Separated by a Common Language

 I've recently picked up a wound on my leg. While it was healing I had to cut back significantly on my drinking because alcohol affects how blood clots. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a very Plymouthian first aider in the back room of a night club. Despite us speaking the same language, we had quite different vocabularies. I don't remember the beginning of the story very well. It was almost 30 years ago, it was well after my bedtime, and I'd drunk a heroic amount.

There was some horseplay with a beer bottle that eventually got broken. I got cut on the hand and bled profusely. Before throwing me out the bouncer took me to a back room where my wound was dressed and details of the accident were written down. Who knew that the nightclub has a duty of care towards all the drunken idiots who paid to come in? I said to the first aider "I don't know why it's bleeding so much, it's not very big". "That's because you've been drinking" "Oh Yes you're right, alcohol is an anticoagulant isn't it?" "I wouldn't know about that love, but it thins the blood."

Richard "sesquipidalian" B

Staff

 I've hurt my leg, and since then, even though I'm not a fit bloke, it's become depressingly clear how much of my recreation is based on exercise. Most weekday evenings I go out for a stroll to relax, get some air, and a little exercise. I go to indoor climbing twice most weeks. That is all on hold while I recover. So what can I do to pass the time? I like mixing and drinking cocktails but alcohol would stop the wound from healing so effectively. I like to cook, but I'm severely constrained in how much I can eat while I'm getting zero exercise. This weekend I set myself a crafting project in the workshop and I loved it. I made a walking stick from a bit of hazel that I cut from my hedge. At one point I had to sharpen a lathe tool so that I could true up the thumbwheel on a rubbishy Chinese spokeshave so I could thin down the stick. My new walking stick has got a knobbly handle, a gentle taper and a steel ferrule, all made at home.

Richard "Mum, I'm bored" B

Skill Issue

 I can think of nowhere I'd rather get injured than the Climbing Hangar in Plymouth. I fell off a climb and gashed up my shin on the way down. I asked for help at the front desk before I went in to shock and was looked after unbelievable well. Three beautiful young women sprang into action as highly trained first aiders while still being caring, compassionate and helpful. The wound was cleaned and dressed. I was laid down when I got faint. They ran around after me picking up my stuff. They got me a sugary drink from the café (jumping the queue, and not charging me) and found me somewhere comfortable to sit while I got my wits back. Their medical assessment was also spot on, they said I should get it checked at the urgent care unit, and it did indeed need to be stitched closed.

Richard "game leg" B

Rake and Trail

 The windscreen wipers on my Fiat Panda judder and creak, even when you fit new wiper blades. My friend (who works in vehicle development) asked the very wise question, why do they judder on old cars, but not new ones? What has deteriorated? On Sunday I spent a fascinating hour in the rain with my car testing different theories and remedies.

 His theory is that the spring that holds the blade down onto the windscreen is weak.

 Some random chap on youtube says that the wiper arm is twisted and that the blade is contacting the windscreen ahead of the arm.

 The advice on the Euro Car Parts website is to change the wiper arms.

 I was interested in the behaviour of the wiper blade. In cross section it's shaped like a Christmas tree and it's supposed to flex at the "trunk" so that it follows behind the arm (kind of like the bristles of a paint brush) .

I didn't have new springs for the wiper arms, but I lubricated and exercised the hinge and the spring attachment points. I also added extra pressure to the wiper arm with my hand. This all affects the nature and frequency of the judder, but it didn’t solve it.

 My theory is clearly wrong because new wiper blades exhibit the same judder, but I cleaned and examined my blades. It made no difference.

 The random guy on youtube is right! My wipers only judder on the way up. I put a little twist in the wiper arm with two adjustable spanners so that the blade was a little bit further behind the arm and they started to work perfectly. My theory is that the arms haven't twisted over the lifetime of the vehicle, but that the hinges have worn asymmetrically and the twist I added to the arms is counteracting that. I think that buying new wiper arms would probably work even better, but cost more.

 Richard "North Plymouth Drizzle Laboratory" B

Plug Hole

 My week away was slightly spoiled by the rubbishy plumbing in my posh looking bathroom. The plug is one of those ones that you push down to close it, and then push down a little bit more and it will pop up to open. It stopped popping back up so my departure was delayed by my trying to empty the sink, and while I was away I had the constant niggle that I had to fix my plug hole before I could ever have another shave.

I spent an inordinate and unnecessary amount of time replacing the plug hole with one that had an actual plug on a chain.

This is what I've learned:

• It's not called a plug hole – it's a basin waste.
• The type of plug I described is called click-clack.
• The mechanism that pops the plug up and down is also called a click clack.
• Click clacks are standard parts, they cost about £4 and they can be easily changed without taking the waste out of the basin.

Had I known, I could have done it in 5 minutes with a pair of pliers.

Richard "hindsight" B

Triathlon

 I'm better at running than a shark, but a shark is better at swimming than me, so in a triathlon it's all going to come down to the cycling.

I've got involved in a culinary triathlon, and I'm not confident that I'll win. My brother and  I can be quite competitive, but we're also sportsmen. He's better at pool than me so the recent Bolingbroke Handicap Invitational Pool Tournament was set up as best of 7 games, but I got a 1 game head start. I lost, but I only lost 4-3.

I have learned to cook on an induction stove and I now like it very much. My brother is very much of the opinion that gas is best. The competition we've set up to gauge which is best consists of 3 different races, each scoring one point. Race 1) Bring 0.5l of cold water to a rolling boil. Race 2) bring .05l of water at a rolling boil to a controlled low simmer. Race 3) Fry a single slice of white bread to crispy and golden on both sides.

I'm confident that I'll win race 1). I think race 2) is in the balance. In preparation for the triathlon, I've discovered that I'm not very good at frying bread.

Richard "cooking on gas" B

Courteous Driver

 My dad used to talk about coming home from sailing trips "cold, wet, and frightened". The same happened to me after a short journey by motorcycle. I was riding on a 2 lane section of the Tavistock Road with a 40mph speed limit. The rain was so unusually heavy, the surface conditions so wet and slippery, and the visibility so poor that I was only doing about 30mph. A large, heavy car behind me (I think it was a VW Toerag) was impatient and pulled out into the outside lane and accelerated sharply. He hit a large patch of standing water that was 3 or 4 inched deep and sent up a huge plume of cold dirty spray. As our speeds weren't very different I was hit full-force with a powerful jet of water for a few seconds. I was blinded and deafened by it hitting my visor and helmet. I was instantly drenched and got cold-water-shock (it makes you gasp and flail). The force of the water made the bike very hard to control. I rolled off the throttle, but I didn't apply the brakes because I didn't know what was behind me, or whether I'd stay upright. Thankfully when my vision cleared I hadn't fallen off and I was going in roughly the right direction and still just about in my lane.

I can only think that if I had fallen off in those conditions the next car behind me would have squashed me under its wheels before it saw me.

Richard "super-cub" B

Johnson&Johnson Muffgone

 My favourite razor is an old fashioned safety razor that unscrews to let you fit a single blade. The blades are cheap and I probably have a lifetime's supply in the bathroom cabinet. It has quite a large gap before and after the cutting edge to it's quite easy to cut yourself with it, but with skill you can give yourself a very close shave. I can also shave with a cutthroat razor, and I find sharpening it fascinating, but it's too much palaver to be practical.

I went on a long weekend away and while I had packed my razor, shaving brush, and a stick of shaving soap I hadn't packed a razor blade. At the little Sainsbury's I found disposable razors, but they were quite expensive and sold in large bags. The cheapest option was a pack of 4 "Simply Venus" from the women's section. I argued that there could be precious little difference between a man's and a woman's razor, that Gilette doesn't run a different blade grinding factory for each sex, and that I didn't much care about the colour.

I did shave myself, and the razor is surprisingly different to what I'm used to. The two blades are very close together and the gaps before and after them are very narrow. It's seemingly impossible to cut yourself with it, and also impossible to get a close shave without making multiple strokes, but it can be done. The weirdest difference is a little strip of water soluble lubricant after the blades. In combination with my (harsh) shaving soap and scalding hot water it made a gluey slime, but I was intrigued by its lubricity.

The question I answered at the sink this morning was "in an emergency, could you shave with one of these things without all the rest of your shaving kit?" The answer is yes, and I haven't given myself razor burn, but it takes a while. I've already put one in my wash bag for the next time I go away and forget part of my shaving kit, and they'll be perfect when I'm travelling with a minimal luggage allowance.

Richard "Bic Classic Razor" B

Go Faster Stripes

 Lots of sports cars have livery with longitudinal stripes, which we jokingly call "go faster stripes". If I'd been richer and more vain I could have specified a wide white stripe up the middle of the nosecone, bonnet and scuttle of my kit car. On a camper van however similar stripes can make a significant difference to top speed. Commercial vans are limited to 60mph on motorways, camper vans 70mph. If you buy a van and fit it out as a camper you can take it to the vehicles inspectorate and have it re-registered as a camper van rather than a commercial van. One of the criteria that the inspector will assess is whether it looks like a camper van. People have taken to sticking on long stickers with silhouettes of mountains and words like "adventure" as part of getting their van re-registered as a camper. In this case it gives a 10mph increase in top (legal) speed.

Think about how ridiculous the situation is. We can have two (say) Mercedes Sprinters with the same chassis, body, tyres, brakes and suspension. One has some appliances and soft furnishings fitted in the back. The other is delivering some appliances and soft furnishings which are in boxes in the back. One is safe to drive at 70mph, the other only 60mph. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I believe it's to make sure that delivery drivers know their place in society. Tarquin and Jocasta on their way to five nights in St. Ives are allowed to drive faster than the guys bringing groceries in the same van on the same roads in the same direction.

Richard "compulsory high viz" B

Lemon Salmon Linguine

This is my replacement for the lost lemon salmon linguine recipe. It’s all done in a frying pan this time. I’ve cooked it very many times recently while trying to perfect it.

2 salmon fillets

2 oz butter

2oz (50ml) lemon juice

Chopped parsley

Salt & pepper

 

Shallow fry the salmon fillets on medium in a little oil in a heavy pan. Season each face with salt & pepper as you turn them. Cook the prettiest face first and the skin side last.

Set the salmon aside for a short rest.

In the same pan add the butter, when it is half melted add the lemon juice and stir.

Add the parsley and stir.

If it seems appropriate add a couple of spoons of hot pasta water from the linguine you should have just finished boiling.

This lemon sauce is an emulsion, it wont last more than a few seconds in the pan without separating and all the lemon flavour will boil off.

Take the pan off the heat.

Quickly take the skin off the salmon and put it on a bed of linguine (pretty side up), spoon/tip the sauce over the fish.

 

Richard "TV chef" B

Intercom

 I recently went on a track day with a friend of mine. My car has an intercom so you can just about talk to each other (in full face helmets) while you're lapping the circuit. We're both classically English and have politeness and apologising ingrained in our characters. We both issued very rapid and terse apologies over the intercom while we were driving – mid fuck up. My friend missed a gear and forced the car from 3rd to 2nd at about 70 miles an hour instead of 3rd to 4th. As soon as the clutch came up the revs spiked and the rear wheels squirmed. Before the car was even fully under control again I heard "SORRY!" in the intercom.

I entered a hairpin too fast. I didn't spin the car, but the tightest line I could manager took us out over the kerbs and over a section of grass. Before we'd even left the track I had shouted. "TOO FAST. SORRY!"

Richard "My Fault Entirely" B

Fish and Chip-ocrite

 There's a 60s song that you sometimes hear called MacArthur Park. It goes on for a very long time and it doesn't make a lot of sense. The bit it keeps coming back to is about a cake whose icing is melting because it was left out in the rain and the line "I don't think I can take it, because it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have the recipe again"

I've never really thought about it carefully. I assumed it was about romance slowly fading, and I certainly never considered that the song was about a missing cake recipe.

Years ago I used to live with a "vegetarian" who would also eat fish, so we had lots of good fish recipes. One of them was for Lemon Salmon Linguine. It worked like magic, The fish was cooked in the oven with butter and lemon juice and the liquid out of the fish would combine with the other ingredients to turn itself into a delicious, glossy sauce. It was served on a bed of linguine and parsley.

I haven't cooked it in years, I can't remember how it was done, or where the recipe came from, and I have failed to re-create it. I want to cook it again because I have house guests who have asked for fish for tea and I can't.

I'm now re-thinking the song MacArthur Park. Maybe it is about the frustration of losing a recipe.

Richard "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" B

PPE

 I have reached the stage in my life where I have had to buy my own angle grinder. All I have used it for so far is wirebrushing my rusty railings and cutting the heads off rusty bolts in my rusty railings. Pretty much everybody I have mentioned this to has told me a horror story about how dangerous angle grinders are, and the importance of protective gear. My brother nearly lost his big toe to one, a friend of a friend nearly lost his whole foot to one. I was wearing goggles, ear defenders, gloves, a welding jacket and sturdy boots just to cut the head off an M8 bolt.

Long Shower

 I don't know if I'm at the age yet where I can "have a fall" rather than merely "fall over", but I did. I was quite proud of the very urgent prioritisation that I did afterwards. I've been painting the rusty railings around my deck with black Hammerite. Hammerite is sticky, goes off quickly, and is completely indelible. The edge of my deck is about 4 feet above a bank of gravel. To finish the painting I had to gingerly walk on the outside of the railings. For my readers who climb: it's like a V0 slab problem. I fell down onto the gravel while still holding the paint tin and wet paintbrush. I banged my knee hard on the edge of the decking and hurt both ankles when I landed. However during the fall I had got about ¼ pint of Hammerite in my hair, down my face and neck, and all over my clothes.

The adrenaline and the panic allowed me to ignore my injuries, I was most concerned with whether I would ever get the paint off me. I walked to the bathroom, stripped off and got straight in the shower. This was my worst mistake. I should have stripped off outside and then gone to the shower. I put Hammerite on the bathroom floor and the cabinets, but there was none on my feet so that I don't need new carpets. Hurray! I decided to work on my hair first, my reasoning was that if the paint dried It would be impossible to cut or shave off the matted hair, whereas you can probably live quite comfortably for a few weeks with a big black stain down half of your face and neck. The clothes were already ruined and I sacrificed a towel to the project too. About 20 minutes of shampooing, combing and towelling my hair and it was almost back to normal. Next I cleaned the bathroom floor and cabinets as best I could (you can hardly see the damage) and threw away the clothes and towel. By this stage the paint on my face was dry, but I discovered that I could remove most of it with a nail brush and soap. It was quite painful and made me bleed in a few places, but after a couple of days you wouldn't even know that anything had happened.

Richard "My Eyebrows Saved My Eyesight" B

Days of Future Past

 A lot of life advice (and I think perhaps religion) seems to boil down to prioritising the future over the present. Do what you can today to make tomorrow better. Work hard and strive for a better future. Make sacrifices in this world to get access to eternal bliss in the afterlife.

I'm really bad at doing that. When I think about tomorrow's Richard I think "that lazy so-and-so can do his own washing up".

I've been painting the outside of my house. One of the main things with painting is to do the preparation well. When I started the most recent section I said to myself that I must go carefully and diligently as I brush off the dirt and debris, because I hadn't been doing it well enough. I had previously found myself with a loaded paintbrush in my hand looking at a spider web that had clearly not been brushed off the wall. This time, even though I thought I had done an excellent job of brushing everything down, I found myself, with a loaded paintbrush in my hand, looking at an entire window's width of old spider webs full of dead leaves and litter.

Yesterday's Richard is lazy and slapdash and needs to step up his game.

Richard "And I Trimmed the Wisteria" B

E10

 Back in my day petrol was better and cheaper. Unfortunately innumerate environmentalists and corrupt corn farmers have persuaded our lawmakers to insist that the distilleries debase it with ethanol. The net effect of this is more atmospheric CO2 production (fertilizers, diesel for the tractors, coal for the electricity for the distillation, road fuel for transportation). More concerning for me is that it rots the rubber in our old cars' fuel lines, the brass in the fuel pressure regulators of our fuel injected motorbikes, and the carburettor diaphragms in our chainsaws and lawnmowers.

There are however a couple of things we can do to keep our chainsaws happy. Pure ethanol is soluble in petrol, but it's much more soluble in water. If you mix up say 700ml of E10 petrol with 300ml of water and a few drops of food colouring the ethanol will dissolve in the water, but the water is insoluble in the petrol and you'll get two fractions, 370-ish of coloured water and 630ish of actual petrol. After it's settled you can decant the petrol or tap off the water. Don't drink either fraction.

Believe it or not there is a community of amateur petrol quality inspectors who do this test and also try to determine the actual RON numbers.

I don't know how long it'll stay this way, but Tesco Momentum 99 keeps coming up as genuinely having a RON of 99, and containing absolutely no ethanol. That's what my chainsaw drinks.

Richard "We're going to need a bigger separatory funnel" B

Pitch Meeting

 A few weeks ago I told you about a fictional black knight driving a Toyota Yaris with half a dozen long decking boards on the roof rack, but sadly I didn't know anything more about him.

A couple of text messages revealed (inspired) a lot of information.

My Brother texted me the two words "Black Knight" with no context. I didn't know if he was talking about the Deep Purple song, the cocktail, or my fictional character. A few hours later a friend texted me to tell me that her phone had combined two diary events and she'd got the reminder "Peony and Rat Trap".

Peony and Rat Trap are clearly a puppet double act on children's TV. Like Zig and Zag for the 2020s. I'm sure that they'll introduce episodes a long-running cartoon series. Like Roland Rat introduced Transformers every week, or Sarah Green with Defenders of the Earth, or Philip Schofield and Gordon the Gopher with Cities of Gold. I don't see any children's TV, but I imagine that the "just innocent men" dog introduces a cartoon series too. 

So Peony and Rat Trap are going to introduce the cartoon series "Black Knight". We know it's about a black knight who drives a Toyota Yaris with half a dozen decking boards on the roof rack. We also know the theme tune "Black Knight" by Deep Purple and we know it'll finish on the line "Black Knight is a long way from home". I expect that it'll be an anthology series with different locations and characters each week, tied together by the Black Knight on his long journey home. In 22 minutes plus commercials they'll speedrun the hero's journey with a new character each week. I imagine that the Yaris and the planks will be recurring plot devices. Either building temporary structures, bridges, and diving boards, or using them to joust non-threatening foes (puncture a bouncy castle, ring a bell loudly, frighten bats out of a tunnel etc.)

Moreover we know that Black Knight has a signature drink. On a kids cartoon it's unlikely to be a cocktail made with Irish stout and over-proof Bermuda rum. It would probably be blackcurrant juice, or depend on the sponsorship deal "Ribena".

As it's a cartoon aimed at children I see no need for an explanation of why he's wearing a suit of armour or why he's a long way from home.

Richard "The Littlest Hobo" B

Burden of Dreams

 I've been climbing as a hobby for nearly three years. Low altitude indoor free-soloing (or bouldering as it's actually called) I just did my hardest climb recently and it involved an obscure technique.

There are certain things that we believe exist, but that we never actually see with our own eyes: the moon landings, kingfishers, doggers.

There's a climbing technique called Figure Four and it's so obscure that you never see it used. It's an intermediate technique that really strong climbers never need. Our lord and saviour Magnus Midtbo explained that once you can do a one armed pull up you never need to use it again. It's used when there's nothing to put your feet on, when you're hanging on one hand, and when you need to reach upward with your other hand. You hook your left knee over your right elbow (or vice versa) and you can use your core and leg muscles to get a little bit of extra height. A strong climber would "campus" to the next hold but I haven't got the strength to support my weight on one hand with a bent elbow.

I've been working on one particular climb for ages after I was told "it's pretty soft for a red". I later found out that the person who told me that is a professional swimmer, spends loads of time lifting weights, and can campus the first move. I could only solve it by using the Figure Four which I've never used before, and which has probably never been used before at my climbing wall.

Here I am doing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUxo2IVS_5E

Richard "heel hook" B

Paint the Fence Paint the Fence

 I had a bewildering evening yesterday.

I had taken the day off work in the hopes of painting the outside of my friend's house. It was raining in the morning so instead I went shopping and had planned to buy myself a luxurious lunch. My friend was seemingly studying synoptic charts, rainfall radar and meteorological apps. He messaged me midmorning to tell me that it would be dry in the afternoon and that we started painting at noon.

That timing meant that I didn't get any lunch. The ladder is heavy, the sun was hot and we worked at a fast pace. By the time we had painted the front and back of his house I was tired and hungry and I was given a Tom Collins (double gin, lemon, syrup soda) and sat in the sun. The rest of the evening was confusing. I think I had a bit of sunstroke, low blood sugar, and I was quite drunk.

Richard "sun hat" B

Not a Writer

 I very much like it when a story writes itself. I've played collaborative board games where a series of dice rolls and individual decisions turns into an engrossing story. I set myself a mission in Kerbal Space Program and a series of unfortunate events meant that the best I could do was to use the spacecraft I had with me to jury rig a lander and an orbital relay station. It was fascinating. Neil Gaiman talked about writing Stardust: he said that he already had the idea for the village, but when he saw a shooting star over the desert and realised that it was really just a hot lump of rock, that the story just wrote itself.

I recently came up with a fictional character reflexively.

I borrowed a long ladder and I took it home on the roof rack of my (very little) Fiat Panda. One of my friends said it looked like I was going jousting. Without thinking I said that a black knight in a Toyota Yaris with half a dozen decking boards on the roof had challenged me. I've been thinking about the fictional black knight a lot over the last few days and I'd really like to know more about him.

Richard "Emergent Narrative" B

Noga Arm

 I recently came into some money, so I bought a present for my lathe. It's a professional quality articulated arm to hold a dial indicator. It's quite wonderful in that it has a magnetic base that you can turn on and off, and all the articulations are tightened up with a single knob.

It's such a pleasing piece of equipment that I didn't want to leave it in the cabinet under the lathe. Its magnet has now been attached to the bottom of a cake tin, and it holds pride of place in my kitchen as a recipe holder.

I managed to cut down the clothes peg to fit the 1/4" dovetail part of the holder, and I'm unduly proud of that as the clamp only has about 12 thou of movement between fully open and fully closed.

Richard "The Wrong Tool For the Job" B

My Perfect Colleague

♫I've got a cousin called Kevin. He's sure to go to heaven♫

Actually I've got a colleague who recently let me stay at his house.

Both him and his wife are the sort of garish over-achievers whom it's best not to compare oneself to. They were generous, gracious hosts, despite the fact that I had invited myself. I turned up wet and dirty without any clean clothes. They laundered a couple of garments for me and didn't bat an eye at me joining them for dinner wearing gardening trousers.

They feed and rehabilitate local wildlife, and only use the most humane methods to control the pheasants (they get chased away personally)

♫He's got a fur lined sheepskin jacket. My ma said they cost a packet♫

He's actually got a beautiful cottage with a large garden. It's being tastefully extended and refurbished. They seemingly have no end of energy, enthusiasm, taste and skill.

♫Oh, my perfect cousin. What I like to do he doesn't♫

They barely drink, but despite that they keep an excellent cellar. They're early to bed and early to rise and they'll have a sit-down cooked breakfast on a week day.

♫He's got a degree in economics. Maths, physics and bionics♫

Actually both him and his wife were senior staff at a university, and he enjoyed teaching. They both have pilot's licences and she's a yoga instructor. They're excellent cooks, brewers, bakers, raconteurs and who knows what else.

♫He always beat me at Subbuteo cause he flicked to kick and I didn't know♫

He has a huge collection of board games and hosts regular board game evening with his friends.

♫His mother bought him a synthesiser. Got the Human League into advise her♫

Actually he makes interesting electronic projects, metalwork projects, software projects, and home improvements with his apparently copious time and energy.

In the same way that I hope Tim Peake turns out to be a child molester, I feel better about myself imagining that they keep some shameful terrifying secret.

Richard "Outdated Musical Reference" B

Wobbly Table

 This will be part one of three of a rather mathsy blog. We're going to talk about the Borsuk Ulam Theory and the Whitworth Three Plate Method because I believe that they're related to something I saw on YouTube. The claim is that if you've got a 4 legged table that wobbles then it can be corrected by simply twisting it. This is clearly wrong and I can prove it with a counter example: Image that the floor is a perfect plane and that the table has one short leg. It doesn't matter how you twist the table, it's still going to wobble. It'll stand on the two legs adjacent to the short one and wobble towards and away from the short leg.

I hate that there are (cheaply made AI) videos like this around, and I doubly hate that I had to prove or disprove their findings to my own satisfaction. However I think there is something in the claim that you stop a 4 legged table from wobbling by twisting it, and I'm exploring the limits of how far it's true.

Richard "Radial Lobing" B

A couple of hundred years ago Joseph Whitworth seemed to have worked out how to make accurately flat surfaces. There is great insight and also an oversight in this story. We had the technology to mark where one metal surface touched another (with blue dye) and the technology to remove tiny amounts of metal (by hand scraping). It was already commonplace to fit two metal parts together accurately using these techniques, but if you wanted to make something flat, you needed something even flatter to copy from. There's a bootstrapping problem with manufacturing the first flat reference surface.

Whitworth's insight goes like this. If Plate A fits against Plate B, then they match, but one might be concave while the other is convex. However if we introduce a third plate C, and C matches against both A and B then they can be neither concave or convex (he's right so far) and they must be flat (weirdly he's wrong here!).

The Whitworth 3 plate method was a huge leap forwards in manufacturing, and it was quickly corrected to deal with the oversight. The original problem is that there's a shape which is neither concave, nor convex, and which fits together with the other plates, but isn't flat. The problem was called "radial lobing". It's hard to visualise, and I sure as hell can't draw it, but I'll try to describe it. Think of an oblong plate which is mostly flat, but the top left corner is a little high, and the bottom right corner is a little low. Now imaging that every line you draw on the plate that goes through the middle is completely straight, not bent in the middle. You have radial lobing. All 3 plates like this can fit together perfectly, and they're not concave or convex, but they're also not flat.

I'm convinced that this is story relevant to my mathematical investigation into wobbly tables.

Richard "Moore Pattern" B

The next instalment in my investigation into wobbly tables is the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem.

The real formulation of the theorem is rather complicated, but the simple version is that if you squash the skin of a rubbery ball down onto a flat surface (without tearing it) then no matter how you stretch it, you always end up with two points on top of each other which were on opposite sides of the ball. If we say that barometric pressure and surface temperature on the earth vary continuously (no step changes from one point to the next), then right now there are two places on the surface of the earth which are exactly opposite each other and have the exact same pressure and temperature.

The real proof is rather hard to follow and involves tightening a symmetrical lasso around the origin of the Cartesian plane. However it's the first part of the easy proof that we need for wobbly tables. If we think about the barometric pressures around the equator of the earth, and pick two points that are opposite to each other, then either those points have the same pressure or they don't. If they don't have the same pressure then A has a higher pressure and B has a lower pressure. If we spin the points round the centre of the earth until they've swapped position, then by now B has a higher pressure and A has a lower pressure. Somewhere between where the points started and where they finished they must have gone through a place where they had equal pressure.

Richard "Are You Bored Yet?" B

My contention is that you can correct a wobbly 4 legged table by rotating it if two conditions are met: 1) The floor is continuous (no holes, no edges, no steps ). 2) The legs of the table are "flatter" than the floor.

I will first prove that this is true for a table where the ends of the legs are perfectly planar: If the table isn't wobbly, then we've already found an orientation where it doesn't wobble. If it does wobble, then there is one leg above the floor. If we were to rotate a square table by 90 degrees, then a different leg is above the floor. For an oblong table it would be 180 degrees but the same reasoning holds. In the same way that we prove the easy version of the Borsuk Ulam theorem, somewhere between the first position and the rotated position, which legs touch the floor must have changed. So somewhere along that rotation all the legs must have been touching the floor.

The same reasoning holds as long as the table legs are "flatter" than the floor, but "flatter" has a peculiar meaning. Any irregularity in the floor with 4-fold rotational symmetry would have to be discounted – the whole table would go up and down as it rotated, but it wouldn't change the gap under the short leg.

Richard "Q.E.D." B

Grimy

 Along with about 13,000 other households I've been cut off from running water for a couple of days. I've had a few advantages in this situation. I have a friend with running water who let me cook and server a roast meal at his house. I'm quite prepared to lower my standards of personal hygiene. I had enough mineral water in stock that thirst wasn't a problem. The difficult bit was washing dishes and flushing the toilet. South West Water gave me several 2l bottles of water. I would heat one of these in the kettle, mix it with another in the washing up bowl and then do a very meagre batch of washing up. The washing up water was saved in a bucket and used to tip down the toilet.

The water came back on this morning and I was glad to have a shave and a shower.

Richard "camping" B

Track Day Photo Safari

 This is what it looks like when I go to a track day:

Car with luggage rack and luggage - waiting to go

got to the hotel

luggage off, hood on, parked up for the night

luggage off, luggage rack off, windscreen off, waiting to go on track. Makeshift tonneau.

driver ready

on circuit

the rest of the paddock

what we're doing to our tyres

back home again

Richard "reconfigure" B

First Lathe Project

 I ended up making my own catch tank for my car using my new (old, 2nd hand) lathe.

turning and facing the barrel

drill, tap and face the ports

facing end caps

hosetails fitted

ready for assembly

end cap bonded and finished

leak test

fitted and working

Richard "fabrication" B

Hard Pressed Potatoes Recipe

 Everybody hates it when you go to a recipe site and you have to wade through a load of tedious waffle about how the recipe came to be, and how important it is to the author and so forth. However, that's exactly what I'm going to do. 

One of my brothers (the pirate, not the oil baron) is an absolutely outstanding cook. When he visited my recently I fried for him a chicken breast. I had been marinating it for half a day, I used seasoned flour, fried it in a mixture of corn oil and butter, I did it carefully and got a crispy golden crust. It was served with a little bit of sriracha. I call this recipe Kensington Fried Chicken after my sister mistakenly referred to (chicken magnate) Colonel Sanders as "Mr Saunders".

My brother wasn't in the least bit interested in the chicken, but asked many questions about the potatoes it was served with. What breed of potato? How hot, exactly, was the water? What oil? He thought they were fantastic and had never eaten anything like them before. I call them "Hard Pressed Potatoes" because they're a lot like "Smashed potatoes”, but not as smashed

Every kitchen is different, but this is how I cook them:

• look at the clock, they'll be ready exactly 1 hour from now.
• turn on the oven at 200 C and put in a heavy metal tray.
• start boiling a pan of water.
• give some potatoes a half-arsed wash and cut them into halves or quarters
• the water should now be hot but not boiling, put the potatoes into the water.
• cook the potatoes for 15 minutes, turning the heat down when the water starts boiling
• drain the potatoes
• pull the scorching hot pan out of the oven and paint a thin layer of cooking oil onto it with a pastry brush. Work quickly so as not to burn the brush
• throw the potatoes into the hot oily pan and press each one somewhat flat with a saucepan lid or potato masher
• paint a thin layer of oil onto the top of the pressed potatoes with a pastry brush
• throw some coarse salt over the potatoes
• put them back in the hot oven and wait for the rest of the hour.

Richard "Fresh, Vibrant, Delicious" B

Excess Postage

 If I ever have a nemesis, I'll need their postal address. Then I'll send them letters and parcels but without paying the right postage.

My sister is generally not paying attention. She once received a wonderful letter from her bank that said something like "Thank you for your change of address notification. Unfortunately we have been unable to action this as you didn't include your name or your account details".

When she visited me recently she somehow accidentally took a radiator bleed key with her when she left. She texted me a photo of it and asked if I wanted it back. Yes Please. A couple of weeks later I got a snotty letter from Royal Mail about an item addressed to me that didn't have the correct postage paid. About a week after I paid the excess (and a handsome handling charge) I received my own radiator bleed key through the letterbox. Poor value - would not buy again.

Richard "Amazon Composite" B

Better than the R.A.C.

 In the late 90's I didn’t own my own car or a mobile phone. One weekend I borrowed my mum's car and drove to Guildford to meet my friend. I broke down a few miles short of his house and had to walk to someone's house, ask to use their phone and call him. He dutifully came and towed me back.

Last weekend I drove in a car that I inherited from my mum to visit the same friend in a village near Guildford. Again I broke down a few miles short of his house, again he dutifully came and rescued me. I believe that as soon as he got off the phone with me he said "this is the second time he's done this now".

The first time it was an alternator fault. We misdiagnosed it and bought a new battery, and while it did get me home it had to be fixed properly once I'd got home. This time it was the clutch and while we tried to put a new clutch in ourselves we ran out of time (we had dogs to walk, birthday parties to attend, stag nights to go on) and I had to come home in a recovery truck.

Richard "we couldn't get the drive shaft out" B

Swarf

 I'm learning to use my lathe from Youtube, and there are quite a lot of videos about what your first turning project should be. My first one was just making some chips off a bolt head to see if I could get the thing cutting. My 2nd project was to make a handwheel for a friend's watchmaker's lathe. He's also recently become a lathe owner and his lathe is too small to make its own handwheels. I didn't make a very good job of it. I've now thrown myself in to job 3 which is to make a strong and airtight catchtank out of aluminium.

A good friend of mine acquired a lathe a few years ago. It came with the house he bought (my mum once got an elderly pet rabbit in the same way). As he's a few years ahead of me in self-taught turning I asked him what he'd done on his lathe. His answer was poetic and honest. "I've turned valuable stock into piles of swarf".

I'm close behind him. Every operation I do my proposed catchtank design gets smaller and thinner.

Richard "CCMT06" B

Treasures

 I'm now the proud owner of a lathe, and various boxes of junk/treasure that goes with it. It belonged to the father of a good friend of mine. Sadly he died between agreeing to sell it and completing the deal. Even worse the roof of his workshop had failed and everything was rusty/mouldy/mildewed (I did get a steep discount).

The lathe itself is from Warco, so it will have been a Taiwanese import, but fettled in and delivered from the home counties. It's small. 9 inch swing and 20 inch between centres. 3/4hp motor. You need to put it on a bench and it only weighs about 100kg. It is sadly rusty and in need of quite a lot of restoration. With the original owner being dead, it's quite hard to know what's what. There are boxes of tools and accessories, a lot of them damaged, and it's hard to identify all of them.

I think I've mentioned "yak shaving" before. You can't do job A until you've done job B. You can't do job B until you've done job C. Eventually you need to have shaved a yak before you can finish what you started. I want to use the lathe to make part of a catch tank. I need to use the 4 jaw chuck to grab the stock because it's too big for the 3 jaw. I need to use the dial indicator to centre the stock in the 4 jaw. I found dial indicator, it's clearly ancient and has been repaired many times over the years. It has got wet and seized but I managed to free it up. The "glass" seems to be homemade from acrylic and it has gone yellow and cloudy so that you can't actually see the needle. I found myself polishing a dodgy bit of acrylic as a necessary step in cutting some 4 inch aluminium tube. I wouldn't have been surprised if the polishing had had to be done with freshly shaved yak hair.

Richard "Mitutoyo" B

D.I.Y.

 As I have previously mentioned my car has old fashioned wheel bearings with conical races and tapered rollers – and a big castellated nut with a split pin.

I was able to drift out the old races but try as I might I couldn't find a way to press in the new ones. I thought I could use my hub puller in reverse, but there wasn't enough room to fit any kind of tool under it. I thought I could use my vice but it wasn't big enough. I thought I could use the stub axle and the hub nut but it wasn't long enough. I eventually gave up and took the hubs and the new bearings to my favourite garage.

When I picked them up they refused to take any money. Instead I got quite an insulting lecture about how easy a job it was and that I could definitely have done it at home without bothering them. The races weren't a tight fit - "I could almost have pushed them in with my thumb" and I had the old races to use as a drift. Apparently they went all the way home with a couple of taps from a hammer.

Richard "But at What Cost?" B

Perfect Pitch

 My car has an old fashioned front axle with double wishbones and uprights with a stub axle. The hub is supported on the stub by tapered needle roller bearings which need to be repacked with grease every 4 years. How quaint!

I have played with some very skilled musicians over the years, but I now consider that none of them had as good an ear as the mechanic who did my MOT this year. He gave me "noisy wheel bearing offside front" as an advisory. When I took the bearings apart to grease them one of the bars on the cage that holds the rollers in place had broken off and probably been crushed in the bearing. The outer race was slightly discoloured but I saw no other damage. As far as I was concerned it ran smoothly and didn’t make excessive noise.

Richard "He's the Alan Jeffery of Chasses" B

 Stihl GH370 Chipper/Shredder review

Overall I'm pretty disappointed with the machine, but with coaxing I've managed to get some useful work out of it.

It wasn't cheap and it's made by a good brand. It also has a nominal maximum capacity of 45mm dia branches, so I was expecting a lot from it. In fact it requires ridiculously careful preparation of the branches to get it to chip anything anywhere near that thick, and when it does it goes quite slowly.

The good points:

It's nice and sturdy, it starts easily, the automatic choke, governor and drive system work well. It's quite easy to wheel around.

Operation: It's an "impact" type chipper. There's a heavy belt driven flywheel with two blades. Material is fed into a funnel and drops down a feed shoot towards the blades. The blade strikes the material, chips off a piece and then centrifugal force (yes I know) flings it into the output chute.The feed chute is more than 500mm long and somewhere between "letter box" and "side plate" in cross section. If a branch is bent or has lots of sideshoots it won't fit into the feed chute, let alone fall under its own weight. The same goes for leafy material, vines and creepers.

Tips:

The tab on the output chute is stiff. It needs a good thump backwards to lock it into the open position.

It only works when the blades are really sharp. As soon as you start producing warm sawdust rather than chips you're completely wasting your time until you resharpen it. The blades are ground at 30 degrees on a flat stone. As far as I could tell there was no microbevel at the edge.

You can block it up by letting the output chute fill up with chips. It needs to be moved or shovelled out regularly.

There is a black rubber gaiter in the funnel. This reduces noise, stops rainwater from running down the feed chute and arrest pieces of debris that get flung off the cutting wheel. I do not recommend that you remove the rubber gaiter. However if you do you will require a 5 lobed security star bit. You should also insist that the operator then wears eye and ear protection. Without the gaiter you can see what's going on and clear blockages with a stick before they bung up the chute. You can also learn what it does and doesn't like to eat, and see when it's ready for his next meal.

I think the same person should be preparing the branches and feeding them into the machine, that way they can learn what it will accept and prepare them accordingly.

The GH370 was by far the slowest bottle neck in my project to thin out my hedge, but two people did get about 600kg of wood through it in a day and a half.

Richard "Mr Creosote" B

Dyton and the Land Girl

 How was your long weekend? It was like hell on earth - if the bars, restaurants and canteens in hell are really exquisite.

On day one I was supposedly going on a long seaside walk with some slightly fitter friends. It was actually an 8 mile route march through mud. But it was punctuated by a really good English breakfast at a beautiful seaside cafe. My brother was driving to Plymouth but his journey involved a flat tyre, a broken radiator cap, gridlock at Bridgewater and the A38 closed due to an accident. Neither of us was in particularly good humour when he arrived - heavily delayed.

We then ate really excellent food from a charcoal grill and drank superbly in a luxurious cocktail lounge.

The purpose of the weekend was to thin out my hedge. The work was physically harsh, frustrating, loud, dangerous and prickly. It was started early and with a hangover. I got really angry with brambles, ivy and plastic netting. We were too tired to leave the house in the evening but I managed to home-cook a very good meal (Kensington Fried Chicken and Hard Pressed Potatoes) and we had all the makings of French 75s to drink.

I didn't bother showering which seemed luxurious at the time, but it meant that my bed was then filled with really sharp sawdust for the rest of the weekend.

Day three was just as hard work, just as early, just as hungover, but it was even more frustrating. My woodchipper (I call him Mr Creosote) wasn't manly enough for the task, and I lost a small part which we had to remanufacture. We were completely delayed by trying to gently feed individual, carefully prepared sticks down his throat and the job didn't get finished.

Tea on day three was just Freezer Surprise – Chilli Con Carne, but it was served with an excellent bottle of red wine (a very generous gift) and followed by decadent cream cakes (another gift)

Richard "Better to Drink in Hell than to Serve in Heaven" B

PIR Sensor Modify Field of View. Infra Red Mirror

 For the past few weeks I have been over-engineering the replacements for the security lights outside the front of my house. They are now screwed into reclaimed teak pads which should have a service life of 80 years. The cable is armoured and secured to stainless steel bases. The PIR sensors are wired together so that either sensor will light both lamps. 

The most interesting bit is the infra-red mirror in front of one of the motion sensors. The sensors have a wide field of view, but it's not quite 180 degrees. What this means is that when you approach my front door the lights will come on, but when you leave the house, you're in the sensor's blind spot and you're left in darkness until after you've tripped down the stairs.

The sensors work on infra-red emitted by warm objects. Polished aluminium will reflect infra-red radiation. I just happen to have some aluminium foil tape from another project, but the shiny side of kitchen foil should work just as well. I've put a little plate covered in foil tape in front of the sensor at 45 degrees. Instead of looking out the front, some of its field of vision is now pointing directly at the front door. The most amazing things are that 1) it works perfectly. 2) I managed to get it working without a thermal camera, so I couldn't see what it could see, or whether the tape was actually reflective in the infra-red.

Richard "Let There Be Light On The Stairs" B

Goodheart's Law

 When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric.

I discovered last year that I had put on an unwanted 5kg and I have been slowly removing it, except over the Christmas period when I put some weight back on. This year my progress has been much faster and I'm currently within 400g of my target weight.

It turns out that the easiest (but probably least productive) way to lose weight is to stop going to the gym. I usually go to a rock climbing wall twice a week, but in recent weeks I've been lucky to get there once a week. These calendar issues coincided with my most rapid weight loss. I worked out last night that I'm losing muscle rather than fat.

So it sounds like I still need to feel a little bit hungry most of the time AND do all my exercises.

Richard "Thanks I Hate It" B

Cure Hiccups Every Time

 For about a decade I've been telling anyone who will listen that there are two different (but very similar) bows that you can tie shoe laces into. Only one of them is secure. I don't think I'm responsible, but the knowledge is becoming a lot more widespread and there are multiple web pages and videos about it.

I will now share my family's method of curing hiccups. It seems to be little known, but more effective than most.

The "patient" is issued with a glass of water. The "doctor" gives the commands "Sip!" and "Swallow!" repeatedly in a random order. When commanded to sip the patient sucks a little bit of water from the glass into their mouth (but does not swallow) even if there is already water in their mouth. When commanded to swallow the patient swallows even if their mouth is empty. This procedure continues until the glass is empty, or it's clear that the hiccups are cured, or you're both bored. It doesn't work if the doctor becomes predictable so its best for the doctor to repeatedly toss a coin as quickly as they can and shout "Sip!" for heads and "Swallow!" for tails.

Richard "it always works" B

Bad House Guest

 I believe that one of the things that make holidays enjoyable is that you take a break from worrying about things. You're not thinking "I really must make the cable entry for the security light watertight" while you're on an Atlantic cruise.

As such I was a terrible houseguest over the Christmas period. I stayed in my friend's lodge on a holiday park in North Devon. If you're not familiar with a lodge, it's much nicer than a static caravan, but you could move it somewhere else - if you had a large crane and two lorries.

We visited his father and I gave my friend some advice about dealing with the finances of the elderly - adding massively to his New Years To Do list. I went outside in the morning and came back inside to tell him that his gutters were blocked and that the downpipe was disconnected - adding massively to our Before Lunch To Do list.

I was also partly responsible for some pretty shocking hangovers, but they seemed to appreciate the cocktails that preceded them.

Richard "ghost of chores yet to come" B