Mend it and make do

[swee'pea99]

I fixed my wife's A3 printer. But it's alright now - I bought her a new one.

 

[MontyVeda]

I bodged my drill stand into some sort of working order using two 1" hose clips, a bottle cage handlebar mount and a crappy plastic tyre lever...

 

[Drago]

I bodged my drill stand into some sort of working order using two 1" hose clips, a bottle cage handlebar mount and a crappy plastic tyre lever...

View attachment 578618

Now there's a mans man, workbench and pillar drill in the kitchen.

 

[ColinJ]

Now there's a mans man, workbench and pillar drill in the kitchen.

Last week, my bubble pal declared my house 'too messy' (whatever that means! ) and set about tidying it up. I pointed out that it isn't her home and that we haven't been partners for 20 years so it wasn't really something that should concern her but she said that if she was going to continue coming over here 1 or 2 days a week then she would need it to be tidier. I told her NOT to touch any bike bits or throw away anything without asking me first***! After a while I started to feel guilty and gave her a hand... I admit that it DOES look better, but if I'd been in the middle of working on my bike then there would have been tools and cycle parts all over the kitchen work surfaces and they would have stayed there until I'd finished.

*** We had a row 30 years ago (when we WERE still partners) about tidying. I had been away to visit my family and arrived home to find a big box of papers in my back yard next to the rubbish bin. I looked in the box and found all sorts of important documents in there, and I'm NOT talking about just lists of riders in the 1950s editions of the Tour de France.

No, the discarded papers included my birth certificate, school and university exam certificates, NHS card etc. Apparently she had done the tidying with her sister and they got bored at looking through piles of 'useless papers' (such as lists of riders in the 1950s editions of the Tour de France! ) and decided to throw the whole lot away. It was upsetting - they had obviously done a lot of work and it was very kind of them, but you just can't do that kind of thing without asking permission first!

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Years ago our family had a yellow Ford escort estate. I think it was 1974 vintage or thereabouts. We called it the yellow submarine. Over the time the bodywork rotted away. As way of repair the gaps were filled with papermache . When it came time to tell it was going well till potential buyer leant on a bit of the substitute bodywork!

 

[MichaelW2]

Moving my workshop from old shed to new shed I had to resize the heavy duty 3 plank workbench to 2 planks deep. My dad made this to his usual nuke-proof standard sometime in the 1960s and it has been a fixture in the garage and on the farm.
I managed to remove the dozen 6" bolts holding it together but woodworm have been munching at corners.
I have some permethrin spray for clothing, which is also active ingredient of woodworm treatment. Any reason it wont work?
Also sawed off the worst affected corners and replaced with solid bits of the plank I removed.
Now to build a supporting frame out of shed leftover timber.

 

[MontyVeda]

Now there's a mans man, workbench and pillar drill in the kitchen.

The joys of living in a one bedroom 1st floor flat.

What you can't see is the other workbench, several sheets of ply and MDF against the wall, two big boxes of small bits of wood, two large tool boxes, several handsaws, about 15 clamps, etc, etc, etc. On the ceiling is two long lengths of springy net curtain wire from which two large dust sheets hang, separating the worktops, oven, kettle, fridge, sink, etc. from the sawdust when I'm playing. Apart from the big workbench, it all packs away quite neatly* when I'm not playing.

*neatly, from the male perspective

 

[tyred]

Years ago our family had a yellow Ford escort estate. I think it was 1974 vintage or thereabouts. We called it the yellow submarine. Over the time the bodywork rotted away. As way of repair the gaps were filled with papermache . When it came time to tell it was going well till potential buyer leant on a bit of the substitute bodywork!

It's something I was thinking about recently is that youngsters today will never know the joys of bodging cars back together again. I must confess I did fill a couple of minor and non-structural rust holes in the boot floor of my 205 recently with fibreglass matting and after a bit of sanding and a coat of paint you'd never notice at a casual glance. I only see it as a temporary fix as I plan on proper restoration next year. It is twenty-five year old after all.

I had the ability to do so in my skillset, an apprenticeship served helping my Dad do things like that when it was normal to have rust holes in your Ford Cortina when it was 5 or 6 years old. I know someone who bought a new Talbot Sunbeam in 1981 and he ended up in a hedge after the rear suspension arm pulled out of the bodywork due to rust when it was just three years old. I put my foot through the floorpan of my neighbour's Toyota Starlet on our way to a Sunday school outing and it could only have been a few years old at the time. My Dad was a haulage contractor and most of the lorries of the 70s and 80s were unbelievable rust buckets and Sundays were often spent pop-riveting the cab back together for another while.

I suspect if you were to tell those sorts of stories to teenagers today they'd not even know what you you'd be talking about any kind of serious rust is rare on most cars even at twenty old and you no longer need to constantly tweak things like points and carbs, you can just expect it to work.

 

[swee'pea99]

It's something I was thinking about recently is that youngsters today will never know the joys of bodging cars back together again. I must confess I did fill a couple of minor and non-structural rust holes in the boot floor of my 205 recently with fibreglass matting and after a bit of sanding and a coat of paint you'd never notice at a casual glance. I only see it as a temporary fix as I plan on proper restoration next year. It is twenty-five year old after all.

I had the ability to do so in my skillset, an apprenticeship served helping my Dad do things like that when it was normal to have rust holes in your Ford Cortina when it was 5 or 6 years old. I know someone who bought a new Talbot Sunbeam in 1981 and he ended up in a hedge after the rear suspension arm pulled out of the bodywork due to rust when it was just three years old. I put my foot through the floorpan of my neighbour's Toyota Starlet on our way to a Sunday school outing and it could only have been a few years old at the time. My Dad was a haulage contractor and most of the lorries of the 70s and 80s were unbelievable rust buckets and Sundays were often spent pop-riveting the cab back together for another while.

I suspect if you were to tell those sorts of stories to teenagers today they'd not even know what you you'd be talking about any kind of serious rust is rare on most cars even at twenty old and you no longer need to constantly tweak things like points and carbs, you can just expect it to work.

The hole in the floor on my Triumph Herald was no big deal most of the time. It was only when you drove in heavy rain that your feet got drenched.

 

[Drago]

Put a new stylus in my 40 year old Kenwood turntable today.

This may interest some of you mend and make do'ers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55808632

 

[swee'pea99]

Put a new stylus in my 40 year old Kenwood turntable today.

This may interest some of you mend and make do'ers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55808632

My missus thinks I'm mad, but they all have their place...

 

[oldwheels]

Last week, my bubble pal declared my house 'too messy' (whatever that means! ) and set about tidying it up. I pointed out that it isn't her home and that we haven't been partners for 20 years so it wasn't really something that should concern her but she said that if she was going to continue coming over here 1 or 2 days a week then she would need it to be tidier. I told her NOT to touch any bike bits or throw away anything without asking me first***! After a while I started to feel guilty and gave her a hand... I admit that it DOES look better, but if I'd been in the middle of working on my bike then there would have been tools and cycle parts all over the kitchen work surfaces and they would have stayed there until I'd finished.

*** We had a row 30 years ago (when we WERE still partners) about tidying. I had been away to visit my family and arrived home to find a big box of papers in my back yard next to the rubbish bin. I looked in the box and found all sorts of important documents in there, and I'm NOT talking about just lists of riders in the 1950s editions of the Tour de France.

No, the discarded papers included my birth certificate, school and university exam certificates, NHS card etc. Apparently she had done the tidying with her sister and they got bored at looking through piles of 'useless papers' (such as lists of riders in the 1950s editions of the Tour de France! ) and decided to throw the whole lot away. It was upsetting - they had obviously done a lot of work and it was very kind of them, but you just can't do that kind of thing without asking permission first!

Somebody should have told my wife not to throw things away without consulting. I lost all sorts of stuff but particularly the head badge of my Flying Scot annoyed me and one of a pair of mustard and cress pigs she gave away. Some was not on purpose and I found missing kitchen knives in the compost often.

 

[oldwheels]

The hole in the floor on my Triumph Herald was no big deal most of the time. It was only when you drove in heavy rain that your feet got drenched.

My wife took turns with a neighbour running the kids to school who would not let them travel if it was our van. It had a large hole in the floor on the passenger side. Our car had to be used when it was our turn. I pop riveted a but of sheet steel over the hole eventually. I got so adept at welding sills I could almost weld kitchen foil.

 

[DCBassman]

Radios...
All knackered when I got them, all bar one now working to the extent I can get bits to fix them.
Two mighty Grundig Concert Boy 1100 sets. Sound fabulous! The black one works fully, the brown version (bought new by my Dad to take to Africa) needs a fair bit more work on the AM side.

Two versions of the Sony ICF-35. Black one is more or less fully working and cosmetically OK, silver one has suffered catastrophic battery leakage at some point in its life, and only runs on an external adapter, an original model of which I fortunately have. It also, like the brown Grundig, only works on FM, but sounds OK.

Sony ICF-SW7600 digital PLL receiver. This one needs a load of surface-mount capacitors replacing, due to a manufacturing error by Sony.

The production fault was to flow-solder them too hot, and the capacitors started to deteriorate from that moment on, usually conking out after about 15 years. If (very carefully) replaced with ceramics, the radio should last virtually for ever.

When working correctly, they are one of the best small shortwave sets you can buy, even today. I previously had an ICF7600DS, which I gave to my younger son when I got a new ICF-SW7600GR, the last model in the line, in 2003. That will probably work for decades, as all the bugs had been worked out over the preceding 20 years. It's my totally overkill alarm radio!

I like radios!

 

[tyred]

That reminds me, I have a pretty old Roberts radio I found dumped at the side of the road while cycling a while back. I always meant to get batteries and see if it works and if not why not but had set it to one side and forgotten about it.