All of these use quite old Abelo poly brood boxes that weren’t made to the correct dimensions — they have both a top and a bottom bee space.
The stands have sacrificial/adjustable legs. adjustable because nowhere around where I live is level. Sacrificial so that if one rots, it’s just a small piece of wood to replace.
Honestly, I probably made these because I could rather than because laser-cutting was the best way to do them. First, a very fat dummy — to take up several frames worth of space in a queen-rearing box.
And the same thing, with a built-in feeder.
Or not. We have recycling collections every week — cans/plastics, glass and paper/card. We’re supposed to do food waste as well, but that all gets composted. And in fact a fair bit of the paper and card also ends up in the compost. The non-recyclable stuff is collected every three weeks. This is our bin, after three weeks. It’s not uncommon to find this little in it.
I shan’t bother putting it out. Most of the time I reckon we could comfortably go a couple of months between non-recyclable collections.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s ok if it’s not in the red, right?
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.
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.
