A new house, of course, requires various new things to go in it. In our case, that included a new telly - partly because I threw away the stand for the old one, in a fit of pre-house-move clearing up. I had foolishly thought that since we had never used it in the ten years (or so) that we had the old telly, it wasn't worth keeping. Bah! Anyway, we decided to buy a new, bigger telly. I didn't do a great deal of research; I basically just decided to buy another Sony Bravia because they're always good, aren't they? (if maybe a bit expensive). And so it is - lovely picture - but instead of having 2 SCART sockets, 3 HDMI inputs, composite video and a VGA connector for your old laptop to plug straight into, you get 2 HDMI inputs and composite video in. And that's it. Well, it also has an ethernet port and it does wifi (which is nice) but where do you connect your VHS player, or (in my case) even SCART-only DVD player? Answer: you don't mate. Buy yourself a nice new BlueRay player and subscribe to Netflix. Oh well.
Meanwhile, in another aspect of
new different house ownership, I decided to replace the original crappy 3-flap vents which terminate the ducting from various extractor fans around the place with something that doesn't stick open, fall to pieces, attract nesting birds and leak water into places it shouldn't be. This rather mundane task requires the use of both a ladder, and the neighbour's drive to put it on. Of course, this is Devon, so the neighbour's drive slopes.
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| the neigbours' drive slopes |
After my ladder-based tragedy of some years ago, and its resulting broken arm, I'm a bit sensitive about ladder safety nowadays; so rather than propping my ladder up on a random bit of wood, I made an adjustable ladder leg. Here's the close up:
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| leg, close up |
As you can see, it's basically a thing clamped onto the short leg. Specifically, the thing is the bar part of a Krooklock steering wheel lock I had many, many years ago. It's ideal for the job, because it's made of steel, with a hard but compliant rubber sheath bonded onto it. It even has a rounded end, which makes a great ladder foot; and the rubberiness gives really good friction for the clamping. I tested it by extending the leg for several inches, putting the ladder on the ground with the extension on a block of wood, and jumping up and down on it to try and rotate the extension out of place. I couldn't move it. All in all, the ladder leg extension was a complete success - which is more than could be said for the Krooklock. At the time I had a Golf GTi, a Krooklock, and two sets of car keys - but only one of them also had a key for the Krooklock. One day, the lovely Jackie and I went to stay with a friend in Wiltshire (or some other far-away county). Since we had to park overnight on the public road, I clicked the Krooklock on - and then noticed that I had the wrong set of keys. Our friend called up an acquaintance who she thought might be able to help (he said "when do you want it done?" which I thought showed promise) but in the end it turned out that, armed with a large screwdriver and a willingness to experiment, a Krooklock can be removed in about thirty seconds by someone with zero previous experience. I notice that Halfords still sell these (they have a bent bar now) and that Autocar's review of "Best steering wheel locks 2018" lists the time required to defeat it as
five seconds. Hmmm... I wonder what the worst ones are like?
Needless to say, I didn't use again it after that. Instead I took it to pieces, and kept the pieces in the garage for a couple of decades. The lock part (actually quite a good cam lock with a cylindrical key) was used a couple of years ago to replace the failed lock in the old camper van's internal "safe" (just a lockable steel box really). It wasn't a drop-in replacement, but I got it to be functional after a bit of metal work. And the bar - well, it's just been reborn as the ladder leg extension device. So that's yet another winner for my preferred policy of never throwing anything away!
