Table saw alignment gauge complete!

Posted on March 14, 2024 by james

At last, after a lot of changes of design for the 3d-printed mount, I have the entire thing assembled.

The glue is taking a while to go off, so I’ll leave it overnight before testing it out.

Posted in 3D Printing, Projects, Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 10th September 2022: It’s the final harvest…

Posted on March 13, 2024 by james

Well, perhaps for the tomatoes. We’ll see. Depends a lot on the Autumn weather. If it’s kind there may be more. But for today, I have picked all of the remaining tomatoes that appeared ripe.

And I decided it was time to cut the spaghetti squash free and leave them somewhere to harden off, too.

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

No dig diary, 13th March 2024

Posted on March 13, 2024 by james

Not much time to get stuff done today, but I did manage to weed Frankenstein’s Greenhouse for the second time this year. Sadly I think all the plants it contains intentionally are also going to have to be removed too. The peppers are all looking very dead and the pineapples seem to be rotting. The pineapples might yet make a surprising recovery. We’ll have to see, but I think the peppers will be coming out of the ground very soon.

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

Ok, ok, so I said I wasn’t going to do it

Posted on March 13, 2024 by james

But yesterday when looking for suitable bolts etc. to finish off the dial gauge project I found some 6mm plastic threaded knobs that I could use instead of nuts for locking the mount onto the carrier. Unfortunately to use them I was going to need a bit more space around the slots for my fingers. I redesigned the mount to be 20mm wider.

And as I had a lengthy visit to the dentist planned for this morning I left it printing whilst I was out.

I think that’s now as good as it gets.

Posted in 3D Printing, Projects, Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 2nd September 2022: What’s this ear?

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

Sweetcorn, of course! It’s harvest time!

I used to have real problems growing sweetcorn, but since last year have started planting them in a block across two of my beds, three across the 1.2m ( 4′) bed. So I have three plants, a 60cm (2′) path then three more plants. This is worked very well. Along the beds I just keep planting until I run out of plants — usually somewhere around forty-eight plants. Depending on how things go, I also plant a few winter squashes around their feet.

A few usually get eaten before the main harvest though we try to finish any that are still frozen from the previous year first (if we have guests however, it’s always nice to have the freshest ones we can get and it’s fun to harvest and prep them together). Since I changed to growing this way we’ve always had plenty to harvest:

Including the occasional monster

Some of these will be eaten straight away, others frozen as soon as possible. They turn much more yellow than they are immediately the leaves are removed, but I’ve not been able to find out why so far. I assume it’s something to do with the beta-carotene, but I really don’t know.

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

Hifi wifi

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

Last week my wife and daughter started complaining that they were seeing quite poor performance from our Internet connection, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with it and from the desktop PC in my office I was not having a problem.

It took a while (I’ve been ill) but eventually it occurred to me that they must be connecting to the wifi router in the cellar instead of the one on the ground floor (lots of stone walls makes wifi fun to get working here). In fact, the wifi router on the ground floor was completely powered off despite being switched on. A quick test with the voltmeter showed that the power supply was only delivering 0.2V instead of the advertised 7.5V.

Fortunately getting hold of a suitable replacement wasn’t at all hard and it arrived today. Everything sprang back into life as soon as it was plugged in and the half of the family lacking a Y chromosome is now happy (at least with the Internet connection). The new PSU even has a USB charger socket which is bound to come in handy at some point.

Posted in Computing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

My workshop vacuum still sucks :(

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

Having replaced the power switch on my workshop vacuum it appears that there are other problems too. When run in “normal” mode it seems fine (other than the volume, which I’ll come to in a moment), but if I plug my chop saw into the power outlet and have it switched so the vacuum runs at the same time as the saw, the motor starts “pulsing”. I’m guessing there’s either some odd feedback thing going on with the power or there’s another fault somewhere else in the electronics. I’ll try on another piece of equipment tomorrow.

Had it appeared to work properly then I’d have thought about dealing with the noise issue, which I think is likely to be down to worn out bearings in the motor. I can’t seen the point in putting in the time and effort to deal with that if I can’t really use it the way I’d like however.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 12th March 2024

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

After an awful lot of rain again last night there was little chance to do anything much in the garden, so I have settled for putting my seed potatoes out to chit.

I’m only growing the variety “Charlotte” this year. Although I think they’re usually considered salad potatoes we found that they made excellent chips as well. I’ve given up growing maincrop potatoes because we always seem to get blight here, but the first and second earlies are out of the ground by the time blight becomes a problem. I would also grow “International Kidney”, but it seems to have been in very short supply over the last two or three years.

Usually I plant first and second earlies three across a 1.2m bed which is about the spacing commonly recommended, but I’m thinking of giving half of them a bit more space to see if they’ll produce larger tubers.

For the moment however, I’m back to waiting for the ground to be sufficiently dry to walk on.

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

Memory Lane, 1st September 2022: Tomatotastic, mate!

Posted on March 11, 2024 by james

Time to pick all the ripe tomatoes so those left on the vines have some change of getting ripe before the days become too short and cold.

Apero F1:

I think these are something like “Limoncello”, but I’m not sure. My wife just handed me the seed packet one day 😀

Costoluto di Fiorentino:

And Olivade F1:

Also in this tray, on the left, we have Garnet:

And this lot are all going to get roasted in the oven and turned into pasta/pizza sauce. Should last us most of the year 😀

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

My workshop vacuum sucks

Posted on March 11, 2024 by james

Or doesn’t.

It actually belongs to my father-in-law and he’s had it many years. He even tried to throw it out once, before I recovered it, fixed it, mended the cable he’d cut off and started using it again. A while back however, it started playing up once again.

When I took it apart this time I initially thought that there must be a broken wire, but I later discovered that it was the actual power switch that wasn’t working, in that applying power to the centre pins of the switch didn’t result in a voltage appearing on any of the outer pins.

It’s a double pole switch because the vacuum has a power outlet. In “normal” mode the vacuum just switches on. In the other mode it comes on when power is drawn from the power outlet, so I can have it come on when I start the chopsaw for instance.

I thought I’d pull the switch apart and have a look inside to see what was going on. Mostly what as going on was that it had filled up with sawdust 🙁 Obviously this isn’t great from the point of view of operating the switch, but it’s not great from a safety point of view either: sawdust in the presence of a spark has all sorts of opportunities not to end well.

The obvious place that sawdust might be getting in is around the ends of the switch rocker, so I think I’m going to reassemble the vacuum and fix some clear polythene over the top of the switch with insulting tape so the dust is kept out.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment