What have you fettled today?

[Ruth]

Is that the one you used as a handbag on your trip?

[Deano]

God, no. I still have that one!

[jsabine]

Is it the bag you use to hold a Downmat?  A downmat that hasn't been eaten by rats, that is 

No, jsabine has that to fix now.

I do indeed. And idleness has meant that although I've looked at it, and inflated it, and thought about it, I've not actually fixed it. No doubt I'll start to sort it about nine hours before I'm due to leave for our next camping trip (which hasn't been talked about let alone planned yet).

[JonBuoy]

I applied patch number 31 to the inner tube on the front of my mountain bike.

Not sure how old it is but it has seen off a few tyres and I reckon that there is still plenty of life left in it 

[Ruth]

Mowed the lawn, did some washing, organised some property redistribution with Crusty.

He's doing well 

[Biggsy]

Sunday - fitted a new rear wheel, tyre, sprocket and chain - Shimano Nexus 7 hub gear job.  Took me all afternoon and all evening.

Thinking back, I don't know why it took so long.  It's not thaaaat difficult.  I seem to have turned into a snail.

[Tim Hall]

Scary sharpened the iron on my Stanley plane.  Now off to read how to adjust it properly.

And because I was in a honing mood, laid some scary sharp goodness on my Opinel too.

[interzen]

Pugsley's now running a 1x10 drivetrain, albeit with a stupidly small (22T) chainring - so as well as having Clown Tyres^tm I also have some fairly idiotically low gears, but then you don't need big gears on a fatty. I've ordered a replacement 26T ring, so the gearing will be downgraded from Insane to Merely Ludicrous.

Dismantling the MWOD chainset was surprisingly laborious, and I now have an impressive collection of bolts and spacers now that the outer ring and bashguard are surplus to requirements.

I've also fettled the old fridge/freezer out of the kitchen into the back garden in preparation for recycling when its replacement is delivered tomorrow.

[David Martin]

Apparently my timing system fettling worked well in arbroath though there was some interference from the bagpipes. Who knew bagpipes could be used to ward off bats as well as young children?

Anyway, 1100 people watched my electronics fettling in action and it worked. I was somewhat aprehensive about handing over a prototype to someone with a  5 min 'here it is, set up like this, this is how the app works, email or phone if you have any trouble' and then him putting it into live action the next day.

Apparently today it will have been rained on in Kirriemuir. I have been working on an upgraded version with big display. They now have sufficient confidence to spend more than a few quid on sensors so we should be able to do a better with fewer false triggers. This is kind of fun.

[Kim]

Finished and tested the two in-progress alerter module boards, made up a load of extremely tedious front panel wiring, and applied bodge resistors to the cheapo PIR sensors to stop them glitching.



So I'm now waiting on the enclosures, plus the remaining boards (I now have all the components to populate them when they arrive).  So other than the plugins for heating control, gas sensor and doorbell triggering, it's all mechanical fabrication left to do.  And the inevitable minor software tweaks (there are some software botches in place to integrate with the existing system that need removing, and I have a couple of ideas that may or may not be worth adding).  But the hard work is done.

I will at some point have to rip out the existing system and re-route some cat5 in order to deploy all this, but for obvious reasons I need everything to be fully built and tested first.


It's overkill, and not the most elegant of designs, but should be stable and reasonably future-proof.

[mcshroom]

Well I've replaced the shifter cable and tried to get the rear mech working on my road bike after an accidental twig/chain interface before easter. Can't get the shifting to work anything like though. Tried straightening the hanger, playing with tension and b-screw, loosening the jockey wheels and reassembling and eventually shouting at it. It's still sluggish changing both up and down gears, and seems to rub on the outer plate of the rear mech in lower gears. I think the plates are a bit bent after it all jammed up.

[Torslanda]

Well I've replaced the shifter cable and tried to get the rear mech working on my road bike after an accidental twig/chain interface before easter. Can't get the shifting to work anything like though. Tried straightening the hanger, playing with tension and b-screw, loosening the jockey wheels and reassembling and eventually shouting at it. It's still sluggish changing both up and down gears, and seems to rub on the outer plate of the rear mech in lower gears. I think the plates are a bit bent after it all jammed up.

Sometimes you just have to accept that 'FU'ed is actually 'FUBAR'ed . . .

[Kim]

the plugins for [...] doorbell triggering

Molished, programmed, integrated.  Probably needs a case.

[Kim]

Helped nikki fettle her brakes, un-botched the turbo trainer to work with 700c wheels and lent it to her for physioterrorism / bike fit purposes.

Also some seat-of-the-pants lead-free SMD finger-burning with inadequate tools for a project we're working on.

[David Martin]

Got the electrickery worked out and working for the timing system v2 using proper retroreflective light beam sensors.

Got a bit interesting trying to find the right holes in the breadboard after looking at 3W RGB LEDs.

Need to fettle the code but that should be straightforward.

[nikki]

Also some seat-of-the-pants lead-free SMD finger-burning with inadequate tools for a project we're working on.

SMD capacitor (lightweight racing multimeter for s(c)ale)

[Vince]

Did some garden fettling then moved on to tent repairs.
The Scouts cooking shelter had the plastic grommets ripped out of it during some windy weather at the Kent Jamboree last year. The 1950s Singer did the business, though it did stall when I occidentally tried to go through 8 layers of canvas! Then hand stitched traditional grommets.

[Kim]

SMD capacitor (lightweight racing multimeter for s(c)ale)

I think the solder's more impressive scale-wise.  (Though it's a suboptimally thick diameter for even through-hole electronics soldering.)  Reckon the capacitor was an 0603 or so, and amply demonstrated why I reckon dealing with anything smaller than 0805 is a job that's best left to robots.

(After chasing it round the table with the probes for a bit, and failing to pin it down with both lx tape and blu-tac, I gave in and soldered a wire to each end.)

[TimC]

Put the nearly-winter wheels on my Kinesis, vice the really-winter wheels, in the hope that Spring might have sprung (on the grounds that every outing on my summer bike so far has resulted in drowned-rat syndrome).

[jogler]

This morning I fettled the adjustable steering column on the Volvo.It is now locked into the desired position after a few days of occasionally doing an impression of a wooden spoon in heavy porridge

[David Martin]

Swapped the broken front shift lever for a new one and tidied up the cables. Then retaped the bars. Then redid the cables again, and retaped the bars. Then dicovered that the brake cabel outer was fubar so redid that and retaped the bars. That tape has been on and off the bars more times than an olympic gymnast.

But now it works. I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to swap the working RHS lever for a matching new one.

[Gattopardo]

Yesterday have attacked a bike frame with wire wheel, now to get to the fiddly hard to reach bits.

[David Martin]

The LED driver shift registers arrived and so I tested them, and after testing set to with a soldering iron. This is tedious work.

IMAG2190 by davidmamartin, on Flickr

That is two hours and one of three pairs. Two to go but they do work.

https://flic.kr/p/ntue2w

As you can see they are large 7 segment displays - 3" high digits should be good enough to see across a crowded field.

[Kim]

We slayed the triffids in the back garden.  Several hours and many drugs later my hands are swollen and tingly, with added bleedy bits, my shoulder aches and my eyes and lungs aren't right.  Need to go back with some sort of chemical weapons when I can grip properly and finish the job.

There's also a large pile of sharp and stingy green twiggy stuff to deal with.  Not sure what the best strategy is, given that the council no longer collect green waste.  It's an awful lot of trailer trips, and we don't have room to safely burn it.

And we now know about the bags of rubbish that someone has fly-tipped at the bottom of the garden.

I can't believe people do this stuff instead of riding their bikes...

[jsabine]

we don't have room to safely burn it.

Incinerator? Twenty quid, and (given a suitably large paella pan) can also provide the heat source for outdoor paella cooking.

Shredder and compost heap is a more expensive, longer term alternative.