Up-cycling an old shoe shine box...

A short video where I up-cycle an old shoe shine box into something more useful, in this case an easy to carry sewing box.

The box didn't really need much doing to it, just a new handle and a bit of sanding, I did make a small tray for the inside to add extra storage, all in all I'm happy with the results, and again another object given a new life and saved from the bin and for no cost other than a little effort.

I've found over the years that although an object might need some work the way it was built is much better than modern equivalents and was made from better materials, I guess more effort was put in to making an item that functioned well but would also last for many years and production costs were less of an issue.

Anyway the video is below.

Thanks for visiting.

How to repair a puncture...

A rough guide on how to repair a puncture in a bicycle inner tube, or at least the way I've been doing it for years, it's a simple process, it can be done almost anywhere as long as you have a repair kit and a pump.

There are products you can buy that will temporarily fix a puncture really quickly, Tire weld is one that springs to mind, technically made for cars but it does work for pushbikes.

Anyway hopefully this will prove useful -

Thanks for visiting.

Homemade garden fork handle...

It's the time of year where my thoughts turn to all things gardening and so I start making plans and lists of jobs to be done.

Trouble is I broke the handle of the only fork I have for use at home, I have a couple down the allotment, probably should get another for home use (how many forks is too many?) I broke the handle whilst trying to dig up some very old rose bushes that someone in our local area had put on a freecycle type website, in the end I got eight very large (rooted) rose bushes, which are now in the garden in various places, which is good, but it did leave me with a broken garden fork.

So off to the workshop to make a new handle, below is the video.

Thanks for visiting.

Repairing the hole left after removing an extractor fan...

We've recently taken out an old (and broken) extractor fan from the kitchen, the trouble is that once the extractor was removed we were left with a hole roughly 100mm wide right through both walls of the house, the problem was filling the holes.

Definitely a hole in that wall

There are numerous ways to do it, but being tight and not wanting to spend any money I used what we had lying about, that being half an old breeze block, these are handy because they can be cut very easily with an old handsaw (I have one just for cutting breeze blocks) and as it turns out you can very easily turn them into round blocks with a little bit of cutting and filing using a rasp.

Obviously I made the wiring safe, the cable has been disconnected at both ends and is not live, I wasn't able to remove it from the wall as it's been plastered in and I didn't want the extra work.

'If you're not confident with electrics please get someone who is if you need anything electrical done'

So please take a look at the short video of the rough steps I took to fill the hole, it really was very simple to do, below is a picture of the finished wall, we've painted the kitchen white so it's difficult to see much so you'll have to take my word for it that it's fixed and you can't tell there was ever a hole there.

All done - 

You can just see a faint outline where it's been painted

Take a look - 

Hopefully you find it useful.

Thanks for reading.

Paint scraper /decorators knife repair...

 It's been a while since I've posted, so to start off here's a quick repair job.

I've been decorating the house and managed to break the scrapers / decorators knives I've been using for various tasks and seeing as I didn't want to spend any money buying new ones, or if I'm honest given the current lock down I didn't want to have to queue for ages at a diy store to buy new ones, so of to the shed to repair the ones I had, there's a short video at the end of the post if you're not in the mood for reading.

One fixed already - 

Repaired and to be repaired.

You can see the problem, there should be a plastic handle attached to the metal part, so I need to make one of those and as it turns out it was easy given the piles of random bits of wood I have.

First I marked 2 points where I intended to drill -

Ready for drilling.

Then after drilling the holes I found a couple of long(ish) bolts, these need to be long enough to go through the wooden handle.

Like so - 

These bolts should do.

Next a handle is needed, for this I used an old spindle from a wooden bed, sometimes having random things pays off, I just cut one of the spindles in half which gave me 2 handles.

Handle picked and cut - 

Now to make the blade fit in the handle.

To make the blade fit you'll need to make a cut in the centre of the wood you use, a square piece will do, but I'd round it off a bit to make to more comfortable to hold.

Cut made - 

Now to fit the blade.

Mark drill points on the piece of wood, I used the blade I'd already drilled as a template, you'll need to make 2 holes in the wood for the bolts to go through, and it's a good idea to counter sink the holes as well.

Almost done - 

To be drilled.

Bolts fit - 

Not much left to do now.

Assemble the scraper and finish it off, I cut of any extra bits of thread from the bolts and gave the handles a quick sand, they don't need to be pretty as they'll be used and abused, but will last longer than they did with the plastic handles, they do feel a lot sturdier and like they can take more punishment, so although it's a repair it's also an improvement on the original.

Assembled - 

Bit of finishing needed.

All done -

There's a certain rustic vibe to these.

Quick video/slideshow detailing the steps -

Thanks for reading.

Which is better, fixing something or throwing it ?

I like music, who doesn't ? (I'm sure someone somewhere doesn't) but I don't really get the chance to listen to music that much, at least not on my stereo, which hasn't really been used for years, probably due to the volume the thing is capable of :-)
I have some old pc speakers in the shed that I plug my mp3 player into, this is good if I'm doing something repetitive, like wood turning, removing the wood until you have what you want can take some time, so music helps pass the time, just lately AC/DC has been my preference.

If however I'm not in the shed I don't really have a choice but to use my mp3 player with some headphones, I don't have anything fancy, but they put out good sound (which is the important thing) but for some reason I keep breaking them, and it's always where the jack plugs into the mp3 player, probably how I put it in my pocket or something like.

I did have a set of headphones that had an in-line volume control, these are good to have because if someone tries to talk to you, or you need to talk to someone it's easier to just turn the volume right down, rather than ferreting about in pockets for small music players, and because I broke my set that had the in-line volume control I was a little stumped, I didn't want to pay loads for a new set (I got mine on offer) so I got a cheap set and decided to frankenstein me some headphones :-)

Yes I could have just thrown them out and got a new set, or gone for something like this - headphone volume control (opens in new window) but that's just adding to the rubbish and all I needed to do was chop and change what I had a little, I kept the leftovers, pretty sure they will come in handy at some point.

So this is what I did, basically I took the damaged set of headphones and cracked open the volume control.

You need some tools to do this, soldering iron,solder, a knife or flat headed screw driver to open the volume control, if your soldering on the kitchen table use a bit of scrap wood, pliers and a sharp knife or wire strippers.

Here's a picture of what I used -

The stuff.

I cut the good headphones in half, all I needed was a length of wire with the jack on the end (I could have just bought a new jack for the other headphones as well, but it seemed easier this way)

Then I cracked open the volume control unit.

Here's what it looked like inside - 

The gubbins.

As you can see it's pretty simple inside, so then I de-soldered the damaged section, and took the plastic casing and the small black plastic grommet, I planned to use the casing on the new cord to give it some more strength, the grommet was need to make sure the new lead was held securely in the volume controller.

Casing and grommet - 

Casing and grommet.

Next thing was to thread the casing onto the new lead, this took a little longer than I expected.

Threading the casing - 

This took longer than I thought it would.

Once this was done I then set about soldering the new lead onto the volume controller. Now if you haven't ever messed around with headphone wire before then you may find this helpful. I think they do this for all headphones, perhaps not really cheap ones ? but there's a coating on each of the wires and a kind of thread running through each one as well, this has caused me problems in the past and the best way I've found to deal with it is to burn it away with a lighter or such like, but be careful because if you heat the wires too much they sometimes loose colour, this may cause further problems when it comes to soldering, you can also scrape the coating off with a sharp knife (Stanley type blade) 

The wires and thread - 

Not the best picture, but you can sort of see the thread.

So to the soldering, I always find I need three sometimes four hands when I'm soldering, should probably make some kind of vice type system, anyway the contact on the volume controller are quite small, so if you have a finer tip for your iron use it, it will make a difference.

The contacts - 

If you have glasses, wear them.

I got my lovely wife to take a picture of me soldering, luckily pictures don't show the swearing I did as I toasted my finger tips with my soldering iron :-(

Soldering - 

Finger toasting.

Now when you solder small terminals make sure you don't join terminals with the solder, or things don't work properly, and when you have finished soldering don't put it all back together just yet, test it all first, there's nothing more frustrating than finding all you hard work needs to be undone because something went wrong.

Testing music is a preference, I found AC/DC to be adequate for my testing -

Let's rock ! :-)

If everything is working as it should, both left and right ears are working then you can go ahead and stick it all back together safe in the knowledge that you saved money, didn't add anything to the rubbish and you are clever because you did fixing :-) so if you have something that's broke why not see if you can fix it before you retire it to the bin.

Thanks for reading.

How to fix the arms of an office chair ...

Like most people I have an office type chair for when I use my pc, my wife has one too, we got them on offer from Homebase, they are black leather ones, and they recline, and here is where the problems started, well for me anyway. 

Here's what the arms should look like - 

My wife's chair.

The thing I like most about my chair is that it reclines, which is quite relaxing when I'm reading things,books,online articles and when I play some games, now you would think that a chair that "reclines" would be able to cope with some one actually reclining in the thing wouldn't you ? well I did, and soon found out that my chair couldn't really handle that much reclining, this is not because I am large, I'll have you know that I've lost a stone and half since the start of the year, but that's another post.

I used to work in the plastics industry and I know a little about plastics and their properties, as it turns out the handles on these chairs aren't really as strong as you might think, and any small fault with the moulding process may well weaken the arms quite a lot, and because of the way they fix to the chair they are going to be under a load a lot of the time.

The arms fix to the chair with 4 bolts, two in the back rest and two in the seat, so the arms have to take any weight when you lean back on the chair, and reclining adds extra weight to the arms, which I found out one day one one of the arms made a very load cracking sound and snapped, this is also when I found out that four metal washers had been moulded into the arms, one for each bolt, previously I had thought that there was a metal section inside each arm.

I fixed the break using a metal strip and some screws, however this didn't last for long, and shortly after the first break the other arm broke, and in the end the repairs I made did not hold for long.

At this point I could have chosen to buy some new arms, as it turns out you can buy replacement arms from Ebay and some office supply outlets, but my thinking was that if I get a new set of arms the same thing will happen eventually, so I opted for a more permanent solution, which was wood of course.

Fixing the arms with a wooden solution is pretty simple to be honest, you will need some tools, screws,wood glue,a drill, a jigsaw for cutting the shape of the arms, a hole cutting saw (which you can fit into a drill) for decorative reasons, although decoration is entirely up to you.

I chose some 18mm plywood for my arms, and I managed to find some that had a nice look to it on one side at least, so I figured I'd use that on the outside so it looked neat.

So how to make new arms ? well firstly I took the arms off my wife's chair to use as a template, I thought it best to use both arms as a template in case there were any differences between the two arms.

Plywood is pretty easy to work with, and it's strong, which suited me, I have a right to recline in my office chair. After laying the sheet down and drawing round the arms from my wife's chair (which I put back) I cut out the shapes, I cut out four arms, two for each side of the chair, the reason being is that two pieces glued and screwed together are stronger than one, and because I was using 18mm plywood two pieces together where near enough the same thickness as the original arm rests.

 Now you have to make sure you get the holes for the bolts in the right place, otherwise you might have problems, it's best to do this when you mark out your templates.

Once you have cut out your new arms and drilled the holes for the fixings (just to note I had to counter sink the fixing holes to get them to fit properly) you can think about decoration, or not you can just leave them blank. I chose to add a little decoration.

Using my hole cutting saw (which is basically a circular saw you fit into a drill) I cut out a series of holes in the side of each new arm to make a little feature. I did consider going down the steam punk route, and for a short while I also considered making the chair look like the captains chair from star trek, but decided against it.

Here is what the chair looks like with the new arms.

My new arms.

I finished the arms by sanding and using a bit of sanding sealer to seal the wood, I think they turned out pretty good, and it saved throwing the chair away, and it meant we didn't have to buy a new one.

A couple of points before I sign off, I did actually consider making wooden replicas of the original arms, so I cut one of the sections out, but then decided against it. It didn't cost as much as new arms would have, and I think they will last a lot longer than the plastic ones.

You could get as imaginative as you like, or not at all, but in my opinion the wooden arms look better, they certainly feel better, warmer and a lot smoother.

Thanks for reading.