What have you fettled today?

[ElyDave]

My B&M IQ was playing up. Normally it just fires up when i move the bike, but had been refusing to do so lately. It would turn on manually, refuse to charge anything, and turn of after about 5 mi s.

Today, deep cleaning after a grotty ride last week, and I disassembled the dynamo connection and coax connector. Left it to dry for a while and sprayed liberally with 3 in 1, hey presto, fired up as I wheeled it back into the shedde

[T42]

New cleats.  Helluva difference pedalling. Not surprising, they're about a millimetre thicker than the old ones, which pulled out 3 times last Saturday without being asked.

[Mrs Pingu]

More of this
20240306_184026-COLLAGE by The Pingus, on Flickr

Sanding, so much sanding, ugh, what a mess.
Then a 1st coat of paint to show up all the bits that still need filler.

[citoyen]

Fitted a pair of Schwalbe Marathon Plus to the commute bike.

Miraculously, no swearing was involved.

[T42]

Changed the batteries in the eBrute's alarm. Fiddly effort since it's held on with cable ties under the saddle. And put a new eTrex mount on the Domane. The old one looked OK but was getting a bit rattly.

[FifeingEejit]

attempting to lift some decking that's in the way, I is knackered.

There is the small issue of a whrily gig spike needing to be un capped to grt the 2nd last Plank lifted and is proving tricky, I'll be returning to it the morrow with some extra brute force.

once that's done the last Plank interfaces with the wall so I'll see how that fits together and how to make it fit together post blootering.

once the frames gone all I need to do is dig the uprights out and then work out how much soil and grass seed I need.

the biggest pain of all is that I need to drive to the garden centre all of 100m away.

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[Mrs Pingu]

Ooh that's a nice big (concrete) garden. Are you rewilding it?

[Mrs Pingu]

A little bit more filling at lunchtime today. Hoping that it's almost there. I do, however, need to get myself a big long sharp knife to remove some crap bits on the inside corners before putting the Screwfix plaster in a tube up to tidy it up.

[JefO]

Fitted a new battery to the wife's car (the 7 year old battery showed the early warning signs of being on the way out - ie just a slight hesitation when starting).

Changing the battery entailed applying a third parallel volt source, so that the clock and radio were continuously powered. I have jump leads and a spare charged battery for just such eventuallities. The spare charged battery was, however, flat. So I juggled the car positions and used the other car's battery to do that job instead.

New battery cost £67.40 at a very heavily discounted trade price (until last year, SWMBO worked in the office for the shop we bought the battery from). The battery is basically a 9" cube. I shudder to think what the real price of a larger car battery is. Frightening.

Spare battery is on the Optimate charger now.

 

[Mrs Pingu]

Part elebenty in a series. Not bad considering what a mess it looked at the start of the week.
20240308_164335-COLLAGE by The Pingus, on Flickr

That little nook between the chimney breast and the sloping ceiling (can't remember the technical term anymore) is going to be the new cat litter tray area now that Pingu no longer needs an office.

[T42]

Top fettle, that.

When I was a PSO my landlord used to keep his cans of McEwan's Export in a cupboard in the chimney nook. 

[Mrs Pingu]

Ah coom (coombed ceiling) was the word I was looking for, which is Scots. According to Oxford reference.com there is also skeiling, which I have never heard of before.

I suspect it might need another coat of paint but I"ll see what it looks like on a day with more light. Didn't think it was too bad for 2.5 tester pots...

[Pingu]

...That little nook between the chimney breast and the sloping ceiling (can't remember the technical term anymore) is going to be the new cat litter tray area now that Pingu no longer needs an office.

Different sort of shit 

[JefO]

Diagnosed an out of centre axle as the reason my 29er QR skewer would pull up tight but would still rotate relatively easily.

Was quite happy to see that the axle was indeed off-centre. Stripped the bearings down, threw the balls away, inspected the cones and cups, rebuilt it and was careful to ensure that the axle protrusions were equidistant each side.

Fingers crossed this is the end of the slackening skewer saga!

[The Family Cyclist]

Out with the family and the hound for a post dinner walk and a mum and daughter stopped to cross a road in front of us. I noticed the brake cable had pulled out from the braze on's on the frame. I pointed this out and they knew but didn't know what yo do. My offer to fix was accepted with the look of but it needs to go to a shop to be fixed. 30 seconds later they were on their way with working brakes and very very grateful. Thankfully my wife knows my obsession with bikes as apparently the mum was a Latino stunner and she knows I genuinely only spotted the problem with the bike

[rogerzilla]

Fitted a new security light outside the garage.  The last one was Chinese shite and expired exactly when the one-year warranty ran out.

[FifeingEejit]

Ooh that's a nice big (concrete) garden. Are you rewilding it?

no, before the previous owner did this the ground was mostly slabs, tresses and chuckies based on the photos on zoopla.

The plan is to dump some top soil and grassed in the gap, but I now need to work out how to do the higher edges since the slabs sit on blobs of concrete and I'm not lifting them all to replace it with sand.

I took most of today off to go to b&q to buy stuff, and discovered it's 10% off everything if you have one of their cards, deal runs till Tuesday so I suspect I'll be back for a few more bags of top soil, there's only so much I'm willing to put in an estate car.

current state of play:



what I have allowed to happen is the bank from the kettle road up to the garden was weeded and barked, I couldn't be arsed dealing with the saplings and grass that burst through the gaps in the weed sheet that burrowing animals have made, so that's going wild like the other houses, but keeping the saplings below the height of the fence so I can see over the howe which appears to be why the mature trees that were there before were felled , with any luck it will also help reduce road noise from the A92.

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[FifeingEejit]

this evenings progress

slab and decking post now postcreted in.

The stone steps on the left need a bit of tidying up too, cos like the treads are just sitting on top of the risers with nothing holding stuff together. I need to sort out some edging to go round and then can get the should down and decking fascia on.

then try and flog the remaining hit of decking while watching grass grow

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[Cudzoziemiec]

The light in a friend's fridge wasn't working so I said I'd have a look at it, expecting to have to trawl through a hundred and one slightly different types of bulb. In fact, I found I was able to magically breathe voles into the entire fridge, microwave, kitchen sockets and overhead strip lights by the simple flip of an RCD. Which saved a fridge and freezer load of ruined food.

[Diver300]

The light in a friend's fridge wasn't working so I said I'd have a look at it, expecting to have to trawl through a hundred and one slightly different types of bulb. In fact, I found I was able to magically breathe voles into the entire fridge, microwave, kitchen sockets and overhead strip lights by the simple flip of an RCD. Which saved a fridge and freezer load of ruined food.

It sounds like there may be too many loads on the one RCD. Each appliance has some leakage, which will vary. It can all add up to and trip the RCD with no fault.

RCDs are often installed for each circuit to avoid this situation. We had many nuisance trips until I moved the kitchen sockets onto their own RCD.

Unfortunately, it can be expensive to get such changes done.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I had similar thoughts. I've no idea why so many things are on one RCD but getting it rewired would be a nightmare. It's social housing and the kitchen has only recently been rewired, which of course overran.

[Feanor]

It's done for cheapness, and it's a crap way to do it for the reasons stated.

I replaced my consumer unit with one stuffed with RCBOs, ie every circuit has it's own 30mA RCD built into it's circuit breaker for this very reason.

[Cudzoziemiec]

In bike-related fettling, I swapped the plastic toe clips on the bike without SPDs for nice new shiny metal ones. The plastic ones had the distinction of being so oddly shaped that they would collide with the mudguard while not providing sufficient room for my toes; the metal ones, from MKS, seem to provide more toe space while being shorter overall. Win!

And then I started swapping the Rubinos on the "winter" wheels of the bike with SPDs for Conti 4-Seasons. I'd loosened one side and was just about to take the tube out when I realized they were already 4-Seasons, with the Rubinos already on the supposedly summer (in practice year round) wheels. Fail at preliminary identification stage!

[Feanor]

New brake pads on the bike.

A week or so back, I noticed a skiff-skiff-skiff as I applied the brakes.
On the workstand, I could see the pads were skimming the underside of the tyre.
Had the pads moved up on the arms somehow?

No, as the pads wear, the arms have to move further in.
They do not move horizontally.
They move in an arc from the pivot.
As they move further in, they also move up.
And skiff the tyre.

All fixed now.

[Kim]

No, as the pads wear, the arms have to move further in.
They do not move horizontally.
They move in an arc from the pivot.
As they move further in, they also move up.
And skiff the tyre.

This is one of the advantages of those Magura hydraulic rim brakes, which are a lot less pointless than they initially sound.