@LD,
Right next to the Dalmunzie estate theres some lodges up on the hill . Stayed there last Halloween and would love to go back there.
Never underestimate the strength of local knowledge. Thank you all so far for your help. I’d be driving up from windy wet West Wales so would be pretty pissed off to get snowed off after 12 hours of driving.

Plus, I benefit directly from my labour, not some ungrateful mul tibillion pound corporation who hate their employees, but thats a different story.
Bikes are ace.

I find bikes are easy to work on. Access all round, you can lift em with one hand, relativey small torque values, simple technology, nice and relaxing job. Used to stripdown, clean and rebuild my old Rock Lobster in a shift, bearings out and cleaned in an ultrasonic well within an 8 hour shift, every 3 weeks (every nights rotation).
Having spent all day drilling a hardened stainless sleeve out of a 5 ton press tool at an awkward angle, bike soannering is therapy compared to that.

So theyre unlikely to be locked off for a wee bit of snow, it would have to be proper tumping down before they get locked off? Been to Scotland in winter several times but never seen them used. The fact Glenshee has a ski lift area about 2 miles up the road from where I was aiming to go suggssts theres a good chance snow is likely.

I ‘ve done it, fitted a cheap pot-bellied stove into my wooden 16’x10’ shed/ workshop about 15 years ago. Still use it every winter, in fact I’m going to use it this evening. Very very simple job.

Id get a spare wheel from somewhere. The only time I had to change a wheel roadside was when the carcass had decided to come apart. Good luck Sliming that.

Nasty fatal case of Covid coming her way as soon as the dust settles, I reckon, she got too much dirt on the big names .

Lack of sleep is the trigger for me.
I am by nature a night owl, and a week or two of morning shift ( get to sleep at around 2am or later, up at 5am) sees me very likely to be suffering with a few.
As for cures, no idea, but i will be following this with interest.

Did anyone ever have Pony Linebackers in any colour scheme except Miami Dolphins turquoise and orange? I have never seen another pair in the flesh.
Also, the girls used to wear the gigantic Barker Bros jeans and bucket hats.

And those awful White Dove; you don’t need wings to fly bombers.

I just had one installed a few weeks ago. No previous experience of combi boilers before this, but I preferred my old airing cupboard system and tank. Apparently the new Viessmann boilers are hard to set up, acco rding to the bloke who installed it. There is one bloke who works in his company who advises all new owners on how to set it up, and he advises people dont touch it until they download the app first?
I just set the temperature on the bluetooth thermostat, and control it that way. It certainly looks like a quality bit of kit, but has quite a bit of lag between running the hot tap and hot water appearing.
Like I say, no previous experience of combi boilers so no idea if this is common or not.

I have tried a hairdryer on coal, and basically you get a forge capable of heating steel up to slippery heat.
Bushcrafters use a little telescopic stainless pipe to blow air directly into the embers of a fire . Same principle, air flow will differ though. It definitely works to get a smouldering fire to burst into life.

Sounds like a cold flue problem. Is there any way you could insulate your flue against it?
A good ,quick and hot way to get a fire started, or to at least prime a flue that i use is to get dedicated kindling wood and put it in an airing cupboard or similar for a few days beforehand. Shave , or if youre good with an axe, chop little shavings off this and stack in the grate. Build a little jenga tower around it from similar dry splittings, and light. Burns hot and smokeless after about 10 secs when i do it in my stove and in my open fireplace. The injection of top air also clears any smoke, as it aids in secondary burn.
Do you have firebricks around the sides of your stove? These will aid immensely in keeping the heat in the firebox where you want it. If there is too much spare space in your firebox maybe you could put another layer of firebrick in there to reduce the amount of free space you have to heat before the stove starts to heat.
The weed burner up the flue trick sounds like it could be a winner too, you could light a small bit of cardboard to smoke test it to see if the draw is sufficient before lighting the fire proper, that would avoid the flue belching a real fires’ worth of smoke back at you .

You could bush the drill body if the scaff bar is too small in diameter.

Scaffolding bar would be plenty strong enough for this. Wont look pretty but will defo do the job.

Quick, clean kill like a headshot or nine iron, or else leave them alone. Theyre only trying to live, its not their fault they were born vermin. All of this applies only if they are entering your house or if you have a standing water source like a pond in your garden (Weils disease).
I have rats in my garden this time of year ,after the windfall apples, but I also have squirrels and birds and whatever else, so I take the rough with the smooth . Yin and yang, innit?

Always wanted Tin Can Alley but no way were my parents forking out for that. Eventually got it from a jumble sale a few years later. Loved it.
Penny racers were fun too, but I spent most of my childhood up the woods or fishing, so didnt really have many toys.

Best xmas pressie ever though was a tiny rowboat my old man bought off the fella next door, the one whos garage I eventually knocked down, and I had to share it with my brother. We had hours of fun taking it onto the salt marsh at high tide and flicking cowpats at the marooned cattle with the paddles.

Trying to get in the christmas spirit by listening to the Bad Religion Christmas album. Who’d have thought carols would make tidy punk songs?

The leverage on t he branch at 6′ from its trunk might be excessive though.

I had exactly the same idea many years ago when I was an angry little bugger with loads of energy. I used to hang mine from a tree up the local woods and train by the light of a Coleman Northstar petrol lantern, and usually burn myself carrying it back.
The reason was that i used to hang it off my old girls garage beam, but beam was carrying through into next doors attached garage. They had a broken drain which had washed all the support from underneath their foundations, and the constant vibration and shock ended up causing it to fail, and the party wall cracked and split down the middle. So I ended up throwing my heavy bag in the back of my 110 and heading off up the local woods every weekend for a stress relief session.
Great times.

Dont know if this counts, but I had a mate who used to roller ski around the place, on something akin to a ski with roller skate trucks at each end. He was training for the Vassalopet ski race, about 80 miles or so he said, in an area which doesnt really have much snow.

Edit: they are more like inline skates than roller skates, I just had a look.

But on a new, sharp knife, just use the strops until you really cant get away with it any longer.

The problem with water stones is that they dish in the middle as they are so soft. Its the softness which enables the quick build up of slurry which makes sharpening much more effective. We used to use soft green wheels ,which break down in a similar manner to a water stone, to sharpen tungsten carbide tools before diamond wheels became more accesible.Its the same principal used in both, constantly exposing fresh, sharp grit particles to the metal results in rapid removal of the metal.
I use both water stones and my latest acquisition, a diamond plate , by Trend i think. Not cheap, but I sharpen blades and chisels regularly for myself and my friends so its not a big problem.
Had really good results with both, would tend to prefer the diamond plate for a chisel though in order to get the back totally flat.
You can reflatten the dishing out of water stones by rubbing the face on a piece of emery taped to a sturdy piece of float glass, or, if you have access to one like I do, a granite or cast iron surface table . Draw an ‘x ‘ on the dished face of the stone with a pencil, across the corners of the stone, and rub until all traces of the pencilled ‘ x’ just disappears. Hey presto, flat, but not necessarily parallel, water stone.

Had the binos out ready over the weekend ready for mystery thrush to turn up, but seeing as all the apples on his favourite tree have been clobbered,he has probably moved on to orchards anew.
Im gonna assume, from descriptions of behaviour and size, that it was a Fieldfare with unusually dark colourations.

@shortbread- fanylion,
I bought one several years ago, and i have chimp arms too, but am built a bit stockier than you describe. I had to send it back because ,from memory, it was plenty long enough in the arms but the body portion was way too tight around the chest and back, I couldnt make my hands touch in front of me without feeling that I was gonna pop the back seams, if that makes any sense to you.
This is the extreme smock version Im talking about, I dont know if the fit is similar in the jacket version, sorry.
My buffalo fits just fine though as you have plenty of adjustment built in to the design.

Im gonna go with a darker than usual Fieldfare then, even though it lacks the grey cap and lighter areas.
Whatever it is can put the apples away, theyre there all day, either eating apples or sitting on the floor giving all the other birds the eye.

I had a mate who used to cycle to work and was fed up with getting bullied into the kerb by car drivers.
He had a sock or similar filled with old scrap tungsten carbide lathe tool tips to hand. Any car driver who shoved him, tooted him, screamed at him out of the passenger window whilst passing , etc, had his quarter lights taken out in short order.

Yep, bilberries are gorgeous, called Winberries down here though. Perfect thirst killer on a hot summers day, saved my arse quite a few times in the past.
Edit: ooh hang on, just did a google check on bilberries, winberries look identical but seem to run smaller and are glossy not dewy. Anyway, winberries are great, little balls of supertart juice , very welcome when your mouths gone all cuckoospit .

I’ve had redwings before in my garden, but this bird is much much larger, same barrel chest as a pigeon but very obviously part of the thrush tribe. Built like a roidhead with the attitude to match, not scared of magpies either.
Chest colouration is what has thrown me, it has thrush markings, but they are black over a background of dark brown and reddish.
Google a melanistic jaguar cat. The chest is those colours, but stripey not rosetted.

Anyone seen any motorway pears, apricots, plums, etc?
I have seen cherry trees with little cherry trees growing all around them, and they were in a services in Somerset I think. The presence of lickle baby trees proves tbey were fruiting.
I have also seen wild blueberry bushes as tall as me, but thats cheating a bit cos that was in Canada.

Hmm ,Fieldfare is a possibility, but it is very dark, also much larger than the blackbirds which are hovering around the apple tree, hoping the fat git will bugger off so they can have some too.

Also, there is a steelworks in my locale which produces insane amounts of warm water. This has lead to the belief thatt the seas around it contain Tarpon, a game fish usually found in Florida. Do all steelworks have tbeir own urban myths?

Fig trees grow very succesfully in my part of the UK, I ‘ve grown some myself. Brown Turkey was the variety.
Well, I know all about fruit pips having such varied and ancient genetics that youre unlikely to get a palatable apple tree from one. However, in the car park in my works, there is an apple tree that produces the most gorgeous pure crimson apples which taste like honey on a hot day. Unfortunately my attempts to get propagating scions has been fruitless ( boom boom!) due to how high the branches are , and theyre behind an 8’ fence.
Just a thought, all the modern varieties of apple started as a pip once. Only the one tree of each variety mind, and subsequent trees were propagated from that variety.
The original Bramley apple is dead, but seeing as every subsequent Bramley was propagated from its tissue, its still alive in a million places across the planet at the same time. Like planting one of my fingers then having a million johnnymarones all over the globe.

Nope, this bird is much stockier, has the evil crow eyes with white liner too. Also, has a very dark colouration.

I know its probably highly illegal, but on that plot of cleared and left land, I would be planting all the autumn nuts and apple pips I could find. If no one does any further work, then theyll grow, if someone does turn up with a JCB then youve lost nothing except the effort required to collect windfall acorns and poke a hole in the ground for each one.
Guerilla forestry is the future.

What twonks says, he speaks the truth.

Quick tip for you. If you find yourself without your stropping block for whatever reason, a piece of corrugated cardboard makes a decent alternative, but you wont get the superbright finish to the bevel. Use the raw cardboard side not any glosdy printed side. The wood fibres will grab and rub off any edge imperfections surprisingly easily. Watch the cardboard turn black with your blade material.
Also, similarly, a quick way to dull a good edge is to cut cardboard with it.

The knife is brand new, yes? This means it is probably as sharp as it needs to be, the Japanese dont mess about when it comes to sharpening knives.
What is your intended use for the knife? Is it going to be used to chop food, or slice it? I would stick to slicing for now, until you learn how to sharpen a knife properly on another, cheap knife. As long as your practise knife is hard enough, it will take a keen edge.
Now, before you go anywhere near a stone, learn to strop your knife.
This is very very simple, and also intuitive; you will see by the polished finish if you have the knife at too shallow or steep an angle. If you are sticking to softish produce, and not using it anywhere near bone, it is highly unlikely that your edge will wear flat. It may, however roll or become bruised.
What stropping does is it corrects the roll or bruise, and aligns it with the cutting bevel of the blade again. You can buy strops from wherever you can buy straight razors, but they are simply a bit of chrome leather ( i used a scrap of old welding apron) wrapped around any flat, squarish surface. Mine is stapled to a bit of 75mm square timber offcut, nothing fancy.
Charge ( load up) the strop with your stropping compound. I use two types, green chrome oxide for rapid corrections and ‘quick ‘ removal of metal, and the much finer blue compound (smurf poo) which gives a mirror finish and razor sharp edge. Literally, you can shave with the blade afterwards. I use both compounds on separate faces of my stropping block.
The technique i use is simple. Drag your blade backwards ( ie spine first, cutting edge trailing) at an angle approximate to your cutting bevel angles. Do not use any force, the strop will do the work, lightest pressure only. Do make sure you cover the entire cutting edge in one stroke though. Do this 10 times one side, then 10 the other. Do the original side 8 times, then the other side 8 times. Then 6 times, 4 times, and so on until you get to 1. The last stroke is a slow long stroke.
I would recommend green chrome first, then blue superfine compound later. You will feel tbe green ‘ grab’ the blade, the blue will feel much smoother. You will see the compounds darken with black streaks. This is your blade material being removed and deposited in the compound. Your bevels will be highly polished if done correctly, which in itself will help the edge pass through material due to lack of friction, thus aiding a smooth cut.
Do this before you go anywhere a stone with your new blade. The stone is to correct wear, flattened edges due to mechanical damage like chopping, chips in the edge, etc. Your blade should not have any of these defects from new if it is a quality item. It may require honing, but i would definitely try stropping the blade first. Think along the lines of polishing versus filing and you wont be far off. Practise on your shit knife first, then when proficient try your posh jap knife.
Warning. It becomes addictive.

+1 for a Buffalo P+P shirt, the one with the hand warmer pouch and the cinch belt . Mine is over 20 years old, and was unwearable when new as it was so warm. No joke these things are mental warm. Wind wont get through them, it has to really rain to penetrate the outer layer, but that doesnt matter as your body heat warms any ater which seeps through in no time. Also takes not much time to dry out, give it a shake to knock any water droplets off the pile lining and shove it on a radiator. Easy.
For a combo which kept me warm in -40 up a mountain in Alberta, i wore a long sleeve base layer, like a lifa, a hooded jumper, and my Paramo over it, along with hat and gloves. Absolutely fine, and I didnt climb the mountain either, i got a lift, so wasnt warm from the exertion. Not much clothing but very comfortable in extreme low temps.

Gonna upset you all now and say that the absolute best goretex jacket I ever used was an early 90s issue army goretex jacket. It wasnt light, it wasnt fancy, it had some chest pockets and a hood and was by far the best performing goretex waterproof I have ever used.
Overall i have found goretex to be absolutely shite since,I owned loads ,hoping to find one which worked, til i bought the overall best jacket I have ever used ,my Paramo . Not popular on here and I have no idea why, it does everything, kept me warm in Canada, kept me dry in UK.
Is looks or exclusivety more important to you than performance? Not putting your priorities down at all, its your choice , but I’d be looking for performance over looks as we head into into another soaking wet, windy, poxy British winter.
Jottnar jackets performance might be the bollocks, i dont know, seems a lot of money to risk. What about some exotic foreign camo surplus goretex jacket, like the Canadian or Swedish M90 ?

Get Cobalt HSS from any reputable manufacturer. Examples of such would be Dormer, Presto, etc.
They usually have a 135 degree drill point angle, whereas normal HSS bits have a 118 degree point angle. Worth remembering if you have any kind of drill sharpening jig available to you. 135 degree points are not as easy to sharpen.
On the whole though, despite the potential hassle you might encounter when sharpening them, they are much better than the average HSS drill bit, their performance on awkward materials like Stainless is much better.