DIY with function over finesse!!

[CitroJim]

That Darts sketch was directly responsible for the Darts Governing Bodies cleaning up their act.

Spoilsports

[mickthemaverick]

While in New Zealand SWBMO's nephew presented her with a beautiful hand painted plate depicting the island near her sister's house. Unfortunately she could not fit it in her hand luggage so packed it with many layers of bubble wrap in her main suitcase. You can guess the next bit!! When she unpacked the case she was heart broken to discover a chunk missing from the beach part of the plate and shed a tear or two.

I said I would see if I could do anything with the 30+ shards and chunks that it had shed. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture at that stage but after 3 hours diligent manipulation and some repainting I was able to make the plate presentable to help quell her misery. At that point I realised that it had no means of hanging so a stand was necessary. I searched on the bay of sin to discover a suitable stand would cost £15 but at least it might make her happier. Before I committed to buying that one I kept looking, as you do, and came across a listing which included this picture:

BFTW

Aah!! I thought that has the makings of a template, so I spent some time fiddling on Paint to get the image to print at the size indicated and printed it off. An hour in the workshop with some scrap plywood left over from my draught excluding activities and I came up with this:

MTMO

Fortunately the plate fits perfectly and now this is the sight she has when sitting eating her breakfast and I'm pleased to say she is now happy as Larry!! (Whoever he was?)

MTM repair!!

[CitroJim]

Magic

[Gibbo2286]

Chips on a plate............now what's for lunch?

[Hell Razor5543]

Chips on a plate............now what's for lunch?

How about a London Pizza?

[mickthemaverick]

I think I have chalked up some more brownie points today. When SWMBO planned her trip to New Zealand she got herself a new bright pink suitcase for easy ID on the arrivals carousels. Sadly when she collected it at Heathrow it was anything but bright!! She has been trying to clean it since and getting more and more irritated by what had happened to it. Her methods with household products had achieved an improvement but it still looked like this earlier today:

MTMO

I asked if she would like me to see what I could do while she was out and she replied saying "You might as well please, you can't make it any worse!"

So I took it out to the garage and set to, I think she should be pleased when she gets home!!

Spoiler: show

MTMO

[CitroJim]

Very good Just goes to show just how much abuse luggage is subjected to on its journey...

[bobins]

Lady Penelope would be proud to own that now

[mickthemaverick]

I had another consequence of the sewer flood to deal with today. The 100mm depth inside the garage had been sufficient to swamp the roller door edge sensor strip and the transmitter that goes with it. As a result the door kept stopping on the way down due to false signals which meant holding down the remote button for the entire closing process and hence wearing down the fob batteries far too quickly.

I had to order the parts and I was horrorstuck to find a new transmitter is £99.95 and the edge sensor £185.95 As usual I resorted to the bay of evil and found a chap 4 miles away selling a brand new transmitter for £50, he has retired as an installer and is selling off his stock, and another chap in Rotherham offering a 4200mm new edge connector for £100. I wasn't sure if I could shorten it to the 2600 I need but decided it was worth a try as I couldn't find another one at all!!

The transmitter

Parts

So I collected the transmitter in the week and the edge sensor strip arrived this morning allowing me to get on with the job. Firstly I cut the end off the rubber to expose the end of the copper strips which make up the sensor:

The exposed end of the switch

It was clear to me that I would have to cut the strip to length very carefully to avoid crushing the ends of the copper strips together and then I would need to refit the 1.2k end of line resistor across the copper. I honestly didn't fancy my chances at achieving that so I decided to ignore the EOL functions and just fit the resistor at the start of line to look the same to the system. As it goes from EOL to short circuit when the strip is compressed it will still function but should the line get broken the system won't know so obstructions beyond the break won't stop the door. However the actual strip is very robust and I can't think of any way that a break would occur so I'll live with that in favour of the door shutting properly with a single press of the button!!

Resistor relocated into the transmitter

Next job was to cut the strip to length and then seal the cut end to prevent water access and for that I used a combination of heat shrink around the inner copper element to ensure the ends do not meet and then sealed the strip with the hot glue gun black filler.:

Resealed end

Once completed it was a very tricky job getting the whole strip into place and in the end I had to pop the door slats out of the side runners to give me the access to insert the strip. I got there in the end and reprogrammed the system to the new transmitter and fired it up:



I now have a length of spare monitored edgestrip if anyone wants it!

Spare edge strip

[mickthemaverick]

Warning!! Beware of what you post on this thread! Sometime ago I sent a link to this thread to a neighbour when I had 'deratted' the garden shed. Unbeknown to me he has been following the thread ever since and following my posting the edge connector tale he asked me to have a look at his garage door which was suffering from the same non auto closing issue!! I went and checked it out and discovered a loose antenna on his receiver. I sorted that and it is now working properly thank goodness as he's probably going to read this too

[CitroJim]

Shows what a good neighbour you are Mick And it goes both ways - just like my C4 Space Cadet work for a near neighbour saw my conservatory door fixed by that same near neighbour

[mickthemaverick]

If only Jim, I don't have any primary school children that need teaching!

[mickthemaverick]

As it turns out I wasn't quite right with this post.

When SWMBO was in New Zealand I set up the board as a means of passing the time which became a perfect daily exercise replacing the rowing machine I had been using with an activity that I enjoy doing rather than just tolerate. So I have been playing 3 x 25 minute sessions every day ever since and thoroughly enjoying seeing my standard get back to where it used to be when I played seriously.

However, that level of play has taken a toll on the very cheap board which I bought and last Friday the ring around the bull actually snapped!! When SWMBO saw me in a dishevelled heap looking for the missing bit she immediately offered to get me a proper board for my birthday!! Very nice of her but that is not until the end of June so I jumped the gun and ordered the current world championship board which arrived today.

I swapped the boards over and am delighted with the new 'blade' board where the individual segments are far more uniform and actually slightly larger due to the minimum space used by the blades compared to the old wires. My first game was completely bounce out free and I actually hit the doubles and trebles with better consistency. Job done!!

The Winmau Blade 6 Triple Core board

Installed for action

[CitroJim]

Excellent

[mickthemaverick]

Today dawned with nothing at all on the to do list so I went for a stroll round Maverick Manor to see if that really was the case. Arriving in the garage I was confronted with the high level storage consisting of one section of my ladders suspended by bungees and then dumped upon. It looked like this picture from a tale some months ago:

As it was

Meanwhile the other half of the ladder was looking sad on its own:

Single ladder

So I made a few measurements and drew up a rough plan:

The plan

There followed a trip to B&Q to aquire the timber which fits inside the Subaru thanks to the ski hatch in the back seat!
I then set about executing the plan and recovered the ladder, built and installed the new hangers and filled them up with the long items and large sheets of cardboard which I keep 'in case'

The finished rack

The last job was to reunite the ladder and lock them both safely on their brackets:

Restored full ladder

A reasonably satisfying job in that there is no longer a fear of a bungee giving way and deluging SWMBO's car with poles and canes!