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Compost temperature

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

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

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged compost | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Laser, Projects | Tagged jewellery stand | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in 3D Printing, Bee-keeping, Projects, Smallholding | Tagged bait hives | Leave a comment

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 😀

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged carrots | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Projects, Smallholding | Tagged box | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Random | Tagged skoda | Leave a comment

DIY laser bed

Posted on January 10, 2026 by james

After making a few items with the laser cutter I’ve come to the conclusion that a cutting bed is probably desirable, but I want to see how much difference it actually makes. I’ve therefore had a dig around in my scrap metal and found this grill from an old oven (I’m sure I used the oven shelves themselves in my smoker). I’ll rest it on some stands and see if it improves the quality of the cuts.

Posted in Laser | Tagged cutting bed | Leave a comment

A new box for honey jars

Posted on January 9, 2026 by james

Now I have the laser cutter, I thought I could make a better box for displaying and transporting jars of honey. Then I found the “laser cut interlocking” plugin for FreeCAD and I was away!

This is my first attempt.