Brown stuff finished - with costs

Phew. 

Got the rest of the wood. What have I let myself in for?

Felt as if it took half an hour to mark up all the bundles ready for cutting into 3. Then the best part of an hour to do the actual chopping.

Obvs the pillars are all at different positions, so the fence sections are of different widths. In order to get the 150mm (aka 6") slats evenly spaced with roughly 75mm (aka 3") gaps, clearly the only answer was to create a spreadsheet.

Knowing that each slat is 150mm and the target gap is around 75mm, I calculated the number of slat/gap pairs would fit in the space available, then rounded off the resulting number to the nearest integer number. Then I calculated the gap that would result from that number of 150mm slats evenly spaced, then finally the distance of the edge of each slat from the starting position.

I then measured the widths of each of the 8 sections, dialed it into the spreadsheet and printed out the table of coordinates. Then it another apparent half hour to mark out the positions of the slats on masking tape stuck on the horizontals. 

With 2 decking screws per slat, I calculated that I'd need 256 screws. The box of Spax stainless steel decking screws contained a nominal 250 screws. I guessed they would need to guarantee at least 250 would be shipped - but how many extras would they give me? Answer - 5, so I only needed to find a single extra screw to finish the job. The screw gods smiled on me.

Job done. Yes, I had a few left over. The Stupid Fat Bloke had a rush of blood at the timber merchant and brought home too many. And natch I didn't count them up before chopping them up, so I can't take the extras back. Ho hum.

And the cost, overlooking my free labour and not including the surplus planks:

So my estimate of £500 looks eerily on the money.

Job done.

More brown stuff

There's a reason I've not been in the workshop doing proper workshop things of late - and that's due to the backlog of jobs I need to attend to around the house finally. The bad news is that much of it involves The Brown Stuff, rather than metal. Can't be helped I'm afraid.

Here's the latest self-imposed task. Rotten fence beside the driveway. So rotten that it was falling apart and threatening the cars. Off it comes...

Down to Wickes for some treated 3"x2" for the horizontals and some treated rough sawn 6"x1" planks for the vertical slats.

Each 2.4m length of plank cut down into 80cm long slats, then the ends treated.

Horizontals fitted into the pillars.

And mortared up with red mortar.

Next weekend (today), over to Wickes for more timber. The Money Pit can at least lug some timber, allowing me to select the pieces I want rather than play the lottery by ordering it for home delivery. These are 2.4m long.

What have I let myself in for? And this lot on top of the previous trial run will only take me to about 60% complete. Oof.

And..... on with the first set of slats, fitted both sides (staggered) to give some privacy but also allow the wind to blow through.

This buddleia magiced itself up out of thin air a few years ago (perhaps 5?) and has had a good life but it's time to go before it topples the adjacent pillar over.

There. Gone. And the holes for the horizontals are cleared out, ready for their replacements. I'm bracing myself for another session tomorrow, cutting them to size and mortaring them in position, then cutting the slats and treating the ends prior to fitting.

And yes, the gates need to be wire brushed, primed and painted. We have a load of the blue paint that was used on the new front door, so the colours should match.

Oh yes, plenty more work to be done.....

Wifi booster?

What?

I've been suffering from weak wifi coverage in the workshop from the outset. The problem is that when we designed this whole extension to the house, it made sense to have it built so that it met all the building regs ("code" in the US and Canada), so that it might be worth more than it cost to build. 

I did most of the "second fix" myself, namely the wiring, plumbing, heating, painting, lighting etc, so saved a fair bit of the cost. Including the kitchen / dining room extension (aka "sun lounge"), utility room and toilet, it cost something like £50-60k plus several years of my life. Obvs I got the electrical installation tested and certified by a qualified electrician and the building work was inspected and signed off by the local building control office.

The upshot is that the walls between the workshop and the existing house are cavity wall construction (ie 2 walls, separated by a cavity filled with insulation). While this is great for noise and thermal insulation, it's also wonderfully effective at blocking wifi. Even the roller door is aluminium. I've got a "TP-Link Deco M9 Plus"mesh router system running the whole house but naturally it barely makes it through here. 

I suspect the bottom line is that most of these routers are designed for the US market where most houses are constructed mainly from wood ie relatively permeable to wifi signals.

I even tried a Powerline extender at one point but it barely worked. I think I can blame the wiring for that, as I have an armoured steel cable feeding a dedicated consumer unit in the workshop. This makes the route between the main router and the workshop sockets rather tortuous / torturous (take your pick).

What to do? In a last gasp attempt at using technology, I bought one of these supeydupey Wifi 6 range extender things.

Did that help? Did it shite. The problem remains the same ie maintaining contact with the mothership in the house.

Plan B, then:

I've considered this before but never quite got round to it - fit an external aerial / antenna outside the workshop where it can be pretty much guaranteed line of sight to the main Deco router.

To my limited recollection, these wifi routers typically have an array of 2 or more aerials that connect to the main PCBA by means of small "UFL" (UHF) connectors. If I can unplug one of those and replace it with a length of coax leading to an external, wall mounted twig, surely this should do the business.

Found a handy teardown report on these Deco M9 Plus things and it showed how to open them up. Sure enough, there are 6 such PCB aerials distributed around the circumference of the PCBA. So let's get an aerial and see if it works....

Bought one of these Chinesium twigs:

Managed to thread the coax cable through the roller door frame:

The Deco unit is disembowelled while I test it out. 

Works nicely, so let's tidy it up by mounting the SMA plug on the top cover. 

This holder thingy keeps the wiring tidy and provides a means of mounting the Deco using the mains plug and PSU.

A suitably positioned hole allows the SMA socket to be mounted on the cover.

Here it is in its final embodiment.

And showing a reasonable connection back to the main Deco in the house.

The connection to the Nucbox in the workshop isn't bad now.

We'll call that done. Hopefully my Samsung work laptop will also work - it's the most profoundly deaf of the various wifi devices there.

Stained glass window soldering

Here's our inner front door. It's probably one of the few original doors in the house and has an original stained glass panel. Not surprisingly, the lead joints have fatigued after 93 years of the door being slammed several times a day. The middle of the panel flaps a good half inch when you waggle the door open and shut.

I couldn't stop The Stupid Fat Bloke from removing it and starting to remove the panel. He'd whipped the door off and made a start before I knew what he was up to. Oh well...

Got the panel out without it completely disintegrating:

I previously bought a fine Chinesium soldering iron for the purpose of resoldering the damaged joint. It has a massive boss end tip and is rated at a Chinese 200W. I have to say it didn't fuck about but after 10 mins or so, the temp had risen way above the recommended setting of ~350-380C, so that the lead melted almost instantly and left a gaping hole. Not ideal.

So, out with the Pace iron. It's only rated at 80W but has thermostatic control.

Some of the joints were royally buggered.

There was even one that the original craftsman had missed:

If you look closely you can see the 2 fractures in this joint:

There. Both sides fully resoldered and ready to go back in when the door has been stripped and refinished using Osmo Polyx Tint 3072.

Job done.