What have you fettled today?

[rogerzilla]

Half drained the CH, cut the leaking pipe below the damage, and removed the old radiator.

Then spent an hour and a half prising tiles off the walls.  They are going to need skimming before re-tiling as some plaster has come off.  Bah.  That puts the project back until I find a plasterer, although I will leave the old bath in until it's done, so I am still functional (just no showers, and only the downstairs bog and basin).

[T42]

Then spent an hour and a half prising tiles off the walls.

When we re-tiled our kitchen ~20 years ago, a chum came up from Strasbourg to help. The bugger went at it with such abandon that he went right back to the brick in umpteen places and we had to completely replaster the wretched wall before tiling it again. He hasn't been back.

---o0o---

Meanwhile, I haz been taking inventory of my wood stock with a view to finally building a kitchen island.  Turns out that using classic stiles + rails + floating panels I already have enough, if I don't mind oak-ply panels floating in a white-pine frame.  One side of the oak has a pleasant pink shade.

What to do: risk it with clear varnish or slap on a couple of coats of e.g. cherry / dark oak stain? The rest of the kitchen is in ash.

[rogerzilla]

These tiles had been put onto bare plaster by the housebuilders in 1989.  When they're on paint, they often lift the paint rather than the plaster on removal.

I use a wide stripping knife and a mallet. It is not the worst job I know.

[rogerzilla]

Got the rest of the tiles off.  The only thing left in here is the bath now, and that might need to come out for the plasterer to do the best job.  Only a 10 minute job to rip it out now that it isn't siliconed in, but there are no stop valves on the water connections (yet) so it takes half an hour to drain the cistern in the loft (which then creates air locks so the taps don't work afterwards, but I figured out how to clear those years ago - you backflush with a hose from a mains tap, using one of those universal tap adaptors.  If you fitted one of those fancy weir taps, you are stuffed!)

[De Sisti]

New front brake blocks on my xacd titanium-framed bike that will be ridden tomorrow (Sat 11 May), as the weather forecast is looking good.

[JefO]

Big charity ride tomorrow, so Lotsa fettling on my old British bike, then commissioned the hammer shelf (have added a couple of small hammers since the photo).

[ElyDave]

Nice shelf.

My hammers is in toolboxes, apart from the sledge, which lurks behind the door

[MattH]

Took the opportunity of MrsH being away to give the trice a service. The transmission has been giving me a bit of grief, but it's not been properly looked at (other than cleaning the chain and a bit of a tweak to the gears) since I got it, and done a lot of miles on the trainer plus some on the road and track.

There's an old wooden garden table that has been waiting to go to the dump, one of the ones that has a top that's about six inches wide, then two drop down leaves hinged off that. I realised that if I took the top and leaves off it, then swinging out the legs out that would have supported the leaves makes it stable, and the front wheels will sit nicely in the gap between the wooden rails that would have been attached to the top. Put the rear wheel on a workmate (with a small stand if I wanted the rear wheel to spin) and I could work on it all at a comfortable height.

So, stripped it down and cleaned the hard to get to places. Checked and regreased the idler bearing. Replaced the cassette. Cleaned both mechs. Replaced all three chainrings, going up slightly (from 52/42/28 to 55/44/30), then put on three new chains. Spent a bit of time making sure they are all set up properly. Much better.

[ElyDave]

You must have legs like Griepel, my S40 has an ultegra 52/39/30 and I have occasionally found myself in 30 x 30 and this king i may need an extra gear

[MattH]

It does go up to 34 on the rear, on a 20 inch wheel. So not as bad as it sounds, going from 15.4 to 16.5  and 88.3 to 93.4 according to Sheldon's calc. I'm more a masher than a spinner. I may yet regret the choice, but might be able to go back to the original 28 smallest chainring without losing the 55 - I'm already beyond the nominal capacity of both mechs. So far I've never needed the lowest gear, but was spinning out.

[ElyDave]

That explains it, I was on a 700c with that, now 650b to allow fatter tyres

[Cudzoziemiec]

Not fettled as such, but fettled into proper position; I spent Friday evening helping a friend shift portaloos for an event he's organised. #FunThingsToDoOnFridayNight(NotSo)

[citoyen]

Haven't ridden my audax bike for a long, long time but with summer approaching I thought it's about time I spurred myself into action.

So on Thursday evening, I disinterred the bike from the garage, charged the Di2 and pumped up the tyres, with a view to going for a ride after work on Friday. The following morning the tyres were still inflated so all good.

However, as I was getting ready to go out, I noticed a bulge in the sidewall of the front tyre and the inner tube trying to escape... nuts.

Had another root around in the garage to see what other serviceable tyres I have available. Found a 25mm Conti Grandsport in usable condition - not exactly a like-for-like replacement for a 28mm Marathon Supreme but it'll do.

That fucker really did not want to go on the wheel though. It's a Stan's Grail (tubeless) rim, with a shelf for the tyre bead to sit in that has a pronounced inner "shoulder". I managed to get the tyre onto the rim after a fair bit of coercion but it was mostly stuck in the well and wouldn't seat properly.

Eventually got it on enough that I thought it would be OK to ride, but then realised that my efforts had knackered the tube, and it was leaking at the base of the valve. 

So I had to go through the whole rigmarole again with a new tube...

Finally set off about two hours after I'd intended. Managed a pleasant 25km. Nice. Must do this again some time. Only without the faffing around next time.

By the time I got home, the tyre seemed to have seated itself more or less fully - often find this is the case. There's one little section where it's still not quite in but I didn't die horribly so I think I got away with it. Must get some new tyres though.

Also need to replace the rim, for that matter - had to revert to tubed tyres after getting a dink in the rim that means it's impossible to get a tubeless tyre to seal properly. Annoying.

[T42]

Last outing the Trek's FD was making gentle trickling noises towards the bigger cogs.  Unfortunately, with the motor hub in place it's too heavy to clamp into the workstand by the seat tube, so I rigged up a Heath Robinson contraption by laying a roller stand, that usually goes with the table saw, flat on the floor so that the back wheel could ride on it, and clamping the front wheel into an old turbo.

It was bloody hard to turn and noisy with it, but I eventually achieved a result of sorts, and took the bike out for a tootle and a listen.  No good.

This afternoon I put the roller stand & turbo back where they belong, put a bit of a sling round the saddle and hauled that up onto the sticky-out gibbet of the workstand, leaving the rear wheel 2 cm off the floor and the front wheel resting on the ground.  Apart from the bike flopping over sideways occasionally, this was a much better set-up.  The FD is now OK.

BTW, my feeler gauges (both sets) had long since eloped, so to achieve the 0.5 mm offsets that Shimano prescribe I used a 0.46 mm pick out of a Harley Benton set, jammed it between chain and FD plate and twiddled until it fell out.  Merci, M. Thomann.  Natch, a new set of gauges is now winging its way hither.

Anyone tried playing the guitar with a set of feeler gauges?

[MattH]

Finished off (other than painting) some bike rack fettling I started yesterday. Converting a US Thule bike rack to fit the Trice, both for transport and for storage. The rack has two arms that stick out at the top, which will fit nicely under the cross beam. Being the four bike variant it has plenty of room on those arms. The vertical 50mm square tube wasn't quite enough to keep the trike's back wheel off the floor, so that got extended by 20cm with a piece of 50mm square section and a longer snug-fitting thick walled square section inside both of them to act as a connector.

The rack has a US style 2 inch hitch fitting which meant I picked it up a few years ago for 99p on ebay because no-one wants that in the UK. Despite being British, my planet slayer comes with a 2 inch hitch as the OEM tow fitting, which then goes via an adaptor to get to a UK standard ball hitch (or pin hitch, or NATO hitch, or anything else). I've got an adaptor to put the camper's tow bar fitting to 2 inch.  The camper, planet slayer and adaptors are rated for 150kg nose weight rather than the typical weedy allowance on most cars, and the rack in original form has a 150lb load rating, so even with the small extension and increased leverage the trike on it's own will be putting less load on that four standard bikes. I can actually just roll the Trice into the back of the planet slayer if the rear seats are down, but we intend doing some stuff over summer with the camper and it doesn't fit well in there if we are actually travelling.

The next part will be with a (yet to be obtained) 2 inch hitch wall adaptor bolted to the garage wall, will be able to store the trike and the carrier vertically out of the way and easily get it out to use, rather than negotiating 90 degree bends inside the house to get it out or stacking it on top of other stuff in the garage.

[BrianI]

A new pair of red and blue "collars" to go on my kitchen tap levers to designate the hot and cold taps.

The previous collars got chewed up last year as I was prising off the stuck levers to replace the ceramic discs in the valves.

20 minute design in FreeCAD after measuring the lever dimensions, then a 10 minute print for each collar, one in Red PLA and one in Blue PLA!

[barakta]

3D printers ftw!