h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The knee kicker is a carpet-stretching device. It grips the carpet with some sort of spikes and has a pad which you can strike with your knee to push the carpet forward, stretching it. The carpet is in held once streched by the under-carpet grippers.

Very useful for doing a stair carpet where every step must be stretched and gripped in order to be safe.

Excellent - I do enjoy repairing and building things. It's very satisfying.

My last DIY project (besides Tavaron's house ) was a quintain that folds down small enough to fit in the shed or in my car, yet is sturdy enough not to fall over when and I hit it at a gallop. I'm considering writing an entry about it...

Wednesday's task was to attach horizontal wires to one of the garden walls. These had to be about 4 or 5 inches (10-12cm) out from the wall. Mrs G is growing apple trees against the wall and by training the branches horizontally along the wires, the branch spends less energy trying to climb towards the sun and put more effort into producing big apples.

I attached thick wooden posts to the wall and then put metal hoops into these. The wires were strung between the hoops. Ideally I should have used those wire tighteners which you turn to tighten the wire, but I couldn't find them on sale, so I just used brute force.

The apple trees are just starting to flower, so hopefully we'll get a few apples. We have strawberries, blackberries, redcurrants and raspberries in our berry patch just beside the apple trees.

Traveller in Time retensioning the wire every few years
"The advantage of 'wire tensioners' or 'backstay adjusters' over fixing the wires stuck is you can re-adjust the wire tension after a few years.
Thinking of the force / stretch curve of springs, the bottom flat part is stretch without adding tension.

Geuss you should be able to find them in a specialised gardening shop or a shipyard ."

Or perhaps a common hardware shop - in the zone where you would find clothes-line and accessories.

Yesterday's jobs:

1. Attempted to fix the lock on my brother-in-law's front door. Modern doors have a standardised lock barrel that slides in, so it wasn't too difficult to get it out. Although the shape is standardised, there are different lengths, and the hardware stores that open on a Sunday don't stock the really long ones. My B-i-l had to phone a locksmith, who had a stock of them and quickly sorted it out.

2. Fixed the flex on a hair straightener. this has a special rotating commutator connection where the flex joins the appliance, so that it can be twisted without damaging the flex. It wasn't making a good connection and only working about one tenth of the time. My first thought was that the rotating connection was broken, so I dismantled, cleaned and re-assembled that, but it turned out to be a damaged flex, just 3cm from the rotating gizmo. I cut out the dodgy bit of flex and put a big crude connector on it, covered in insulation tape, but it works!

When you say "flex" are you referring to that thick part of rubber around an electrical cord that keeps it from getting crimped?


If so, pick up some stuff called "Sugru" at your local DIY.
http://sugru.com/

It's just the thing to fix that.

I recently discovered this stuff and used it to replace the soft rubber power button on my motorcycle's GPS unit. (Actually, just the rubber weatherproof cover protecting the actual micro-switch). That saved me a at least around $150 to have my unit replaced with another refurbished unit, the cheapest way Garmin will "fix" a barely broken unit.

By "flex" I mean the cord itself.

I have some Sugru but I didn't use it for this.

The closest I come to fixing anything is being the one who broke it in the first place.

I remember when I broke my father's typewriter. My mother told me I'd have to pay for having it fixed -- until my father tried to fix it himself and made it worse. The my mother relented and said that my father would pay for it, having made it so much worse.

I once broke the 1950-something Underwood typewriter. It weighed more than I did. I fixed it before anyone knew about it.

And in later years, every degree of teletypes .... helluva coincidence, that.

(I also built and repaired 100 to 20,000 watt radio systems that took input from such keyboards, and received them. That was incidental )

And I have trouble even figuring out how cellphones work.

There's no shame in that. Besides the difference between iPhones and Android (and Blackberry, anyone still use blackberry) most manufacturers put their own twists on their phones and then there are the constant updates and changes. Even if you figure out how to use your particular cellular device, it's doubtful you would know your way around the next person's.

And even when you think you know how to use yours, you really don't as there is NO DOCUMENTATION, no instructions. I haven't had two smart phones that used the same method to take a screen shot.

My phone has an online manual, but it is surprisingly sparse in information. It doesn't for example tell you what the one button on the front of the phone below the screen is for. Since this is one of the most basic functions of the phone, you would expect it to be explained in the manual.

You built "radio systems that took input from such keyboards" -- 1950s Underwoods? You have us fascinated

Teletype was a direct relation to the Underwoods - just with loads of selenoids and contacts.

My

I like the idea of selenoids controlling the machinery.

We've four nice wooden chairs around our kitchen table for the four of us. We've folding chairs which we trot out when there are visitors. The four chairs are getting a bit old - the glue is becoming brittle and they are creaking at the joints.. I've added a lot of big screws into them to hold them together.

One of them started feeling seriously dodgy on Friday so on Sunday I took it apart - one of the main pieces of wood has dried out over the years and has broken. It's just around where the leg joins into the seat. So I found a handy piece of metal, cut it into shape with my mini-carborundum wheel and screwed it into place, holding the seat together. Then the whole thing had to be put back together. Total time, about 3 hours.

Result: we have four chairs again, and I don't have to go out and find four new ones.