Lockdown

It turns out it's not so bad for the rest of you after all.  Screwfix is still doing deliveries, so there's really no excuse for slobbing about all day eating biscuits and watching cat videos on your phone (even if they were specifically sent to you by your now oh-so-much-missed friends) when you could be doing all those little projects you have always claimed you would do if you had the time.  Which, now, you do have.  Except that you don't, because you're too busy servicing the 15 new WhatsApp and Facebook groups your friends have started so that you don't lose touch with each other.

Not everything is available though.  Just before the first stage of national seizure, I was getting some more garage keys cut in a local lock shop, and I asked about the possibility of getting a spare part for the lock itself.  The bit in question is the wedgey bit that holds the door shut when it closes, which has always been missing since we moved in.  It's not a vital bit, but if it's missing you have to deliberately close the door with the handle to keep it shut.  Which is a teensy bit dull.

Anyway, the man in the lock shop was not optimistic that a part could be found (not really surprised, I can't find anything like it on the internet) but his eyes lit up a bit when I said that the front door lock is the same type, so I could bring in an example, if that would help.  He said he might have something lying around in the back of the shop - which was music to my hoarder's ears.

But then we went into self-isolation, and then all the shops closed, so I never got a chance to find out whether the things lying around in the back of his shop did include a Yale wedgey bit, or not.

So I thought I'd make one instead.  In normal times, this would just be a silly idea, but thanks to the lockdown, it's now a fully justifiable project!  Here's what the part looks like (as removed from the front door):

Yale wedgey bit

Obviously the first job is to find something to make it from.  It's not very big, but it needs to be solid and reasonably hard, which cuts down the options quite a lot.  I went for this:

it's a bracket

Cambium Networks people may recognise it as one of many, many designs of ODU bracket that have passed by (or through) the workshop in Ashburton and ended up in a scrap bin.  It's cast aluminium alloy, which is not very tough, but is easy to work.  It has enough meat in the middle for the actual wedge, and very handily features wings to hold onto it by, like this:

hold onto your wings!

After a while with a hacksaw, some files and even the small angle grinder(!) it looked like this:

And before you could say "artisanal skills with hand tools", and then complain that a drill press isn't a hand tool, and stop for a cup of tea and a biscuit, it looked like this:

mine's the shiny one

bottoms up!

Which I have to say, was quite pleasing.  Mine's a somewhat different shape on the back because it doesn't need to be reversible, and more metal around the hole is better.  There's lots of room in the lock.

I did have to remove the entire lock strip from the door to understand how to put the whole thing back together properly.  There's a trick mode where the latch shuts, and then doesn't open with the handle(!) to catch out the unwitting reassembler, but the clues are all written on the lock body - which is just as well, because it's rivetted together (ugh!) so you can't see inside.

Anyway, its back in the door now and it all works perfectly.  Smug emoji!

Which is more than can be said for the starlings.  I made another vent-style bird house and fitted it way up high, but still no takers as far as I can detect.

way up high

Perhaps they are being put off this one by the enormous red arrow outside it? Meanwhile the kitchen vent fan sounds like a bag of nails being dropped into a cement mixer again, so they obviously haven't taken the hint after all.

I nearly forgot to mention that there is another reason to make your own lock parts out of scrap - the two new keys (one for the up-and-over garage door, and one for the Yale multipoint) cost me a rather jaw-dropping £21.  What price a hard to find, genuine Yale, slightly used wedgey part, I wonder?  Still, I don't begrudge the man his £21 now because he's probably at home going bankrupt and watching cat videos like everyone else.  Or maybe he's sorting out the stuff in the back of his shop? Nah - my money's on the cat videos.

For the birds

At last - my lifelong strategy of stockpiling everything that could conceivably be useful later is finally paying off!  All those unfortunate people now stuck at home, in need of a screw or a bit of wood or something to complete some long-postponed project must be fairly gnashing their teeth at the fact that Screwfix is still open, but the government says you're not allowed to get in the car and go there.

I, on the other hand, have a garage full of screws and bits of wood and - things.  So, if you need anything, and you are within one official governmentally-approved exercise outing of Exminster, let me know.  I can always leave some things out on the pavement for you.

Meanwhile, it's the nesting season for starlings.  We know this because at least some of them are, rather surprisingly, undeterred by the big flap covering the end of our various wall-mounted vent terminations, and have been having a go at setting up shop inside.

To be honest, I wouldn't really mind housing a few starlings if they weren't so jolly noisy.  It's not their fault, but the vent pipes are made of a kind of stiffened corrugated paper with a foil lining, and when the starlings move about inside it sounds like an infestation of rats scurrying about under the floorboards.  Unsurprisingly, the lovely Jackie finds this an unwelcome addition to the dawn chorus, and so the poor blighters have to be evicted.

First up was the kitchen cooker vent, which started making a loud bashing noise when the fan was turned on.  I took it apart (from inside the house) and found a single bit of stick about eight inches long had fallen into the fan.  However, turning the fan on flat out for a while seemed to deter the little chappies because we haven't heard any more noises from there.  Or it might have been the curry.

Next was the scullery vent fan, which doesn't get used often because the scullery has a perfectly good window for ventilation.  This one is more or less underneath the bedroom, and thus was the main cause of wifely distress.  Several mornings of blatant scrabblings had led me to believe that they'd got a pretty advanced building project going on in there before I finally got around to having a look.

I spend a couple of hours looking for (and eventually finding) the special Devon neighbours' slopey drive ladder leg adjuster (see something-old-something-new.html) and then realised that I could reach the vent using just a stepladder, at least enough to poke a phone in, take a picture and have a look. Here's what I found:

Not exactly the Taj Mahal, is it?  So I took the cowl off the front and went off to find something to put across the front of it.  As luck would have it, I found a length of plastic stuff full of holes, designed to fit under your eaves and keep vermin out.  Ideal!  Well, nearly.  I tried plastic welding it with a soldering iron (following great success with the technique repairing the K75 pannier that got smashed when Dales misjudged a gap), but it didn't melt properly, so I had to use the hot glue gun instead.  Then the flap fouled on it, so I had to file bits off to make it work again.  Got there in the end though.  Of course, filling up most of the hole also necessitated the making of a new, thinner special tool to reinstall the cover on the housing, but I found a piece of aluminium which didn't even need cutting to make a new one.  Hah!

plastic stuff full of holes

Finally, the downstairs loo - this morning I heard the pesky passerines in that vent, too.  When I returned fire with a bash on the ceiling, a little chappy flew out and perched on the neighbours' garage roof nearby, looking very Sturnus and not a little Vulgaris.  So I just put a big spring clamp on the vent to keep the flap shut for now, and save any misunderstandings about the denial of planning permission.

Sadly, I think the starlings all hate me now.  Even though I went to the trouble of finding a big piece of drain pipe (previously seen in shelling.html) and fashioning it into a desirable bird house, with elegant slash-cut overhanging porch and real wood rear wall, all mounted away from the house on the garage with an oh-so-subtle downward slope for drainage, so far no starling has taken the bait.  I fear it may be too low for a sense of starling safety, and I'll have to relocate it up near the roof somewhere. Or maybe they are just snobbish about new-builds.  It's hard to tell.

The real wood rear wall didn't need any cutting either - it came from a now redundant CD rack - and neither did the bracket, which is an offcut from some galvanised perforated strip I used to make a magnetic mount for a poster.  All in all, a project that almost did itself.  And I have all the parts to make another, if we do get an uptick in demand, as they say in marketing. This classic, one of a kind, innovative technology can leverage world leading best practices to empower multiple stakeholders in a bleeding-edge, below-the-cloud synergy of green hogwash and feature-rich, space-age, client-centric environmental design patterns, disrupting the global homespace environment and providing a magical mindset and a solution-driven ecosystem filled with best of breed low-hanging fruit, so that your chicks can - er - hit the ground running.  As they say in marketing.

too low for starling safety?

As you can tell, the lockdown hasn't really had a very profound effect of my lifestyle yet.  True, we don't get visits from Layla any more, and we have to disinfect everything that comes into the house,  and my hands have never been so frequently washed, but many things go on pretty much as normal.  I hope your life is as undisturbed as mine, dear reader.  If not - I suppose it's yet another reason to retire as soon as possible.

Covid-19

Normally I try to stay away from commenting on current news, because it's rather off-topic for the blog's stated aim, but COVID-19 has become so all-pervasive and life-changing I feel it's appropriate to make some observations.

Firstly, it is, obviously, fairly serious.  4000 of the most seriously affected Italians are now unable to confirm that, being now dead.

Next, it seems that some people are very sensitive to the virus (not just old people) and others aren't, and nobody knows why yet. But we do know that the seriousness of infection is very much increased by age, chronic respiratory conditions and immune system weakness, so the lovely Jackie (62 and asthmatic) would definitely be better off not getting it.

And so we find ourselves in the self-isolating vulnerable category, hunkering down for a stay-at-home that might last for - what, maybe a year or more?  It seems that we are not alone though - others are also feeling the urge to hunker.  In the spirit of social distancing, I tried Morrisons' click-and-collect-from-the-car-park service: the next available slot for collection was a week away, and half the items we wanted are out of stock anyway.  So I just went to our local mega-Tesco instead.  Here's the white wine section:

Really? White wine? I didn't realise it was that serious.

In fairness, the red wine section looked like this:

So I suppose that's fair.  They were also completely out of organic milk, and any sort of bread, and eggs, which does suggest that people have either been stocking up for something, or preparing for a massive bread pudding festival that I haven't heard about because it's only been advertised on the dark web.

I had just scan-as-you-shopped my third packet of toilet cistern blocks (making a meagre six blocks in total) when a public address announcement told me that to ensure fair play for all, customers were only to be allowed to buy two of any item!   I fully expected to be stopped at the checkout and charged with hoarding (or possibly billboard) but it seems they haven't quite got that rule into the scan-as-you-shop software yet, so I got away with it.  Phew!

Fortunately, artichoke hearts and stuffed olives were still available, so it looks as if we will be OK for a while. I successfully held my breath for the entire trip, degreased my hands in boiling acetone before I got back into in the car, and showered in Dettol when I got home, so I'm hoping we got away with it.  My coat got quarantined outside on the terrace for the afternoon, but it's not showing any symptoms so we've let it back into the house now.  And since you can't get bread yeast anywhere - not even for ready money - I've just started my first ever sourdough starter.

Still, it might not be that bad.  It's possible that the arrival of warmer weather might change the course of the pandemic for the better, and we'll all be free to go back to worrying about flooding, deforestation,  habitat loss, catastrophic insect population decline, plastic waste, toxic pollution, ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion (again), global water shortages, antibiotic resistance,  methane and anthrax coming out of the permafrost (all of which are still actually happening).  Not to mention nuclear accidents and human overpopulation. Or, for the far-sighted, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, "gray goo" and autonomous killing robots.

Or Brexit.

Even if we make it through 2020 unscathed, it seems we should still expect a repeat performance, at least every winter, unless we get an effective vaccine.  I wonder which choice the anti-vaccine people will make?

However.  History suggests that things never turn out as badly as I imagine they might.  In this case, that observation doesn't seem as comforting as it usually does, but it's the best I've got.  As ever, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. It probably won't be what you expect. Meanwhile, I'll see you on WhatsApp (if at all).

Another partial success...

As regular readers will know, I usually report my engineering exploits with a subtle, understated presumption that the success of these enterprises is pretty much guaranteed.  Of course, I am able to do this because I only write about things I've already finished.  There is an automatic editing process which makes things that didn't work out so well seem just a little bit less interesting to write about than splendid victories.  It's the "history is written by the winners" phenomenon, writ small - in my case, very small indeed.

Anyway, in the spirit of honest journalism I feel duty bound, in my role as trailblazer for the wanna-be retiree community, to let you in on a less successful exploit.

I finally got round to fixing the Samsung phone that Ellen was going to sell for spares.  It needed a new screen glass, and the headphone jack had snapped off in the socket.  She'd been quoted £120 to fix it, because the headphone jack issue would need a new sub-assembly, and it's a pain to take it apart to that extent.  I was jolly pleased to finally get all the bits in hand - new front glass with appropriate adhesive film, new rear panel adhesive, and a new sub-assembly complete with with power socket, headphone socket, and soft switches on flying leads. I also splashed out on a 21-piece special phone-mending toolkit (SPMT), mostly to get the big sucker you need to pull on the screen in the disassembly process.  Total outlay for all these parts: £14.20.  Good so far.

And so I set to.  First task it to get the back off, by softening the adhesive with heat, and pulling with the big sucker from the whilst holding on to the frame.  It turns out it takes a really surprisingly large amount of heat (from my newly acquired, but not part of the project, heat gun) to heat the thing up enough to make any impact on the glue, and then it's all too hot to hold onto the frame, which is tiny and slippery.  So I had to make a special tool to hold the frame:

Phone clamp

Spot the far-from-deliberate mistake?  That over-centre clamp has a custom-made jaw to exactly fit the frame of the phone - but it's made from an off-cut of plastic drain pipe.  Guess what happens when that gets hot?  Hmmm.  It goes as floppy as a floppy thing on a floppy day (as Ben Elton might have said) and doesn't hold the frame at all.  However, by only closing it when it was really necessary, and generally being extra careful, I did manage to make it work (as you can see).

Once you have unstuck the back,  you simply extract the thirteen tiny screws, and pull the frame off the screen, and you can separate the actual touchscreen from the (broken) glass by yet another application of a surprisingly large amount of heat, plus wedges and picks supplied in the SPMT.  Clean everything up with IPA (IsoPropyl Alcohol, silly, not India Pale Ale) and position the adhesive film (tricky) and the new glass (also tricky) and leave overnight.  Then we're ready to unclip all the tiny, tiny, tiny connectors using a delightfully-named spudger from the SPMT, remove one more screw, and get the PCBs off.  It really is all quite microscopic in there.  Anyway, the new sub-assembly is a perfect fit, and the new soft switches have their own glue on, so it all goes back together very nicely.  Replace the fourteen screws, press the power switch, and - nothing.  Bugger.  Maybe I left something off?  Take it all apart again, put it back together again, nothing.  Charge it up - red light, then blue pulsing light (fully charged).  Factory reset using volume down, power and home buttons - nothing.  Drink tea, contemplate, repeat the above with all possible button combinations - nothing.  And so we have the current situation - total failure.  Pooh!

On the upside, oven cleaning...

A few months ago someone posted on our street's Facebook group (yes, indeed it does!) that their favourite oven-cleaning man was coming to visit, and did anyone else want to book him while he was in the area.  The lovely Jackie, ever supportive of local people's kind invitations (not to mention ever reluctant to attempt oven-cleaning herself - it's the asthma you know) said OK.  Of course, I wouldn't have, but it was all agreed before I knew anything about it.  And so the favourite oven-cleaning man turned up and started work.  To my surprise, he didn't use any foul-smelling products or fancy equipment of any description, so I asked him about the process.  He was very happy to tell me that he only uses washing up liquid, water, and elbow grease, applied using a variety of things, the fiercest being one of those plastic dish scrubbers which look like coarse wire wool.  He assured me that they don't scratch the enamel.  There's no smell, no white streaky bits from holes in the oven that sprays get behind, and everybody's happy.  We also discussed the merits and ecological footprint of various washing-up liquids, and he told me that his preferred choice overall, after extensive testing, is Lidl's V5. And he pointed out that, having told me everything there is to know about his process, that I wouldn't really need to employ him any more - if I could be bothered to put the required effort into doing the job.

Well, it turns out I can.  It's much more rewarding that trying to use those horrible foaming products full of noxious poisons, and it works very well.  It does take a while, but approaching it as an exercise for the arms and shoulders rather than merely a chore makes it better in every way.  Wax on, wax off, as it were.

Actually I seem to spend quite a large proportion of my time cleaning things these days.  There's Layla of course, who needs a dedicated team of attendants (especially if pasta with tomato sauce is involved), but now we are all washing our hands every time we've touched anything, and disinfecting hard surfaces and shared keypads with soap, it's becoming something of a full time obsession.  This is all because of the lovely Jackie's history of asthma, which together with our advanced age, makes her doubly vulnerable to Covid-19, so it looks as if my proposed strategy of contracting it early while there are still some hospital beds available if required isn't going to fly.  We are stuck with trying to avoid getting it at all, at least until there's a vaccine or something.  Which is going to mean a lot more hand-washing and cleaning things.  Still, one upside of all this is that we get to stay at home more, which I quite like actually.

Speaking of Corona virus reminds my of that other Corona from my youth in the 60's:

corona virus, 1960's style

I think it was delivered by the milkman.  It was fairly unexceptional stuff, apart from the cream soda, which was strange (in quite a good way).  We used to like making ice-cream sodas by floating vanilla ice-cream in it and eating the resulting sludgy mess with a spoon.  Very American Graffiti.  I can't help wondering what was in it?  Today's equivalents don't shed much light. This is Barr's cream soda:

Hmmm.  I expect the 1960's response to "What's in it?" would have been "Mind your own business!", but now we have wikiHow, which tells us that the main flavouring in cream soda is vanilla, and the cream part (probably) comes from cream of tartar, which was used to make sucrose into invert sugar, which turns some of the sucrose into fructose, because it's sweeter than - er, sugar.  You know - high fructose corn syrup, favourite ingredient of the US diabetes industry, and all that.  The fructose also makes the angle of rotation of light when the solution is illuminated go negative, which is why it's called "inverted".

So we've all learned something today.  I hope that makes up, in a tiny way, for the dreariness of the incessant rain, scare-mongering of moment-by-moment Covid-19 updates, and general idiocy of Boris Johnson trying to look Churchillean on the telly.  Probably not though.