Wasssaaap chaps!
You are probably wondering what I’ve been doing.
No? Oh ok. Well I’m going to tell you whether you like it or not.
We will find out what the wooden thing is for if that makes things more palatable for you. It’s not a chopping board - I made one of those and gave it to Mrs Sweetpea for Christmas a couple of years ago. And it’s not a drinks cabinet for the MR2. I quite like the idea of sitting in the back seat drinking wine and spirits while being driven around though. Only a couple of problems… I don’t like wine or spirits (most of them) and the MR2 doesn’t have back seats.
Maybe I need a Jaaaaaag?
For the first excuse we need a trip to work where we have an old Soundcraft analogue sound desk which has been making some horrible noises.
Annoyingly we couldn’t work out why it was making a racket. Or where the noises were coming from if it wasn’t the desk itself. Because of the way the desk was designed and wired in to the studio it would be very susceptible to picking up noise from anywhere around. So I took the decision to do a bit of a rewiring job and balance all the previously unbalanced channel insert wiring. It was a shot in the dark but it was worth a go to see if it’d help. It turned out to be a metric curse word ton of work that’s taken a few weeks to do.
What’s this got to do with not getting on with he MR2?
Well I had 6 boxes full of audio transformers to build and for ease I designed and built them in the garage.
And that blocked two of my work benches for a couple of weeks. It also meant that I couldn’t do spraying or dusty stuff.
Look, I even got the cheap Chinese function generator and oscilloscope out to do the testing of my wiring.
The function generator is curse word but it did the job and was quite handy. I quite like the oscilloscope though.
So here is one of the boxes completed.
I went proper old school and bound all the cables with lacing twine. There wasn’t room between the transformers to get tie wraps in. It looks like there is a fair bit of room in there but believe me, it’s rammed.
Apart from clogging my garage up for a couple of weeks this also explains what the wooden thing is.
It’s going to be a box to put the Chinese electronic tat in.
One of the problems is that the different things use different power supply voltages and that makes it awkward to use. So the idea is to mount it all in a panel with a power distribution underneath. I can stick 12V in and it’ll create all the necessary supplies to make it all work.
Crazy. The oak and the time to build it cost way more than the contents. But why not… The oak was just off cuts anyway.
I’ll get another photo or two when I get it finished.
In other news… Mrs Sweetpea has a hedgehog feeding box in the front garden. We have a camera in it so we can see the comings and goings. We had three in there one night. They all seemed very tolerant of each other which is unusual for hedgehogs.
Here’s a fuzzy screen grab of a hedgehog having a good nosh and probably doing a massive dump in the water bowl. Hedgehogs aren’t the brightest of creatures.
We did have a rat turning up for food for a while which I was less pleased about. The hedgehogs dealt with him by pushing him out of the way and sitting in the food bowl with their spines out.
Given half a chance the rat would stuff himself silly and then climb onto the top of the engine of the Lexus and, I guess, would lie on his back with his paws in the air in a puddle of his own wee until he digested enough of his meal to be able to move on. We cut down the food and tried to make him unwelcome on the top of the car engine. Eventually he stopped coming. We heard later that he’d been found dead in a neighbours drive. Probably obesity killed him.
He was definitely a bloke. You could see that on the camera in the box. His nuts were literally bigger than his brain. My nuts are smaller than my brain and given that rats have proven to be more intelligent than me… Er, well, I’m not sure what that says about me but it’s not good.
Anyway, I digress. Some other furry little cheese eating monster decided to chew through the USB cable to the camera in the box.
So that needed splicing back together.
Back in the kitchen…
Hmmm. It’s been a bit like that for a few years but it suddenly got worse recently.
There is a very good reason I’ve been ignoring it. Directly above this is the hot water tank and I’m in denial that it might be leaking.
Can’t ignore it any longer. Better get the floor up and investigate.
This pipe is the cold water feed to the header tank that feeds the hot water tank. It would appear that the push fit elbow is leaking a bit. That’s going to be almost impossible to get apart as it’s been leaking for so long and is in a tight spot.
So I just chopped it out and replaced a section of the pipe.
I don’t like to blow my own trumpet but, God, I’m bloody good!
James