This website is not masterful. It is devoted to things
I do either because they need doing, or because I enjoy doing them,
and which someone else might possibly want to do. Perhaps if my
mistakes are included here in enough detail someone else might not
make them…
I am not an engineer, or a software developer, or a mechanic, or a
carpenter, or a bookbinder, or anything else I might pretend to be on
these pages. I am just an Amateur, but in real life I’m a PhD student
in Theology. Except insofar as the aformentioned things I am not come
in to it, this is unlikely to be apparent here.
This website is purely static, and is the successor to a wordpress
blog.
Posted on April 18, 2020
(Last modified on August 19, 2021)
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My father’s electric shaver wasn’t holding charge; he asked if I could
have a look at it and see if the internal battery could be replaced.
Here’s the exploded view:
The green battery is a NiMH, not NiCad as I’d expected. I suppose
it’s not that old. Which is as well, as I couldn’t find any NiCads
in the drawer when hunting around before, and was planning on gutting
it and fitting a LiPo battery and tiny charging module.
Posted on April 14, 2020
(Last modified on August 19, 2021)
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This was a sudden impulse last summer: I’d seen a ‘sunrise’ alarm
clock (which fades on slowly to simulate sunrise, theoretically
bringing you out of deep sleep naturally and waking you up gently).
My sister mentioned having difficulty getting up and needing multiple
alarm clocks. Ergo.
First thought: where to get the light? I had a look in the LED parts
draw, but it was disappointing, as was the draw of old led torches and
bike lights. None of them gave a reasonable light: more like a little
pin-prick than the sun. So off down the road to the bricolage shop
(or bric-a-brack as we call them) and I came back with this:
Posted on January 12, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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Dad rather liked my clock. In fact, he went looking for ‘a clock with
hands and an adjustable chime’. Which, of course, made me wonder
whether I could make one.
The first question was the hands: I liked
the leds at the front of mine, and didn’t see the point in moving real
hands around with a stepper motor or something of the kind. A digital
clock should, I think, look digital. Looking online for things like
’led ring clocks’ showed the odd design, but none with all three hands
in one ring, and three rings struck me as a bit much. Thus I started
looking on farnell for bicolour leds to make the hands out of, and
found an orange/red led on clearance at around 10p each: and also some
red/green rectangular leds. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to have the
’ticks’ in the display differently shaped as well as coloured?
Posted on January 12, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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I don’t much like PCBs, but I like wiring ICs up even less. Up till
now I’ve made boards with the toner-transfer-and-any-old-container
method. The trouble is that I hate making up ferric cholride and
always make the bare minimum, and during etching the concentration
falls off, the rate slows, and you get poor definition and damage. So
I decided to make a proper vertical etching tank, big enough to do a
large board and still not run out of etchant. Casting about the shed
found a large transparent dust-sheet, and I wondered about using it
for the tank. With care an unpierced section could be found, and a
bag was taped together:
Posted on January 12, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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This project began when the noise of the ethernet switch opposite my
college room became unbearable. I picked the room for the view, which
was sublime: the valley falls away so steeply you can see right down,
over the trees, to the river, and climbs again the far side in a
steeply wooded bank over which the pigeons perform what I can only
describe as buzzing runs on the squirells. In the distance, the
rolling hills, at night the moon and by day the sun—morning and
evening, opposite corners of the window. Sometimes the outside world
would come a little
closer:
Posted on January 12, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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Moving is not much fun. Moving pianos is even less fun: you have all
the difficulty of moving a 300kg object coupled with the worry that
you’ll twist it out of shape, drop it, strain it, or just shake it too
much.
Moving, however, just round the corner—700yds, according to
Google—is at least easier than moving halfway round the world. But
moving a piano 700yds is not apparently any easier than moving it 300
miles: you can’t wheel it, not on those little coasters, or even on a
furniture dolly. And the seven hundred yards in question included one
gravel drive, a hundred yards of dodgy pavement, three LVAs and two
sharp corners—and then a lot of road, not to mention steps at the
far end. On the other hand, I couldn’t find a van for less than £300.
Split with my housemate that’s £150: surely that money could be spent
on something I could keep at the end of the day?
Posted on July 28, 2019
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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I arrived back yesterday to discover that the fridge, or more
specifically the fridge-freezer, had been off for at least a
week.1 The same week, coincidentally, that temperatures in the range
of southern France on a cool day have lead to pantograph cables all
falling off. Oops. Hopefully the repairs will be more heat-tolerant…
Thus in this heat wave2—well, it was certainly warm—the inside of the
fridge/freezer got to goodness knows what temperature (fridges make
good beer-brewing ovens, as google will show).
Posted on May 23, 2019
(Last modified on October 6, 2020)
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One should not over-brew one’s coffee. This is a fault (mea culpa) I
occasionally commit. One should probably not use one’s coffee pot to
reheat coffee, and if one does, one should pay some attention to how
long it is on for. Else it will boil dry, and then that heat has got
to go somewhere… In this case, it went into the handle, the silicone
rubber seal between the two sections and the knob. The handle
drooped, faded and expired with a great groan. Already it had broken
off when the pot hit the floor at a velocity not specified in the
design; now its weakened frame gave up the ghost. (Why do they use
thermoplastics for these things? Because this aluminium pot cost ~£6.
But it came with not only an (ungrammatical) warranty, but also a
spare silicone sealing ring and filter! So all is not lost.) Here is
the dismembered carcass:
Posted on December 9, 2018
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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I have a piano to tune. And also to restore: a few hammer shafts to
bend, hammers to file, a bit of crud to clean out, bridle straps to
replace, etc, etc. The piano cost £40 from Ebay and is in remarkably
good nick, and any piano is better than none! But an out of tune
piano is no good.
Now students, I feel, should not really spend money
having their pianos tuned—at least, not students of Theology.1 But who
is to say I cannot tune it myself? So I read a few books (I am doing
an arts degree after all!) and websites, and it seems a moderately
competent person with a tuning meter can expect to do a reasonable
job in a day—the kind of job a tuner would do in half an hour. I’ll
settle for that: it’ll make things infintely more playable, and I
can’t start work regulating an out-of-tune piano. It’s just too
painful on the ear.
Posted on December 2, 2018
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
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The radio we use in the kitchen to make washing up bearable stopped
working. Specifically, it wouldn’t turn on, but the power LED was
constantly flashing on and then fading off. What makes me think the
power supply might have died? Lo and behold, after purchasing a cheap
multimeter (it’s incredible how cheaply one can get some things now:
in ten years the price of test equipment has plumetted): the ‘8v’
output was about 3v, and the ‘15v’ output was 0v. Hmm. Here’s the
very crude power supply: