Curtains

We don't really do curtains very much in the house of Sears, but the lovely Jackie decided that we need a fabric enhancement the bit of glass beside the front door.  This particular curtain-like entity would be hand-made of various pieces of exotic fabric (in middle eastern styles) collected over several years in our travels abroad, sewn together into a vertical pennant by the lovely Jackie herself.  The whole assembly would be supported on a bracket, which would need to pivot so that the pennant could rest against either wall or window, ninety degrees apart.  Obviously, this pivoting bracket would need to be custom made.  Equally obviously, the most fulfilling solution would be to make it out of bits of scrap found lying around the place...

One obvious source would be the several curtain poles which came with the house, now forlornly unused because of our general preference for blinds.  Here's a candidate:

a candidate

 When you take it apart, there are some useful things inside the fixing system.  And I had a few other bits in stock.

useful things...

 The two threaded bits on the wooden block are RivNuts; when you squash them into a hole in a piece of metal, they rivet themselves on, and you have a strong thread attached to a thin sheet.  I have those in stock.  The piece of aluminium underneath everything else was salvaged from Cambium Networks when they scrapped a load of them; I can't remember what they were originally. It's about 3mm thick, and has those bosses attached, but a swift blow with a suitable punch removes them quite easily (for use for something else). 

From these bits, I made a bracket, a cut down top post cover, and a rather complicated block:

One bracket, a cut down cover, and a rather complicated block

Or, looked at right side up, and with the addition of a long roofing screw, like this:

right side up

I also cut down the shiny post gizmo that screws onto the ceiling so that I could get it further into the corner, but I forgot to take a picture of that part before it got installed.  You get the idea from the cut down cover shown above.

The idea is that my little bracket gets screwed to the wall at the bottom, and then the roofing screw shown above holds the wooden cover on, at the same time as protruding upwards to form the bottom pivot by threading into the second RivNut, which is glued inside a hole in the bottom of the post.  The post then pivots on the thread, like the kingpin end of the bottom wishbone on an MG Midget.  But without the grease nipples.

When it's all assembled, it looks like this:

and the ends in close up:

Oh, and the top bar (from which the pennant will hang) is made from a piece of rather nice hardwood which was part of the packaging of our Miele dishwasher (I think it was three years ago).  And so, the whole thing was done with no new parts purchased at all, which I think is rather a delight.

The best bit of the whole thing was using the router as a spindle moulder by clamping it upside down in the vice...

spindle moulder anyone?

Then you have to clamp blocks to the workpiece to make it big enough to slide around on the thing:

big enough to slide around

(The hammer is just to stop it all falling off while I took the picture)  I pondered trying to use a fence to guide it, but in the end I did everything hand-held.  All in all, it worked surprisingly well, with no loss of fingers.

In other news, it's curtains for the patio, because we've started having the extension built which will become the dining room in due course.  So far, they've dug down over two metres and haven't got to the top of the foundations yet! The hole keeps getting bigger (sideways) and filling itself in as the sides collapse, too.  It's all slightly scary, but fortunately we are paying someone else to do the worrying, and Rusty the digger man seems quite good at excavating.

Rusty the digger man getting started

I expect there will be more news of the hole soon...  In the meantime, we are sticking our fingers in our ears and going "La la la" a lot.