This is a swarm I’ll pass on…

Posted on January 11, 2026 by james

In a hole that had rotted out of a tree after a branch fell off/was removed. The landowner wanted them removed before the tree was cut down a few days later. I decided that I didn’t fancy trying to do anything up so high at such short notice.

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Off the scale!

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

Ok, not quite.

I wish I could think of a practical way to extract this heat though, say until the heap cooled to about 50°C.

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Tacwise 191EL nail/brad gun repair

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

I use my Tacwise 191EL quite a bit for making bee equipment, so I was a little distressed when it stopped working. After doing the easy “check the fuse” type stuff I decided that since it was out of guarantee anyhow there was little to lose by taking it apart.

Once in pieces, the problem was pretty obvious. The switch (the upper one in this photo) had failed. The slider had snapped off and the mechanism wasn’t sliding properly so it was never triggering the gun to fire. I’m not entirely sure why the slider had failed. The trigger doesn’t actually press on that part at all, instead making contact with the end of the slider that is inside the switch (which is sprung, so it returns once the trigger is released). Missing the slider however means that the mechanism becomes unstable and tends to jam or even travel too far.

I tried a few bodges, but couldn’t get the switch to work reliably. In the end I just decided to replace the switch. I wasn’t able to find a direct replacement, so in the end I made up a small carrier from an offcut of aluminium plate and added a momentary button that would be operated by the trigger.

The range of movement of the trigger is smaller as a result, but at least the gun works once again and I don’t have to splash out on a new one.

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This little chile lived all Winter

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

A Hungarian Black, which oddly is not a mind-altering leaf crop, in Frankenstein’s greenhouse. This survived the entire Winter last year and is still going strong even now. Produced a nice crop of chiles, too 😀 Others nearby didn’t make it so I’m wondering if it is the proximity to the compost heap (the other side of the wooden wall) that kept it going.

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Compost temperature

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

It’s ok if it’s not in the red, right?

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Laser cut jewellery display

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

My daughter asked if I could make a little display stand for the earrings she makes to sell and suchlike. “Shouldn’t be that hard,” I thought.

Here’s the actual stand. FreeCAD for the win, once again. Just need to make the rails that the earrings hook into now.

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Bait hive floors

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

I’ve never had purpose-made bait hives. I just use old brood boxes that aren’t really good enough for bees to over-winter in. I paint them a dark green/grey so I can tell them apart from all the others. Then I use a purpose-made floor that has a 38mm diameter hole in one side as an entrance. I wanted some more bait hives so I could dot a few around the local town with a view to tempting bees in rather than having them find local chimneys or roofs and suchlike, so I went a bit mad making more.

Having made them it occurred to me that I could 3d print an entrance piece that would allow me to close off the hive to move it, so I fired up FreeCAD and this is what I came up with.

By the time I actually settled on a final design I’d added a bar down the middle of the entrance hole to discourage birds from using it as a nest and (unfortunately not visible in this photo) a small tab that allows the slider to be fixed in the closed position.

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This is not one of Trump’s hands

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

It is a normal human adult male hand. So pretty much completely the opposite 😀

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My honey jar box is evolving…

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

I don’t feel that I’ve reached the final iteration yet, but I wanted to do something that made the box rather more visually appealing. Here’s what I came up with.

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Skoda Octavia lock failure #4

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

It is done!

Well, not quite, if I’m honest, and it turned into even more of a pain before the lock was usable again…

I fitted my new lock and reassembled the door, which is considerably easier to do with it open. Then I discovered that the central locking didn’t work. “Never mind”, I thought. “At least it will pass the MOT”. Only it didn’t, because the indicator repeater on the passenger side wing mirror wasn’t working. Oh joy. I decided to leave it to the garage to fix. But they couldn’t. The car came home.

After much research I discovered that the central locking and indicator repeater are actually controlled from the electric window winder unit. A used unit from a scrap dealer was only £20, so I felt that I had little to lose by trying one. It arrived a couple of days later and I fitted it the following weekend. It worked! 😀 Both the central locking and the indicator repeater functioned correctly!

But…

The winder unit, whilst the same part number, is from a different Skoda model. It seems to know where it thinks the top of the window is and stops winding the window up at that point. It’s actually well below the top of the actual door frame. So I can’t wind the window down without then having to take off the door card, unscrew the winder unit and raise the window manually.

I don’t know how to fix that yet.

Joy of joys, the driver’s side window has stopped working too. From the noise it makes I’m pretty sure that is because the cable that raises and lowers the window has corroded and snapped. I’m really not sure I can be bothered to fix that right now.

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