Most years I put some chicken eggs into an incubator to add to our flock that provide us with eggs and meat. This year I might try to set up a “chick cam” (somehow I feel that’s not going to get the desired results in a Google search) to watch the entire process (the first 20 days might be pretty boring though). Here are a few photos of the previous batch.
Just a quick photo of the first batch of beer made in the beer shack fermenting away nicely in my fermentation cabinet despite the cold temperatures outside.
Whilst clearing out the barn to allow space for the scaffolding, I came across the remains of this mangle, hidden away behind some other stuff that must have been there years:
I wonder if they provided mangling services to Wile E. Coyote?
Also present was a bit that looks as though it needs attaching somehow, with wording stencilled on both sides:
A hunt for similar items in somewhat better order turned up this image from the Grace’s Guide website:
Clearly the one I found is missing the two tensioning bars for the top roller. I’ll have to hunt around to see if I can find them, though possibly it has been moved so many times that they have been lost.
Once the old battery was removed and cleaned off, this useful part of the label became visible:
The replacement battery I purchased claims to be 48Ah and has a CCA figure of 430, so looks to be a more than adequate replacement.
I have a Yanmar 1510D compact tractor, brought into the UK as a grey import. It’s a great little thing. Does lots of stuff that anything larger would just be too big for. The battery is giving up the ghost however. On cold days it absolutely will not start. And I need it working for tomorrow to transport stuff around for the builder doing the barn roof replacement. Unfortunately there’s not much information to go on regarding obtaining a replacement and the labelling is all in what I assume may be either Japanese or Chinese, but regardless it’s unintelligible to me.
Having cleaned the dirt off a little I managed to find the text “60B24R”. I think, though I’m far from sure, that is something to do with the battery rating and dimensions. It was enough to stick into a search engine however, and the results led to the inference that it might be the same as an NS60 battery. That’s not something I could find for sale in the UK either, but in turn it looks like it might be the same as a Yuasa 057 model. That’s something that even Halfords stock as as the HSB5057 (or elsewhere it seems to be available as an YBX3057 or YBX5057). The dimensions looked correct so I decided to go for it.
Not everything went smoothly with the replacement however. The bolts holding the battery retaining bracket were so corroded that one of the stays snapped when I was trying to get them undone. And then the negative terminal connector collapsed when I was trying to undo it. For the time being I’ve wired the battery into place so it can’t rock about or slide around until I can make up some new stays. And the terminal connector I just closed up with a pair of pliers and then tapped it into place on the terminal. Hopefully that will hold until I can get a replacement strap to connect the negative terminal to the chassis.
Despite the problems, once wired up and given a little burst of preheat the engine fired up first time, so it can at least be used tomorrow morning.
My daughter likes to listen to Heart FM for reasons I’ve never quite felt the desperation to get to the bottom of, so it’s often what the car radio is set to when we go anywhere. I’m not a big fan myself, but when doing the Saturday trip to swim training today they actually played a few tracks I like, including Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”, Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” and Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye”. But there’s a problem with the last one. It’s been emasculated by removing Sean Paul’s part altogether. I’m lost as to why anyone would do that. Part of the power of the track for me is the counterpoint between the two singers. Without that it’s really quite bland.
I’m reminded of the version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” that they used to play, where in reference to photoshopped images the lyrics are “we know that shit ain’t real” and the word “shit” was removed whereas it was apparently fine to leave “go ahead and tell those skinny bitches”. Seems bizarre to me that it wasn’t considered acceptable to call something “shit”, but referring to other women as “bitches” wasn’t a problem.
In the case of Rockabye however the rap sections don’t contain anything I’ve spotted as potentially offensive (and Sean Paul has been removed entirely, not just those sections). It makes no sense to me at all. Leave it alone. It’s a great track.
The conversion of my stainless pots to brewing vessels still awaited, so with the beer shack at the point of usability (by some definition — there’s still no water supply) and my old boiler repaired I had to go for a trial run. The planned brew was the Morland’s Old Speckled Hen clone from Graham Wheeler’s “Brewing Great British Beers” book.
The brew generally followed the same procedure as I’ve been using for the last twenty years, with the important changes coming with the boil and for fermentation. In the fullness of time I intend to have a “chimney” taking the steam and other volatile products of the boil directly outside the shed, but for the short term I sat the old boiler in place of the new one and bodged up some piping to allow the steam to escape outside.
This meant I could do my first ever proper rolling boil. To stop condensed gases (some of which you really don’t want, such as DMS — dimethyl sulphide) running back down to the boiler I created a sort of trap, so they’d run into a separate bucket instead:
The top end of the pipework is demountable and just pokes out of a window when I need it to. Here you can see it working well (and you can see that this is before I’ve glued down the EPDM roof covering). The graininess of the photo is down to our weather. It’s been like that for a lot of the last few years 🙁
They’re all the rage at the moment, obviously, but I’ve always fancied having a remote controlled aircraft since I used to make model aeroplanes as a child. I recall a rubber-powered balsa wood biplane that I made with my dad and some sort of wire-controlled petrol-engined plane too. So, with children of my own now it seemed like a fun thing to get involved in. We’re fortunate in having loads of space to fly one in and no immediate neighbours so the only things likely to be irritated by its presence are the local fauna. Note to self: I wonder if our visiting roe deer would be distressed by the presences of a quad?
I didn’t feel the need to start with anything big and would rather learn to fly with something cheap and painless if it breaks, so after taking a bit of advice and hunting around on the internet I opted for a Hubsan X4 H107C:
There are a few things I particularly like about this quadcopter. First it’s small enough that we can learn to fly it indoors or in a barn in relative safety. Across the diagonal it’s less than 150mm from propeller-tip to propeller-tip. Also, the controller has adjustable sensitivity, so whilst we get the hang of flying it’s possible to back off the sensitivity of the pitch, yaw and roll controls to make allowances for being a bit heavy-handed. And finally, it has a camera. It’s just a simple thing built into the body so it can only view in the direction the quad is pointing, but it still leaves room for a bit of fun creating videos.
In addition I ordered a pack of spare parts to fix breakages (which I have to admit is taking its time to arrive) and five additional batteries with a USB charger:
The charger does feel a bit cheap and nasty and the sockets for the battery connectors are very stiff, to the point where I didn’t realise at first that they weren’t fully inserted leading to frustration when they kept falling out.
Also in the above photo you can see the first mod I’ve made, adding a little folded insulating tape to the end of each battery to make it easier to remove from the quad when it needs replacing.
Having the five spare batteries works well as at learner indoor speeds if they are recharged immediately then once all six have been discharged the first is pretty much ready for use once again.
First impressions are that it really helps to wind the sensitivity back on the controller. It was a bit of a handful for us novices otherwise. The battery position is critical. If it isn’t fully pushed into its slot then the quad tends to drift backwards. For that reason the spare batteries I purchased are the same capacity as the originals. There are batteries available that should last longer (from memory, 500mA rather than the standard 380mA), but my understanding is that they are longer and shift the centre of gravity of the quad backwards meaning it will drift backwards unless the drift is trimmed out, which in turn makes it awkward to mix battery sizes. The camera is not brilliant, but actually it’s nowhere near as bad as I expected. I have been pleasantly surprised by my tests. Obviously it’s never going to be as great as a gimbal-mounted camera, but for the price I have no complaints at all. The controller is quite comfortable to use, but it would be nice if the tops of the levers weren’t quite so hard and spiky. Obviously it’s important to have a good grip on them, but they could be a little more comfortable. The quad has also proved remarkably robust. There is a prop guard in the spares kit I ordered, but even without one fitted we’re still on the original set of propellers. Generally I’m very pleased with it and it’s been a great deal of fun.
Oddly our cats, who are brothers from the same litter, have taken to it quite differently. Once is very fearful and will leave the house if he hears it. The other will quite happily sit in its downdraught and when landed will place a careful paw on it just to make sure it can’t get away.
I’m told that a larger and more expensive quad would be easier to fly and it’s certainly taken a while to get the hang of flying, but I have at least now reached the point where I can keep it in the air indoors for as long as it takes for the battery to discharge from full. From there I think we’re going to have to move outdoors as and when the weather allows. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some video of the barn roof replacement as it takes place.
We have a barn that I believe was at some point in its life used for threshing grain, though it shows signs of having been extended a number of times and may not originally have had that purpose:
Over the last couple of years the stormy winter weather has made it quite obvious that it’s time to replace the roof, especially as it’s become obvious recently that the two timbers supporting the central section of the roof in the second photo were completely rotten, to the point that they could be removed:
So, as part of the operation to replace the roof the first step is to build new buttresses on that side of the barn to match the ones on the other side (it appears those buttresses did exist at one point, but have since disappeared) and create an arch between them to support the new roof. First step is to make some proper foundations. There’s no need to go too deep here as there’s not a huge amount of soil on top of the rock of the hillside. Just clearing off the loose stuff and backfill is sufficient.
To make room for the scaffolding the roof has to come off the hipped end of the barn too.
Next stage is to get the concrete into the trench for the foundations.
I’d given up on the old boiler I used to use for brewing when the thermostat died. When I initially checked, to replace it was going to cost almost as much as a new boiler. Some time after it failed however I came across replacement thermostats on the website of The Brew Shop for a far more reasonable amount and bought one. I also bought a stainless backnut for the heating element which is far easier to work with than the original plastic one.
Having this 25l boiler back in service means I can work with smaller experimental batches more easily than I would be able to in my new boiler. I’ll probably convert to a small stainless version at some point, but for now it will do the job.
