↑ same. I’m on the verge of just buying a new set of chisels, but making something like that looks like a challenge. Might see if I can 3D print one…

Following McMoonter on instagram means there are frequent pics of his wood sheds and holzhausen, so I got inspired to have a go…

It’s a very satisfying thing to build.

@pondo what website are you using? They official one is https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ but there are several unofficial versions.

Pretty pleased with this one 😎

Absurdle 5/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I like it. I like the fact that it’s just one puzzle a day – addictive without taking up much of your time.

Wordle 202 3/6

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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Ikea or Cheese
There’s a similar one, Ikea or Death Metal

Better still, Porn Star or My Little Pony 😎

Totally random but you get suspicious looks from all involved if you correctly guess a porn star name…

Another fan of the ZTTO 11-46 cassette here. Had one on my Orange for the last year, have just replaced it with another (not due to wear, qr failed while the bike was on the rear rack, whole wheel was missing when I got home from a ride 🙄). Had no issues at all with the old one.

When my eldest was about six my sister asked what to get him for Christmas. I said he’d asked for a length of plastic chain and some hooks, she thought I was taking the piss but went along with it.

They were immediately attached to the back of his RC monster truck and used for towing all manner of stuff. Still gets used now, four years later.

Awesome photos to kick off the thread! Hope to be a regular contributor, but struggle to get out with the scope as often as I’d like.

This is a recent-ish attempt at Saturn, using my phone held by hand to the eye-piece of the telescope… Under the circumstances I’m pretty pleased 😊

I’ve got an old Nikon D80 gathering dust and I’ve bought a telescope mount for it, so hopefully the quality will improve.

Ready or Not is pretty good.

Another vote for Get Out.

Not a recent film, but Black Swan is worth a watch, more psychological thriller than horror.

Also Leave No Trace is excellent. Not a horror or thriller, but the tension slowly ratchets up as the protagonists’ situation deteriorates. Based on a true story too.

A good one from the stats nerds at ESPN CricInfo – prior to this game the highest successful chase in the last four overs of a T20I was 56.

After 16 overs NZ needed 57 and they got it with an over to spare…

Great to watch as an a Englishman with NZ citizenship 😀

Stretching the definition of the thread a bit, more bodged than made… Dropped a pan lid onto its handle and the threaded bit shattered into many pieces. Coated the screw with PTFE spray and poured Araldite around it to recreate the tapped hole.

Slightly more on topic, since this half of the world is rapidly moving into summer I decided the empty log store next to the wood burner was looking pretty shabby and could do with tarting up for the next seven months or so…

Not great as firewood but looks pretty 👍

I’ve just bought one and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a DeWalt DCM565N with a 4Ah battery. Already have a couple of compatible 2Ah batteries from other tools. For comparison I’ve got four petrol saws too – a Stihl MS170 for most stuff, a Homelite 45cc saw with an 18″ bar for stuff the Stihl can’t manage, a cheapo wee top-handle saw and a Husky pole saw. The electric is getting a lot of use though.

As mentioned above, it has a fairly slow chain speed which I don’t like for felling, unless the trunk is less than about 6″. It just lacks power compared to petrol. But, I’ve felled a few black walnut trees (using the Stihl) and the DeWalt has been great for doing ground work afterwards. It goes through the trunks easily but slowly, they’re 10-12″. Great at dealing with brash too, I like that it’s off between cuts, rather than an idling two-stroke.

The battery life is pretty good. Today I got through about 30 cuts through trunks and branches between 12″ and 6″ before the battery started to fade – the power stays at a high level for most of the battery life then drops off rapidly. It claims to do 70 cuts through pressure-treated 4″ pine, so I’m happy with that.

By far the best thing for me is the lack of exhaust fumes. Means I can go out and do a quick bit of work before dinner and not make everyone else at the table breathe in the fumes, or faff about getting washed and changed. We also have quite a lot of wooded areas with quite dense undergrowth. Unless it’s a windy day exhaust fumes can build up under there when I’m removing smaller trees, makes it hard to breathe sometimes.

It definitely has a place, even if you have other saws available.

My eldest’s bike (Scott Scale 24) got nicked earlier this year. School holidays, he was in a holiday care programme based in his own school hall. I got a call mid-afternoon from one of the staff, he’d gone outside to ride his bike and it was gone. They’d done a lap of the grounds, couldn’t see it. They said he’d used it less than an hour before, so the theft was quite recent.

I figured it’s school holidays, must’ve been nicked by some bored scrotes loitering in the school grounds. There are two parks not too far from the school. I was working at home, also not far away, so jumped in the car and headed to the closest park where I spot four yoofs hanging around on a distant bench. They have some bikes. I started walking to wards them, was fairly sure one of the bikes on the ground was my son’s. Also noted that the four lads were probably 16-18. One of me, four of them, didn’t really fancy getting face to face with them.

Luckily I saw a mate doing a spot of rugby league training with his mates and their kids. He’s a big lad, as are his mates, so I quickly asked him to keep an eye on me and come over if anything kicked off. The yoofs clocked me making a beeline towards them and started moving away. I confirmed it was my son’s bike (not a common bike here, also way too small for the yoof), shouted “oi”, the lad pushing it just put it on the floor and they walked quickly away. Result! Probably about an hour from theft to recovery.

Get some that actually go down your lughole a bit, with wee soft silicone bits that grip and also block out external sound. Airpods just kind of hang on your outer ear.

I had a pair of JBL Reflect Flow until recently, they were very good. Great sound and stayed well put, they had an extra silicone bit that kinda hooked over part of the outer ear too.

Unfortunately the case died after a couple of years (stopped charging) and JBL couldn’t replace so I got to choose something else. I’ve now got some Jabra Active Elite 75t, which are awesome. They stay in the ears really well (they come with three sizes of silicone thingies – so did the JBLs). The sound is also excellent, you can tweak levels using the app, and they have active noise cancelling.

I’ve also been watching via VPN and get similar issues, although not quite as often. It generally resumes after a few seconds. I just assumed their hamsters were struggling due to higher-than-normal demand.

Check the towball size. There are 50mm and 1 7/8″ (about 48mm) variants.

The Socially Distant Sports Podcast is excellent. Three Welsh guys who I assume will be familiar to most of you but are completely unheard of down here in the southern hemisphere, talking about YouTube clips of old sporting moments. At least, that’s the premise, they generally drift off onto tangents about all manner of things. Two are professional comedians and one’s a sports journalist and all are mad passionate about sport and especially the social history around sport. Definitely NSFW unless you work on a building site, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

Also Desert Island Discworld, a Pratchett fan who has very interesting guests from non-mainstream backgrounds (genre authors, game designers, graphic novel artists) taking about their own work for a bit then having a discussion about a Discworld novel.

I cycle to work, my wife used to always drive. One day the logistics required me to take the car home. I rode there, approached from the driver’s side, front wheel off, bike into the boot, got into the car. It was a parking space facing onto a busy road, I waited for a gap for about two minutes – wanting to turn left. Saw a small gap but I’d have to time it perfectly and then boot it. So I did.

Unfortunately I hadn’t seen the very large, very solid wooden bollard near the passenger side of the car. Managed to damage the front left wing, both doors, rear left wing and the bit that runs beneath the doors. $6000 of damage, just shy of writing off the car.

My race number got drawn after my one and only entry to an organised race (Huka Challenge, Taupo, NZ), won a holiday for two to Thailand. Flights and ten nights’ accommodation paid for, plus travel around the country and entry to various tourist attractions.

That was the second-tier prize, the top one was won by a 15-year-old lad – a Holden Commodore SS!

My Gore Bike Wear Paclite jacket recently got a loose seam around the collar. Not bad for a 15-year-old jacket. I used Gear Aid Seam Grip, very easy to apply and has held up well so far.

Thinking about it, it’s probably easier to just drill through the length of the stick and tape over one end, then fill from the other end. Ah well.

Lankysprinter
Full Member
Someone on here made crayons with their kid out of sticks and old melted crayons. Can’t for the life of me find it. Anyone able to help or have a link for a how to? It’s clearly not super complex but might be some good tips to avoid mess!

Could have been me, back in the early days of the thread.

Put a stick in a vice, drill a 1cm deep hole in the middle of one end. Drill a long hole into the other end, but make sure the holes don’t join up in the middle. This is important. Mark the end with the long hole. This is also important.

I used an old pan (a crappy stainless thing that came with our bbq, supposedly for making sauces or something) with a pouring lip. Peel the labels off some crayons, put the crayons into the pan. Apply a heat gun (or a blowtorch underneath). Once the wax is liquid, pour a drop into the 1cm hole until *just* over-full. Allow to cool, then fill the other end. Allow to cool again, then get a big knife and sharpen the end that has the long hole (this is why the mark is important).

My reading list has just got much, much longer…

My recommendation: Legionnaire

A British lad in 1960 gets bored/rebellious and runs off to join the French Foreign Legion.

After years of back pain and then having three vertebrae fused, my wife struggled on a bike. Couldn’t do more than a couple of km on the that and a few gentle slopes as it caused too much pain. She bought a Trance E+ and now we can get out as a family (kids aged 4 & 8) on grade 2 & 3 trails for two to three hours. She starts out on the lowest assist level and dials it up as required – basically the extra effort on uphills is what causes the pain.

It’s brilliant, the amount of time and effort it would have taken for her to slowly build up to this on a regular bike meant it just wouldn’t have happened – the kids are getting faster by the week, she’d struggle to keep up! Regarding fitness, just because it’s an e-bike doesn’t mean you don’t put in any effort. It’s definitely helped her regain fitness post-op.

She’s also using it for commuting too, now she doesn’t have to worry about getting hot & sweaty – one less car on the road 👍

Bump.

Just watched The Old Guard. Based on a comic, a different take on immortality. Loads of impressive fight scenes, think Matrix choreography rather than Michael Bay style nonsense. Highly recommended.

What else are people watching?

Another vote for the Sony 1000xm3’s here. We got a couple of pairs using points ‘earned’ from a credit card, in advance of a trip from NZ to the UK and back. Noise cancelling is superb, makes aeroplane noise disappear completely. Even your own voice sounds far away if you talk while wearing them! The sound quality is great too, really grunty bass without being overpowering.

Dug up half of a garden’s worth of “rockery” (misshapen lumps of concrete), piled it on the drive. Stuck it on eBay for 1p or thereabouts, ended up selling for 20 quid collected. We were away the weekend he collected, he called while he was there to say he’d spotted the other half of the garden still full of lumps, and could he have that too? So we got back from a weekend away to find he’d finished the job of clearing the garden for us 👍.

Having recently repaired my washing machine – faulty door latch – I can say that on some models the latch is controlled by a bi-metallic strip. There’s a current running through it keeping it heated and therefore closed. At the end of the cycle the current stops and when it cools it unlocks. This can take a minute or two, on ours the mechanism is in a wee plastic enclosure, fairly well thermally insulated.

We went with IKEA and installed it ourselves. Wife and kids made the cabinets and drawers while I installed, pretty simple to do. The worktops were the trickiest bit, I’d never tried edge/end jointing wood before but it turned out really well.

Add mentioned above, the IKEA design service was well worth the price, the guy who did ours had loads of great ideas about best use of the space, tips on which of their units would work best for a given location etc.

I remember discussing the dress image at work some colleagues; one had never heard of it. We went back to his desk and googled it, both of us saw white and gold. I had always seen white and gold and couldn’t get my head around how anyone could think it was anything but. Mentalists, clearly.

We went on the Wikipedia page for it, looking for an explanation. I was talking through some aspect or other and the image I was looking at just changed, as I spoke. It was weird, like time slowed down for a second while my brain tried to make sense of it. That’s they only time I’ve ever been properly gob-smacked, lost for words. I knew without doubt that the image on the screen hadn’t changed, yet I was also certain it had changed. After that I could change what colour it was by sort of tuning out while looking at it and just deciding.

That shoe is grey and turquoise though.

Conti vert pros

It seems they complied with what was asked of them, but the people doing the asking were a bit slack – not asking about specific symptoms but just a generic ‘are you feeling ok?’ type questioning. It looks like if the authorities had followed protocol properly they would have got answers that would have led to tests, which probably would have picked them up before they drove half the length of the country…

I think Boris is riding a losing horse in this race though and Dom has totally misread the people and his own importance.

People keep saying that Cummings has completely misread the mood of the people… You’ve missed the point. He hasn’t misread the mood, he will have foreseen this reaction, or at least considered it as a possibility. He just doesn’t care. Whatever the public reaction was going to be, he didn’t and still does not give a toss. Why should he? What are we going to do? He’s seen Trump set the example: say what you like, evade answering any tricky questions, bluster bluster bluster, sorry that’s all we’ve got time for, and leave. Repeat the next day. And the next. As long as you’ve surrounded yourself with cowards who will sing the same tune, you’re golden. The whole lot of them are a skid mark on the Y-fronts of the nation.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing! What kit do you use for something that detailed?

@squirrelking – I can’t find the website I stole the idea from, but it’s like this:
http://www.woodworkingtips.com/etips/2007/02/09/ws/

Here’s what the inside looks like:

Took maybe an hour to make, including a bit of trial and error working out the right dimensions – I copied the general design but adjusted the dimensions to suit the sizes of wood and dowel I had available.

I’ve been tidying up the garage and have made a few storage devices using scrap materials, or stuff that had been kept “just in case”.

A set of shelves using a 2400x400mm plastic-covered chipboard that used to be the top section of the reception desk at my old office (acquired for free follow a refurb), ripped in half lengthways. Shelves were three old painted MDF shelves cut into thirds. Backed with a couple of sections of 4mm mdf from a sheet that was stored in the roof of the garage when I bought the house:

A hammer rack from wood offcuts and an old towel rail cut in half:

Screwdriver rack – an offcut of 12mm ply cut in two and glued to make a 24mm plank, screwed into the window-sill.

(Yes, I know the windows need some attention…)

A mobile bench for the middle of the garage. Two cheap second-hand shelf units back to back for under-bench storage, the top is the front section of the afore-mentioned reception desk, cut in two and glued to make a 36mm deep worktop. Fixed to two planks and some lockable castors.

And my favourite – a magic* saw rack:

Fits any size saw (or machete), takes up minimal space.

Even the screws were all reclaimed from previous uses, think the only new bits were the bench wheels.

*(gravity plus friction)

Some great pics there. I’m absolutely positive that there’s a Land Rover (Series II I think) in a hedge in North London, in the northwest Islington/Camden area, only the passenger side visible. I have a vivid memory of seeing it, but can’t for the life of me remember where it is.

An all-expenses-paid 10-day holiday for two to Thailand. Shortly after arriving in NZ I entered the Taupo Round the Lake challenge, they’d just created an off-road version on local trails. It was an 80km ride, the longest training ride I’d managed was 40km! It was a hot day, my riding buddy dropped out half way due to cramp. Race numbers were drawn after the race, mine was second prize. Top prize was a Holden Commodore SS, the lad who won it was still a couple of years too young to drive so I’d say his dad was pretty pleased 😀

I really wanted a Traxxas E-revo 1/10, but they’re stupid money. Looked at the 1/16 version but they’re still pricey. The Zombie is a poor* man’s 1/10 E-revo.

I bought a couple of spares with it, based on reviews that identified ‘common’ breakages. Can’t remember what they are as I’ve never needed them. The only thing that’s broken is the shell, which cracked in a big smash when it landed on the front wing from height. Easily repaired using fibre tape (for plasterboard joints) and silicone sealant, even has one of the body posts drilled through the repair.

Also check out the JLB Cheetah and VKAR Bison, very similar trucks and occasionally at lower prices on they likes of Banggood or AliExpress.

*Relatively 😳.