Christmas 2010 (I think) (by sarah)

I think this is 2010 and that for actual Christmas we went down to Essex for dinner at my parents house but these are photos of our Solcist meal and general festiveness.

Jean and Al playing with the marble run.

King Alaric at the washing up again

Garlic Bread - as in bread with garlic gloves in it 🙂

Jeany sort of setting the table

Jean decorating the MK 2 of The Little Book of Festive Poetry - I spent ages printing out out the sheets and glueing the words onto the pictures as the laptop I had couldn't cope with me trying to do things with large files!

It snowed and I remember playing with Jean outside and me and Al taking it in turns!

Tom and Jean 🙂

Jean really could not get enough of being outside in the snow!

It was the first year we found a yard of Jaffa Cakes!

Jean ran off with them 🙂

Sleepy Jean after all the fun 🙂

Day 3 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Well, after two days of prior work on the ladder, yesterday I settled down to another day.

I started by welding together the second side of the ladder, to match the first. With that done, I now had the two sides of the ladder, ready to join them together with the rungs:

With that done, I carefully aligned everything on the welding bench and ground the welds on the inward sides down so that the rungs could fit on nicely:

I set the rungs back half a centimetre where they were attached at the same point as a spacer, so they were welded both to the uprights and to the spacers, as I felt this would be stronger. The pieces of wood you can see under the rungs are maintaining that spacing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not very good at welding; I can make things structurally sound, but not pretty, because my welds often go wrong and I have to go over them again. This usually leads to big, messy, welds, and on a couple of occasions with this job, I actually melted a hole in the metal and had to patch it up. Here's one particularly terrible weld:

I ground the lumps around the edge of the hole down:

Then welded a metal plate over it:

This, in contrast, is I think the neatest weld I've ever made:

With all that done, the ladder was actually a ladder:

I sanded it down to get the weld gunk off, then washed it thoroughly in white spirit to remove the grease the metal came covered in, and laid it out in the kitchen to paint:

Then I gave it a priming coat and left it to dry overnight (I did it in the kitchen so it would be warm and dry overnight, rather than the cold and damp of the workshop):

It'll need another couple of coats of paint, and I need to cap the open ends of the uprights at the top, then I can mount it on the wall.

Part of welding that I always find quite profound is the way that a bunch of bits of metal, initially held together with clamps, and gingerly handled in case it comes undone, slowly transforms into a structure made of solid steel. This was driven home with the ladder project when, finishing the welds on the rungs, I found the best way was to lay it on its back like in the last photos and sit on it so the welds were flat (the best orientation, as molten metal likes to run away when the weld is vertical) and comfortable to reach; it didn't even flex!

I can't wait to be using it to get up on the roof. There's a flap of plastic sheeting lifting up in the wind and letting rain in, and I can't reach it in any other way...

Continue to day 4...

Sealing up the workshop’s eaves (by alaric)

I keep moaning about how the workshop roof leaks, causing rain to drop down on all my nice tools and supplies. But that's not the only problem with the workshop roof!

The workshop is basically a set of walls, with the roof resting on top. The roof is a large, flat, box with the bottom open (exposing the rafters that give it strength), slightly larger than the outline of the walls. The rafters rest on the tops of the walls, and the roof hangs slightly over the walls.

As you may have guessed if you've been following that, this means there's gaps all the way around the edge of the roof. Howling winds blow through them. These holes are enormous at the ends of the building, where the roof overhangs further; twenty centimetres high and occupying most of the length of the walls (interrupted only by the rafters themselves), but I've pinned up sheets of plastic to temporarily block them until I get around to cutting lots of rectangles of wood to properly cover them with.

Along the longer walls of the building, the gap is more like a centimetre, but again more or less the entire length of the building (which is somewhere around ten metres).

And the worst part is, the rear wall is close to a row of trees, which are covered in ivy. And the ivy has found the gaps and keeps oozing its way into the roof.

And as well as being faintly disturbing, the ivy also drops foul grime down onto my stuff.

So, although stopping the roof leaking is a long-term project I work on when I get entire days to spend building the ladder to get up there, I've been fighting the ivy when I've just had a few hours here and there. I've been cutting bits of thin wood (left-over cladding) and nailing them in place over the larger holes, and then liberally applying left-over bits of sealant to all the edges (I suspect the ivy attacks a gap if it sees light, so hopefully this will make it lose interest). The black marks on the ceiling are damage made by ivy I've torn out:

There's no less than three different colours of sealant there - two different cartridges of brown "frame sealant", one light and one dark, and some leftover bits of white stuff from the bathroom! Unbelievably, it looks miles neater than the mess of cobwebby, grimy, ivy that was there!

I have to climb right up into the eaves to get most of the gaps, however. This picture is not particularly clear, but there's a thin plank of wood that I've nailed down to the top of the wall in order to cover the two-centimetre gap between the top of the wall and the vertical wooden beam at the back, then I've run sealant all around all the gaps and joints:

I quite like working with sealant (I've been sealing gaps in the bathroom, and replacing existing manky mouldy sealant - and doing it neatly, unlike the ghetto job I'm doing in the workshop), and it's nice to think that I'm keeping out all those draughts and grubby plants! I want to properly seal all the gaps in the workshop - and then introduce an extractor fan over the welding bench at one end, and an air inlet vent at ground level at the other end, with a small heater under computer control so I can regulate the temperature and keep the humidity down in here!

I've also started varnishing a bit of scrap MDF that, I have realised, is exactly the right size to make a shelf to go over my workbench (not the welding bench, the one where I have the column drill). That will give me a place to put loads of things that currently sit ON my workbench for lack of a shelf. Also, I'll be able to fit a decent light to the bottom of the shelf; right now, when I work at the workbench, I cast a huge shadow over whatever I'm doing.

Horse Meat and Food Standards (by sarah)

Ok so everyone has been going on about the horse meat in the beef burgers and there have basically been too reactions 1) Oh my god! and 2) hahahahaha.

The first one tends to be along the lines of 'oh no I ate poor horseys!' which for people who eat meat is a bit silly. As has been pointed out they are moaning about the wrong animal being minced up for food. Is a horse really more valuable than a cow?

It could be argued that the horse is more intelligent but the people arguing this will nearly always be bacon eaters too and pigs are really intelligent. The other thing is that this seems horrific to the English but the rest of Europe eat horse! All the time not just when there is a cock up.

People need to assess what they are actually eating rather than burying their heads in the sand. I have friends who don't like the idea of the animals being killed but will not give up meat - they just buy bits that don't look like animal and try not to think about it. Maybe if they thought about it a bit more things like this wouldn't slip in under the radar.

This is interesting as Alaric doesn't even eat fake meat as the idea is alien to him. And this brings me to the point that though I think the reaction is silly, there is still the matter that people where choosing to by minced cow and not minced horse and the choice should be there. Not just for ethical reasons either - now I am not a vegitarian but have issues with cow fat. They make me sick weather in milk or the meat so for me a mistake like this could have serious health consequences. Say I was buying lamb burgers and they happened to contain cow - I would be getting sick and not know why. This is a safety issue.

Also if they have managed to put the wrong meat in there what else has accidently slipped in?

This mess is also going to result in a hell of a lot of food wastage at a time when people are queueing at soup kitchens and food banks are struggling to supply what is needed for all the families in crisis and that makes me want to cry or throttle someone. I know it would seem like a solution to give the patties to them but that would only work if they could be guarenteed safe otherwise you might be making a bad situation worse.

Lets hope it ends up in the bacteria vats for gas and electricity production than in landfill.

Day 2 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Yesterday, I cut out all the bits required to make myself a ladder.

This morning, I set out on foot to visit Machine Mart and Screwfix for some supplies; a set of magnetic welding clamps, some white metal paint for the completed ladder, and these anchor bolts to attach it to the wall. As you can see from the diagram on the box, they just can't wait to be buried in a wall:

Anyway, it's been a long time since I last did any welding (and I've never been great at it), so I started by just tacking a few bits together to check they line up correctly with the wall. I started with the trickiest bit, the angled spacer:

Then I proceeded to drill correctly-sized holes for my anchor bolts into the mounting flanges, using my column drill (a very useful tool). This made a lot of pretty swarf:

Then I started welding the flanges onto the spacers. The new magnetic welding clamps (the red thing in this picture) came in handy here; their function is to accurately hold things at ninety (or forty-five) degree angles:

With all six of the spacers flanged, I could start tack-welding them into place:

My welds on the flat were OK, but my welds inside corners are still pretty ropy; I had to keep chipping the slag off and going over again to fill in gaps. Another problem was that the steel square tubing has rounded corners, meaning that when a spacer has to be welded onto the upright to make a T, two sides of the end of the spacer are to be welded to the curved corner of the upright, making a big gap I had to bridge across somehow. It turns out that surface tension causes the exposed edge of the metal to pull back when it melts, so I had to bodge little slivers of metal left over from the cutting into the gap to stop this happening, resulting in some ugly welds that I may have to grind flat before I paint it - or to make the surfaces I'm going to weld the rungs onto flat enough for them to go on straight! We'll see.

Anyway, having checked the fit against the wall, I could then finish off the welds on all four sides of each junction, completing one side of the ladder. It's intentional that the flanges point in different directions, by the way - they mainly point upwards so the weight of the ladder isn't pulling them away from the wall, except that the one on the angled spacer has to be underneath so I can get in to fit the bolt, and the top one is underneath so the anchor bolt hole isn't too near the top of the wall:

At that point I ran out of time. It won't take me too long to assemble the second side as I already have all the flanges welded onto the spacers (which was quite time-consuming), and I can clamp it all onto the existing side to get the alignment correct without all the cross-checking and measuring I had to do the first time.

After that, I'll need to weld the rungs in place, tidy up the welds, scrub it down with a wire brush and sandpaper to clean off all the welding grime, degrease it with white spirit, and paint it.

Then I need to figure out how I'm going to get it into the wall! I'll need to somehow hold it in place while I mark out the drill holes, which might be tricky without an assistant. Then I have to try to drill the holes where the marks actually are (the bane of my life is carefully marking out a wall, starting to drill, and the bit hitting a stone and suddenly meandering half a centimetre off centre - then having to try and jam a screw in nonetheless, as whatever I'm screwing to the wall has holes in places that can't move to match).

After that, holding it up to the wall and slipping in the anchor bolts should be easy - then tighten them up and I'm done! They have a tightening torque recommendation on the box, so I'll finally get to use my torque wrench, and not be left wondering if I've tightened them enough or risking cracking the wall by over-tightening (which has been a concern with previous anchor bolt expiditions).

Continue to day 3...