/
Swapped a gear cable and straightened the mech hanger on my bike.
Sounds simple but a couple of years ago used to have real issues getting an eagle drivechain to work for any period of time. Not sure if I've just got the knack for it or if Sram's made some stealth changes over the years to make it a bit more robust and less sloppy in the pivots etc.
Just darned a sock for the first time. Not pretty but should work.
Also remade the pool filter shed roof from scrap 2.5 years after it was destroyed. A bitch because the slab isn't square...again it's at least functional if not pretty.
GT Fury, last weekend. Built from a bare frame into a working bike in just over an hour and with 2 mins to spare for a mate to do his race run. He was getting his helmet on as i was still fitting the brake, jumping around "will it be done Steve, will it be finished in time".
Spent half an hour today repairing one of our local trails.
Filled in a hole that was developing and re built a corner that was falling down the hill where folks can't make the turn after a rock slab.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54042386570/in/dateposted/
Filled in a hole that was developing
Do you now work for Amey?
😉
A bit dull, but the washing machine. One of the hanger springs had snapped so the drum was hanging down on one side and the door seal twisted. Drum and concrete weights banging everywhere. New spring ordered and used the drum central lifting eye + a strong youth to lift it up and new spring connected. All done for £20.
Sticking focus mechanism in a Minolta lens. It's pretty much just like a bike with all those cogs right...
Our burglar alarm after one of the bathroom fitters sliced through the cable from the kitchen door sensor and knocked out the auxillary fuse in the control box stopping the whole thing from working - gel-filled B-crimps to splice the six-core cable back together and an 800mA glass fuse in the control box. And yes I did cut mains power to the latter before opening it up. All quite straightforward, no engineer code required to reset the alarm afterwards. Result 🙂
Also, a 2017 Wahoo Kickr. Changed every bearing in the thing - pulley wheel, fly wheel, free hub, belt tensioner pulley, all done. Just waiting for a new drive-belt to replace the visibly distorting one that's been on there for the last couple of years. No thanks to Wahoo for being miserly with both information and spare parts - they\d clearly rather I'd buy a new trainer.
The crux of the thing was getting the bearing that's hidden behind the ratchet ring on the pulley wheel out. There is no tool available, the 2014 3D printed one won't fit, apparently. I eventually got a local precision engineering shop - they're always 'precision' because who wants to be a 'roughly in the ball-park' one? - to bore out the metal between the two bearings, so they could be pressed out without removing the ratchet ring, and replace the missing metal with an equivalent spacer. Seems to have worked fine and means if it ever needs replacing again, they can both come out the same way with no need to mess about with the ring.
Sticking focus mechanism in a Minolta lens. It’s pretty much just like a bike with all those cogs right…
Sure. Bit of chain lube in there, she'll be reet.
Sticking focus mechanism in a Minolta lens. It’s pretty much just like a bike with all those cogs right…
I have repaired a few leaf shutters and in my experience something falls out when I am not looking and disappears in the ether rendering everything pointless until minor part is replaced (and you immediately find the original at this point).
So pretty much identical yes.
My comment was slightly tongue in cheek, this isn’t the first lens I’ve had apart (and they’ve all gone back together too).
Also fixed a sticking aperture in an old Soligor and replaced a torn flexi for the VR in a modern Nikkor.
That hole in the mud is not a repair just a botch the stone belongs on the dyke beside it, I'd be too embarrassed to post that pic
Guaranteed the hole will re appear next to it within the end of October
stone belongs on the dyke beside it.
I've been waiting for the first smartarse to post this.
The stone came from out of the ground under the trees not from the wall.
Maybe you can pop along and tarmac the whole lot for us.
Failing that I'll dig more stone and continue filling as and when needed.
Spent half an hour today repairing one of our local trails.
I am sure I recognise this but I cannot place it!
It's tweedvalley right?
My lawnmower. It stalled the other day and would not restart. Thought it was air filter, cleaned it, not that. Checked oil, checked fuel. Then took the air filter assembly apart and found _another_ air filter that was blocked with grass particles and leaf mulch. Cleaned it, lawnmower works again now!
Handle in an axe today. Had some length of Ash kicking around for just the purpose. Roughed it out with the bench saw and finished off with a draw knife.
Re roofed the wood store at my mums but that barely counts as it was just sheets of wrinkly tin.
Made two good Look Keo pedals out of 4 worn ones in the week.
Replaced the belt on our vented tumble dryer yesterday for the 2nd time in the 10 years we've had it. I really would like a heat pump dryer to reduce energy costs but £6 for a belt Vs c.£400 for a new dryer pays for a lot of uses.
Our kitchen tap had got "slow", so I bought a £6 aerator spanner and in the space of 3 mins had removed a pile of grit from the top of the aerator and we have a strong flow again.
As a self confessed Reg Prescott of DIY, thats made my weekend TBH, very satisfying.
The radiator in the spare room was stuck on full blast. Fixed by removing the trv and smacking the metal valve with a hammer.
Guaranteed the hole will re appear next to it within the end of October
It's now almost half way through November and I've yet to add any more rocks to it. 😉
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stu-b/54135029544/in/dateposted/
LOL, ways good to hold small grudges. Good work on the trail maintenance.
More of a gentle pisstake than a grudge. 😀
The carpet didnt get any cleaner when I used the vacuum cleaner, a Dsyon DC40.
Google showed some faultfinding so I traced the no suction issue to a torn little changeover hose in the base which was replaced for less than a tenner off ebay.
It still didnt suck, so I went through everything again and poked a spoke down a main tube to find it blocked with a plastic wheel nut cap, caught up in fluff etc. It works better than ever now
I only left out one washer when I put it back together
Electric window on the passenger side was making an awful clunking noise. The metal runner had sheared allowing it to step off the guide. New runners for £10, rust prevention on the inside of the door whilst in there. New vapour barrier (as the old one had clearly been trashed by the Autoglass guy back in 2012) and we’re all up and running again. The ship of Theseus sails again!
Refurbed my La Pavoni, a leaky element seal caused a fair bit of rust in the base and a deformed plastic group sleeve was not playing nicely with the piston seals.
Some new seals, brass group sleeve and etch priming, it’s working good as new! Nice coffee still from a 20 year old machine 😉
https://flic.kr/p/2qCtBd5
https://flic.kr/p/2qCuPPt
https://flic.kr/p/2qCoWKN
https://flic.kr/p/2qCvFZ9
https://flic.kr/p/2qCoWLe
Derailleur was making a God awful noise. Turns out the big jockey wheel was in pieces.
So out with the box of ancient dead derailleurs...and lo and behold one that had the right sized bearing. Punched it out cleaned it up and pressed it in.
Very satisfying indeed (smug face emoji)
Yesterday - fancy thermostatic kettle was getting picky about how it sat on its base and wouldn't turn on unless it was just right. Took the base apart, found that one of the sprung connectors had cracked and bent a bit out of shape. Soldered a bit of reinforcement behind it and kettle is now back to behaving itself.
Repaired is possibly pushing it a bit, but my newly acquired 7 ton log splitter is now fully functional.
Undergoing inspection from Barney 😀
£50 spares or repair, motor runs, ram moves but doesn't build pressure.
Checked the oil level and topped it up when I got home, works perfectly.
Yesterday got a phone call from my son saying his boiler had packed up. Condensate pipe had frozen so a temporary bowl was setup below the boiler and the condensate pipe disconnected. Can't unfreeze it as it's a big ladder job and we don't have one.
So more of a bodge than a fix.
Oh and turns out his kitchen radiator is not getting hot today, so off to look at that later.
3 phase 16A socket in the garage. Wired to old standards, my new 3 phase AC charger for the car wouldn't complete it's self check cleanly (so no charging!)
Stripped it all out, new cable (of the requisite size of course) wired up to current standards and now i can charge on the drive without having to string a cable from the workshop, across the block paving to the car. (all on my own property, not planning to garotte anyone).
Also sorted out the schucko 16A sockets as well. Had a poor earth connection, now they don't.
Yesterday got a phone call from my son saying his boiler had packed up.
Snap. Fixed our boiler yesterday. Finally re-routed the condensate pipe indoors. Will save me a fortune in heating kettles full of water to de-ice the thing every winter.
Our oven was heating up but wasn't reporting it was at the right temperature when it was set above 190 or so. My first thought was the thermostat so I pulled the oven out and swapped that but no change.
I'll confess that I then did something that will lose me any credibility - I looked at the user manual. I found out that I could select other modes (ie neither of the 2 we usually use) which meant I could check if each element was working - that indicated that the rear circular element wasn't working so I got a spare and popped it and and... still no difference
So I then started checking through the circuit board and wondered if the power relay for the rear element was the culprit. So I got one of those, took out the pcb and replaced the relay, stuck it all back together and now the rear element is working again!
Fridge hinge. Stupid design, the weight of the door is taken by the plastic trim at the bottom. This is the seconds time I've fixed it in 15 years, the plate washer I used first time 1o years ago wasn't enough to spread the load so I drilled and parted off a piece of 30mm aluminium round bar I had in the garage.
Had some storm Eowyn damage to our crappy pantile roof
Close up
A very long day roofing and looking half decent again
Now pissing it down, feeling pretty happy with that!
Madame bought an old marble top wash stand, it was cute but the marble was pretty buggered and etched by plant pots.
I ummed and ahhd and bought a cheapo set of diamond polishing discs and set to. Immediately I thought I'd wrecked it with the coarse discs.
But I stayed with it, working up the grades one by one until amazingly I had removed all the etching and returned it to almost good as new. It looks ace now
Very pleased as I had never tried it before, plus major brownie points were received
The brakes on my road bike were feeling underwhelming with very little initial bite despite replacing the swisstop pads with a fresh set.
A couple of hours later and they're as good as new. The bushings had completely seized and the bearings were just brown rusty gunk.
As usual the moral of the story is never use Muck-Off, it's horrible stuff. Just stick with a bucket of warm water and generic car shampoo except for perhaps targeting the really gunky bits of the drivetrain with a brush.
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Although my thoughts whilst striping it down into tiny pieces were "why on earth did we collectively just accept that disk brakes were expensive, there's only 12 parts to a brake caliper"
2 halves
1 body seal
2 pistons
2 seals
2 caliper half bolts
2 caliper bolts
1 bleed nipple
There's over 60 in that rim caliper if you include the repentantly pressed together bits like bushings and detent rings.
*permanently
Just brought a m770 shifter back from the dead. And revived a couple of horrible Altus shifters for which death is too kind.
My rechargeable hair trimmer didn't appear to be charging (blades running very slowly even after a long charge). I very nearly binned it and spent £30 on a new trimmer when it suddenly occurred to me that it might just need a bit of oil. Three drops of 3 in 1 later and it's working perfectly again.
Possibly the quickest repair in history 🙂
The driver's window had stopped working on my Mini (R52), I followed a guide on YouTube to fix it.
Removed the Door card (pic 1)
Used a 3D printed spanner to remove the awkward cogs which hold the window glass (pic 2)
Removed the window mechanism
Detached the motor
Removed the cover from the motor and cleaned up the commutator with some fine sandpaper (pic 3)
Pieced it all back together, and it's been working fine for the last 3 weeks
No photos but the car, that I use about once a week now as Mrs jeffl uses it more than me now. It had an irritating interior trim rattle at 1,250 rpm. This is exactly the rpm you need when trundling along at 30 mph in 4th gear. It's been annoying me every time I drive it, but if I'm driving somewhere it's for a reason so I drive, do whatever I need, get home and forget a out it, until next time.
Finally spent a whole 10 minutes locating and fixing the rattle. Now driving in rattle free bliss.
Was at the cycling club annual dinner last night at a local village community centre. I missed most of the award handing out because I was rooting a stepladder out of the store room and carrying it through the main hall to reach the isolation valve for the mens urinals, which were flooding the gents. 😀
I did decline the offer of a plunger to try and clear the blockage, told them they needed an actual plumber for that!
Central locking on my car, which has been annoying me for about a million years so that every time I had to open the back right door (which is basically every time I put a bike in it) I got pissed off, but then forgot by the time i got into the house. You can buy a whole assembly for about £110 or just the little actuator pack for about £70 or a chinese actuator pack for about £30 (though they're not as well made) or you can buy the motor from aliexpress for 87 pence and then laboriously take the whole not-designed-to-be-dismantled bastard apart and replace the motor and then plastic weld it all back together and hope it works. Which it does!
This is distracting me from a failed attempt to fix the ABS on the other car by spraying contact cleaner at stuff and hoping. Cheap shit bearings 🙁
Doing some prep work prior to installing a log burner...no lintel. Now installed; first time I've done anything like this!
- That wee skinny 4x3 lintel is meant to be used with 3 course of brick above it and looks to be sagging a bit
- Give you credit for good size of rests
<li style="text-align: left;">A 6x4 universal lintel is the much better choice seeing as there is a crack up the middle of the chimney breast
I checked and the lintel is not curved, it think it's the lens in my phone camera!
One of the pivot nuts came off my new bike, someone (else) mustve removed it and forgot to put new loctite on it Its only a tenner from YT, but £15p&p, and the wait, so I had to go all around town to find a 1.0mm nut so i could ride at the weekend. Nowhere had anything to fit,not even RS Components,and Id given up hope as i went by an autospares shop but checked it out. They had none, but i saw some brake pipe fittings that looked right, and it fit. I cut the end off with the grinder so i wont catch my ankle on it, and bolted it up. Meanwhile a mate got a normal M10nut and had it rethreaded to 1.0mm pitch but its a bit too big for the recess and the bolt's too short 
sorry about the double pic, but if i try to fix it it'll be worse
Just repaired/replaced our dishwasher door cord, the bit that stops it dropping like a stone. Fitting the replacement cord, the end of the spring decided to break off too.. mangled the **** out of the last part of the spring to make a new hook 😀 If it last a week, it'll have been worth it, and fitting a new spring won't be an issue.
Word to the wise, they make dish washer parts out of tin that isn't filed down, the total cost of the repair was £3.99 plus most of a box of plasters.
Daughter backed into another car while backing out of the drive in the week. Spent Saturday morning removing the bumper, then 10mins with a hairdryer (in lieu of a heat gun) and voila it popped back into shape 👍
Once the weather improves, I'll take it off again and paint it to tidy it up.
I'm just relieved that the car she hit was an ancient Land Rover Defender which barely even registered anything had happened 😁
I wanted a Bosch GKF600 palm router for occasional use, so I've been scouring the marketplaces and so on while contemplating no-brand similar ones on Amazon and so on. One came up for £90 including the plunge accessory that costs about that new on its own, so off I went. Except when I got there the guy couldn't get the router running, so he sold me the lot for £20. £10 later I've replaced the brushes and it's up and going again! Relatively simple for many people I'm sure but I feel a bit smug at saving some landfill and money, and basically "being my dad" because it's the sort of thing he seems to do quite often. Hopefully it lasts, I think its seen some heavy use in the past but it'll be in pleasant semi-retirement in my shed.
I also fixed a small leak in my espresso machine, which combined all the things I dread - plumbing and working in awkward tight spaces on expensive items. That was a relief to get right.
I'm restoring a 1950's Elliott Progress 2G pillar drill. During disassembly I had to cut out the shaft and fork that engaged the backgear which was seized on to the lever.
The shaft fits into the lever in the middle and moves the fork which engages/disengages the lower right gear in the picture below
I also added a second oil seal O-ring on the shaft which sits inside a bronze bush in the housing to prevent future oil leaks.
We own a bridge that provides access from the main road to our house and three neighbours.
There are two huge bed logs topped with joists and running boards. Three of the joists were looking decidedly worse for wear and the runners were starting to break up.
So we had a morning putting things right.
I got the 4 metre joists milled from trees that fell in the big storm three years ago. One of the neighbours (a landscaper) got some fibreglass mesh 'stuff' and we got stuck in.
Gearbox refurb and swap on by 3ltr BMW.
Possibly the worst way to do it. Gravel Drive , Febuary , No help and No idea.
1 vague yooTube video later , a few very long extensions purchaced and a newer,low milage box fitted with new seals, new pan etc.
Took around 30 hours in total. Next time it would be 10. It moves under its own steam , was harder in places it should not have been and easier in others. ie . Sliding a 50kg box and TC up a sheet of OSB3 to align it to the engine. That went ok, removing a silly 1mm thin dust cover held in by a random , afterthought 10mm nut hidden behind the DPF = 4hours
Made another couple of bits for the Elliott Progress No.2G pillar drill.
The previous owner had snapped off the little table for holding the chuck key. I machined a new one then welded it on to the collar
I also had to make a new oil sight glass as the bakelite original had cracked and they are no longer available anywhere. Turned a new one from some brass so should last forever now.
It's now finished except bolting it down to the table and tidying up.
The cord on the patio parasol broke a week ago. £4 of 4mm yachting cord and an hour of my time and it's all fixed.
The fence at the back of the garden has been taken down and re-hung as lots of the original screws had broken. Much fun getting bits of screw out of weatherboarding and cant rails with the drill chuck.
Last weekend my missis was complaining about the mower spitting grass at her. Well yeah there front is completely rusted through in a bloody great split. New one ordered last Sunday, delivered Tuesday and everything swapped over this morning.
Before
After
