Drills, baby! Drills!

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Ok, drill bits, if we’re being accurate. Since I found the three braces, I thought I might sort through all the old drill bits that were scattered around the workshop in various boxes and drawers.

As well as standard metalworking bits, it looks as though we have bits for a brace, masonry drills, morse taper bits, plug cutting bits, SDS bits, spade bits, fly cutters and at least one countersink bit.

I imagine they’re almost all imperial sizes, too.

This one is a mystery though. It possibly looks like a rasp, but why the teeth on the end if that’s the case?

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

A brace of braces

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

#2 in an irregular series of “Tools that I have too many of”.

And what is the plural of “brace”, anyhow? Brice? Braceodes?

During “Operation Tidy Workshop”, I found these. They’re quite lovely tools, though I have no idea when I would ever use them these days.

Then I found a third, with which I assume it is also possible to drill around corners 😀

(No, really, I know it’s a ratchet.)

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

Crackin’ stones, Gromit

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Our Ooni pizza oven sees quite a bit of use, mostly for garlic bread, pizzas and calzone, but we’ve even used it to cook an entire meal once when there was a twelve-hour power cut when we had friends staying for the weekend.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I put in the last of five pizzas a couple of weeks ago and very shortly afterwards hear quite an obvious snapping noise. There wasn’t much I could do at that point not least because it was dark, so I just continued cooking the pizza and then let the oven cool down.

Daylight revealed the horrible story.

I have no idea why the stone would have cracked, particularly after already cooking a number of pizzas. Obviously it’s a bit chilly at this time of year, but enough to cause significant thermal stress in the stone? Unconvinced.

Anyhow, Ooni were very good about it and arranged a replacement for us which we are going to test drive this evening.

Posted in Random | Tagged | Leave a comment

A new beekeeping toy

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

Recently I had the opportunity to buy a second-hand but barely-used electric 20-frame extractor. As it was being offered a fair bit cheaper than the 12-frame model I was contemplating, it seemed like a no-brainer. The only minor issue was that it was a 250-mile round trip to pick it up and that turned into an adventure that I really didn’t need, but more of that later.

So here it is, complete with tangential screens. Obviously I’ve not had the opportunity to use it in anger yet, but it all looks very tidy and test drives just fine.

Hopefully there’ll be a worthwhile Spring harvest this year to test it out on.

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

Bumble bees, at this time of year?!

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

End of the first week of January and as I was walking out of the veggie plot I could hear a loud buzzing sound. Took me a while to locate it, but eventually I found this.

I’ve no idea what she can have been doing out so early. Hopefully she’ll survive until Spring, but we’ve probably still got the coldest parts of the year to come.

Posted in Environment | Tagged | Leave a comment

Looks like the polycrub works then

Posted on January 17, 2026 by james

I’ve not even got it finished yet (yeah, I know), but some of last year’s peppers are still looking healthy despite multiple frosts, which is certainly not the case in the polytunnel and even the ones in the greenhouses are looking a bit marginal. So I’m really quite pleased with this.

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

Decking out, paving in!

Posted on January 16, 2026 by james

The path to one of our external doors is decking which is now starting to degrade quite badly so I have decided to replace it with paving slabs. And by chance I was offered these reclaimed ones for very little money at all. There should be plenty to do the path and a few left over for other purposes. I’ll still need to buy other materials, but this has saved me quite a bit.

Posted in Projects | Tagged | Leave a comment

New toy for the greenhouse

Posted on January 16, 2026 by james

It’s a Spider Farmer SF2000 Evo grow light. Hopefully it will help get my peppers off to a better start this year. We shall see.

As well as looking at this one I also considered similar products by Mars Hydro and Viparspectra, but they all seemed much of a muchness and I got a fairly good deal on this one in Black November. The proof of the pudding however is in the eating of the peppers that the plants produce.

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

How strong is my cider vinegar?

Posted on January 16, 2026 by james

Because if you’re going to sell it, you need to know that it’s at least 5% acetic acid.

Titration is the way forward and whilst it used to be possible to use a wine titration kit (which is actually intended for testing tartaric acid content, I believe) they don’t seem to be available any more. The only one I managed to find for sale had actually been discontinued.

So I put together this kit to allow us to do our own. It contains:

  • Distilled water
  • 0.1M sodium hydroxide solution
  • Phenolthalein
  • 100 ml beakers
  • 10 ml syringes
  • 1 ml syringes

Oh, and a set of instructions that I found on Andrew Lea’s rather excellent UK cider website.

Posted in Cider-making, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

“Early” Christmas new potatoes

Posted on January 16, 2026 by james

I posted recently about my attempts to grow new potatoes for Christmas. Well, sadly, due to my inattention, that didn’t quite go to plan. I failed to move the plants into the greenhouse before the first frost, which killed the plants.

So I lifted all the potatoes anyhow. I don’t feel that they did too badly. We just had them a month early.

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