Memory Lane, 21st September 2022: Who isn’t a fan of prisms?

Posted on March 14, 2024 by james

My wife had been muttering for a while about the fans we have in our bedrooms not being sufficiently high to be effective. And to be fair she was right. She’d balanced them on some cardboard boxes, but they weren’t that steady.

And then I came across some scraps of oak-faced ply in the workshop, and an idea was born…

Starting with a hexagon (for a bit of a bee theme), some careful cutting with the table saw to get the 60° angles on the edges of the ply and the 120° angles on the base and top, I made these.

After cutting the six sides I made a 120° cut along the length of some scraps of softwood to support the joins and then glued the sides together in pairs, then glued the pairs together. The top is supported on square pieces of softwood glued to the sides. The base is actually made from 12mm MDF and fits inside where it can’t be seen, but the thickness makes it easy to glue in and provides a bit of weight for stability.

After that I got a bit cocky 😀 I didn’t have any scraps left to make an octagonal prism for my son’s fan, but I could manage a nine-sided (nonagonal?) prism (each of the nine sides being narrower than they’d have needed to be for the octagonal version). The angles even work out quite conveniently too. Imagining the top as nine identical triangles fitting “pointy ends” together gives the size of the angle there as 40°, so the other two corners must be (180-40)/2 = 70° and the angle for the internal supports and internal corners of the top and base is 140°.

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Really? Before the middle of March?

Posted on March 14, 2024 by james

I finished potting strawberry plants today, from tubs that had sat outside all Winter. I know what variety they are, but they’re of mixed ages. So they’re all going to go into the greenhouse to see if I can get an early crop.

In one case I needn’t have bothered.

A plant with fruit? On 14th March? Clearly something is messed up somewhere. Crazy.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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