Terrible Twos

Yep, it's 2 years, 731 days, 17,536 hours (give or take), over 21,374 visits and 309 posts on and amazingly this Blog is still going. When I started this woodworking blogs were thin on the ground, nowadays everyone's doing it with added audio and visual in some cases - some even restrict themselves to woodworking content... Fear not, I have zero intention of inflicting podcast or vlog upon the long-suffering reader; as you may have noticed I'm hard-pressed enough to get any woodworking on here at all. Anyway, many thanks to the readership without whom I'd be talking to myself, not that that'd stop me...

And to celebrate I have Good News. After many years of begging and pleading any and everybody for same, a noble Australian has at last come to my rescue and provided a scan of a 1966 (guessing from the code at the bottom) Record 043/044 manual. Huzzah! It's a little the worst for wear, so I'm doing some painstaking work in cleaning it up and trying to make it legible, even to the point of retyping text and replacing essential lines on the diagrams. Not by any means done yet, but I've put up the progress so far (412KB) for anyone else like me who's been long waiting to see this elusive manuscript.

All right, don't all rush at once...

Next task, a page on the Record 044 along the same lines as the 040/043 page. Hey, another couple of centuries at this pace and we'll have a Record Blood & Gore...

Edit: Finished the manual - at least I hope so, unless folks say they can't read it... Down to a miserly 348KB what's more.

Drawer diversion

Surprisingly enough I have managed to get a teeny thing or two done in the workshop - you know the sort. The oddments that take a disproportionate amount of time to do for the size of task and yet once they're done you wonder why you didn't get on and do it earlier 'cos it's such an improvement. One such was turning two shallow drawers into one deep one able to take "some" of the bench planes on their soles and convenient to seize up and use (hollow laughter is permitted here). Previously they'd been on their sides and inconvenient. Actually that's not strictly true; previously they'd been in the tool chest but I couldn't get into the tool chest at the moment even if I wanted to there's so much gubbins heaped on top.



T'was but the work of several hours to remove one drawer and cunningly attach its false front on top of the remaining one to preserve the illusion of equally-sized drawers. It'll be fine as long as I don't try to open the drawer by the top, "false" handles too often - it's a fairly heavy load in there.

That left me with a spare drawer box and set of runners, but as I was cobbling together the original and discarded base from the Old Man's workbench and some ply to make a bit of bench top, it wasn't too appallingly difficult to fit the drawer to it while I was at it, and thus made some very welcome additional storage space. Nope, it's not by any stretch of the imagination pretty, but it is solid and didn't cost me a bean, so heck, I can live with ugly.



Not costing a bean was an important factor - as is so often the case when you've just spent a sum of money (cage), other things started falling apart in all directions such as the DVD recorder and other items of Expense. Naturally this also tends to happen in the run-up to Christmas rather than, say, July when the demands on the budget are much lessened. Damn you Murphy and your Law... One consolation is at least there's no Axminster Show this year so I'm not looking down the barrel of a show with no funds to furnish the party bag with goodies.

Meanwhile the cage still glowers in the corner:



And Bertie still waggles his wings in concern in his old cage:



He's greatly enjoying pomegranates at the moment (one look at the state of his perches would tell you that; the juce goes everywhere), so perhaps enough slices of same in the new cage will lessen his horror. I've also got in another new example of his favourite type of toy with similar bribery in mind. Nevertheless, I forsee a long and protracted propaganda campaign will be required before feathered foot steps willingly into powder-coated Cage of Doom. Oh well, early days yet...

Sing like birds i' the cage

Methinks The Reader will be thinking I've forgotten him. 'Tis not so, just seems that way. I mean really, do we want this Blog to turn into the virtual equivalent of the old lady in the doctor's waiting room who buttonholes you and starts listing all her ailments and medical predicaments? No, I thought not. So just assume workshop time is - again - curtailed. Dammit.

On the plus side, we now Have Parrot Cage. Unfortunately not the colour we waited three weeks for - nope, turns out one didn't turn up with the supplier's last order and it'd be another 5 weeks. Grrrr. Well as 3 weeks guaranteed nothing there was no reason to suppose an 8 week wait would be any better, and perhaps the colour that was available would be unavailable by then, so on the principle that a cage in the hand... So it sits there, dark and menacing, while Bertie does his best "I'm a poor little fledgling, save me" wing-waggling routine in sheer horror. Jolly good fun putting one of these darn things together; if you were brought up on Meccano. I wasn't. Took the best part of a day, what with having to clean it all first in case of evil anti-parrot germs thereon - yea, even unto the very nuts and bolts. The things I do for these birds...

Anyway, I shall try and actually keep the resolution I made this time last week, and blog faithfully the Whole Week. After all, it's our second anniversary on Wednesday; please supply your own party hats. With luck I won't be in quite such Bardish mood by tomorrow, so that's something to look forward to at least...

Spooky

All Hallow's Eve and an eldritch screech rends the air...

... yes, the screaming file is a sure sign that the saw's marginally too high in the vice again.



Trick or Treat? Hah, demanding chocolate with menaces more like. I've no objection to the idea in North America where it belongs, but over here it turns me into a first class Hallowe'en Scrooge. Luckily I didn't see one little darling with a plastic pumpkin-shaped bucket begging for sweets or I wouldn't have been responsible for the outcome. At the very least extensive questioning over how much pocket money they got and a short quiz on the origins of the occasion before they got the trick... Hrumph; we used to have a turnip with a nightlight in it and go in for bobbing apples in my day. And if you got the apple without the worm in it you were jolly grateful.

Bah, humbug. And no, they're my humbugs and you're not getting any.

Oh yeah, now the joy of fireworks for a week. Someone started up at midnight, for Fawkes sake...