Hard Gardening

Once again, there is a digger on the premises.  This time it's being operated by a chap called Neil, acting in his capacity as a garden hard landscaper.  I suppose that once they reach a certain level, they turn their noses up at easy landscaping.  Anyway, he is kindly putting a patio where there used to be grass, just outside the new dining room.  Unfortunately, this area is only held up from collapsing into the lower part of the garden by a shallow "wall" made of wood, supported by wooden posts - at least, it was when they built it.  Now it's supported by force of habit, since the posts have already completely rotted away, and the wall has bowed out where the huge pile of earth from the Battle of the Somme leant against it.

But that's all in the past!  Already Neil and his sidekick Ben have removed the fence, dug a ditch for the foundation of the new wall, put a big pile of earth where the trampoline is going to go, and then flattened it out again with the grader.  Generally speaking, they've turned all the previously grassy areas of the garden into the world's worst clay tennis court.  And this is just day one!

Neil digging

world's worst clay court

And it hasn't rained yet.  I suppose there's plenty of time for that in days to come.

Meanwhile, I've been sitting on this little snippet since our last trip to Yorkshire.  Taylors of Harrogate, makers of the venerable Yorkshire tea, have come up with a new idea.  I haven't seen this down south, so I guess they are testing it out locally to see what happens.  Personally, I hope that (a) nobody buys it (even at the knock-down price of £2 for 40), and (b) the person who came up with the idea is either sent for retraining at an establishment run by actual humans, or quietly "disappeared", but I suppose you are free to draw your own conclusions...

Too lazy for a proper tea-break?  We've got you covered... 

I am genuinely shocked by this marketing wizard's attempt to exploit a previously untouched super-vulnerable sub-group within our society. But are there really people out there who can't find the energy to eat actual biscuits?  I hope not.

If you want a proper composite drink, by the way, it's got to be chocolate Ovaltine (with milk - not the stuff you make with water).  Extremely yummy.  The lovely Jackie showed Layla how to dab little bits of the powder onto a wet finger (from a special little pile in a special little dish) but Layla has developed the concept one stage further.  Her technique is to pick up the dish, stick her nose right into it, and lick greedily.  This process distributes the sticky brown powder across her face, her clothes, the table, our clothes, the chair, the floor, and very probably some other places we haven't found yet.  Adorable!

No Crisis Management

Warning:  this is one of those techie posts about metal working and stuff.  I can't imagine that everybody out there likes this type, but since you are all too polite to leave any comments, I keep writing them...

Yesterday there was a crisis at the House of Luuurve!  The magnificent three-pane bi-fold door which forms the back of the house completely refused to close.  This would have presented a bit of a security risk, except that Dales was down for a visit and staying there, so he could be on the lookout for marauding ne'er-do-wells bent on mischief until some sort of fix was found, while everybody else went to work as usual.  And it wasn't even raining.  So when Leo called me up and asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a look, it wasn't even a crisis really. 

It turned out that the reason the door wouldn't close was this.  The system relies on nearly all the weight of the moving parts (i.e. everything) being taken by a little truck which runs in rails at the bottom.  The weight is taken by the bottom hinge, and thence goes down through an 8mm bolt which is threaded into the truck.  This thread provides the adjustment needed to make sure the truck at the top of the doors runs inside its track, and all the doors stay clear of the threshold at the bottom.  Alas, the thread in the aluminium body of the bottom truck had stripped, so that the door couldn't be raised enough to adjust it properly.  It must have been sitting on only the last turn or two of thread, and progressively stripped more and more threads under the (fairly huge) weight of it all until the top truck fell out of place and the whole thing became unworkable.

Here's a picture of the bottom truck with its partially stripped thread in the middle at the bottom:

stripped

There are ways to reconstruct a thread, of course, but the fundamental problem would remain - not enough turns engaged to support the weight.  However, the necessity of the bolt being so high up offered the possibility of a better solution - add more threads above.  Fortunately, my M8 nuts collection provided this rather appealing offering:

appealing...

A few minutes work with a hacksaw and grinder resulted in this:

counter-bored and ground to size

i.e. a threaded fitting with threads slightly longer than the thickness of the plate (because the hole is swaged) which drops down the funny-shaped slot in the truck and can't rotate there.  I counter-bored the stripped-thread hole a bit, to make room for the swage. You get full thread engagement when it's adjusted to suit the House of Luuurve's door, and it's made of tough steel, rather than an aluminium alloy that's optimised for casting.

So, stick it all back together again, and it's fully functional again before teatime.  Hoorah!  Another not-crisis averted in the nick of time - or, as we used to say in the 16th century, in pudding time.

However, I was surprised by another aspect of the engineering of the whole thing.  This is the hinge assembly in pieces, showing the bolt (upon which most of the the weight of all the doors sits).  The weight-bearing interface between the hinge and the bolt is that little collar (between the bolt and the allen key), which is retained by a 4mm grub screw!

grubby engineering

The whole weight goes through that collar and its grub screw.  There's no locating step in the bolt or anything, it's just down to the clamping force and the single-sheer strength of the grub screw.  There are two more grub screws which locate into the machined grooves to the right, which clamp the bold to the hinge after adjustment and help a bit - or maybe a lot - but even so, it all seems amazingly optimistic to me.  Anyway, that part seems to work just fine.  So far...

It's just occurred to me that while the hinge fits into a slot in the truck so that it can't rotate, it's not a tight fit (because the hinge needs to be adjusted up and down).  So whenever the door is opened and closed, there is a slight movement between the two parts.  Since the bolt is clamped to the hinge, this movement must take place in the bolt thread.  Maybe that's another reason the thread failed.  And maybe one should lubricate the thread, in anticipation of movement there.  Who'd have thought?  I bet that's not in the installation instructions.  Not that that matters, because the door was installed by a builder, and builders are always far too busy to worry about installation instructions.

Incidentally, our builders didn't do a great job (re)installing our patio doors, either.  I improved the fit quite a lot by adjusting the hinges (they hadn't bothered) but they are still tight to close because the top and bottom rails just aren't far enough apart to provide any clearance.  Oh well.  Maybe one day I'll do something inventive with my big angle grinder!  Fwooorh!

Table refurbishment

When I started this blog, I had no idea that I would end up writing about emotional distress, self-doubt, and failure.  But that was before the table refubishment project...

It's been a learning experience, that's for sure.  And some parts have been successful.  For example, I did get BoConcept to supply me with a nice new pair of fancy hinges for the extension leaves, despite their best efforts to ignore me for weeks at a time. And - and - well that's about it for successes really.  Almost everything else has been a monumental disaster.

At times, I did succeed in getting a pretty good finish on the copper leaves, but I always managed to spoil it somehow.  On its own, the copper paint is so useless that if you touch it, it leaves a mark which you can't get out - hence putting (1-part acrylic) lacquer over the top to protect it.  That's fine, except that the lacquer redissolves the paint and then forms a seal over the top of it, so that if the paint's thick, you can still leave a finger print in it even after several days.  At one point I had to resort to removing everything from one leaf with cellulose thinners and starting again.  And yet, I just couldn't learn to leave things to dry properly.  Right at the end, I stupidly reassembled the extension leaves into the table when the lacquer was only touch dry, and left a set of prints in it (again!).

Then there was the two-part lacquer.  This is the stuff that costs £24 for a 400ml aerosol can. I'm sure it's very hard-wearing,  and it is the only half-matt lacquer I could find (another demanding requirement from the chief of interior design) so I gave it a go.  When I got some, it came in a can with no English writing on it, and no instructions apart from a frightening safety leaflet, so I looked it up on the internet. It turns out that it's full of isocyanates, which can give you life-crippling asthma if you inhale it in doses which are too small to detect (if you're unlucky) and so the only sensible way to proceed is using forced air respiration.  Ah! So that's what they mean by "for professional use only".

So I made a forced-air respiration system.  Here it is, looking surprisingly like the Russion spacesuits in the Speyer Technik museum.

It's made from a fancy full-face snorkelling mask, which provides a surprisingly air-tight seal, even with my beard to contend with.  I filled up the air exit holes with hot glue gun plastic, so the only way out is through the front valve.  The air comes down a big flexible pipe from outside the building and through a valve, which can isolate the headset completely so that you can detach the feed pipe when you want to leave the building.  At that point you just have to hold your breath until you are outside.

Outside, the air pump is my trusty garage hair dryer, taped on to the end of the pipe and supported by the pole the "sold" sign used to be on, to keep it up in the fresh air.  The steps keep the door shut. I need hardly mention that everything I needed for this entire life support system was already lying around, just waiting for a way to be useful.

There was one moment during the spraying when I could smell paint, so I stopped breathing for a while and just let it flush through.  I guess there had been a slight gust in through the open garage door (even though it wasn't windy) which wafted some paint-laden air out through the side door and into the hair dryer.  Apart from that it all worked faultlessly. Of course, I had to breathe gently, and I couldn't wear glasses under the mask, and the mask wasn't very good optically; all of which made the painting just a bit more difficult. But overall, I haven't suffered any ill effects, so hurrah!

Sadly, the same can't be said of the table.  Despite my best efforts at aerosol wielding, my almost reasonable paint finish turned into a trompe l'oeil interpretation of the mowing pattern on Wimbledon's centre court when I put the super-lacquer on.  And I ran out before I'd finished both copper leaves, so one of them is  shinier than the other.  And I dripped a bit (glove too near the nozzle, a rookie mistake) which leaves, well, drips.  All in all, it's been a hard life lesson in accepting one's own inadequacies.  However, I am determined not to let my ego get the better of things, so I state quite openly, "Thus far in life, I have turned out to be completely crap at painting".  So there.

Still the table is proving effective at keeping things off the floor, which is something.  Here it is in various states of functionality.

so, what do you think you can bring to the table?

nice leg - shame about the face

best viewed in the dark

it's flat really.  honest.