Member postings for John Doe 2

Yes, don't use a pressure washer. They can blow grease out of parts and lift paint, and get inside electrics, and will also get past window seals and drench the inside of a door. Lots of mechanical and electrical stuff inside a car door that you do not want to get wet.

A gentle scrub with a dish-washing brush and some car cabriolet roof cleaner or one of the products designed for the job should sort it.

Don't use bleach etc in case it damages your paint or metalwork. I put a bleach type product in a washing machine once and permanently stained the stainless steel drum, (ironically !).

Edited By John Doe 2 on 07/02/2022 10:57:42

I think that freshly felled wood needs to season for something like 7 years before it is truly stable? I don't know of anyone who sells such properly seasoned wood - it's often kiln dried which will warp. So old furniture would probably be a good source. I had to literally throw away a lovely 1930s oak dining table some years ago, (long story), which broke my heart because of the workmanship and the quality of oak used. You could maybe pick up plain furniture at your local town or county furniture auction rooms for not too much money as long as it's not Chippendale !

Kitchen units seem fairly stable; the units in the house we bought have what seem to be solid oak drawer fronts - made from three strips glued together and veneered on the front surface, and they are all straight and true. They could be bought separately from Howdens or someone and used as mounting boards?

If your display shelves absolutely must not warp even slightly, maybe a thick 'plank' of aluminium with thin oak veneer glued on all sides and finished to look like a solid piece of timber?

Edited By John Doe 2 on 06/02/2022 16:01:10

Did you know that adjacent Fibonacci numbers are approximately the conversion between miles and kilometres?

e.g. 5 and 8. 8 and 13, 13 and 21 etc.

So Fibonacci and the Golden Ratio gives us a correlation between the size of a human being, (miles are related to the size of a man's stride), and the size of our planet, (which defines the kilometre). Weird, and a bit spooky.

.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 06/02/2022 09:52:53

Last week my car electric windows needed to be reset - which only happens if the battery has been disconnected, (it hasn't been). Then, Mrs Doe reported that she was repeatedly flashed as she drove home, (in my car), so I suspected the rear lights had gone out.

The lights were OK when I tested them, so this and the windows tell me that the car electrical system might have an intermittent connection somewhere, (the battery is new and measures healthily). As a start, I disconnected the battery, (to avoid setting fault codes), and then removed and replaced every fuse and relay in both fuse boxes, spraying the contacts with contact cleaner as I did so.

This might cure the problem, but if it hasn't, I will have eliminated part of the system.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 02/02/2022 17:53:08

Just to set the record straight - (admittedly I could have been clearer).

I meant to refer to some delivery companies as 'fly by night', not all of them. I won't name it, but Mrs Doe has had trouble with deliveries from one, as have others. Having had a delivery go missing; trying to contact the company and actually talk to a human being - particularly one who will sort out the problem - is nigh-on impossible.

DHL though, are fine in my experience. (I am probably biased: I once flew freight contracts for DHL and they are an extremely impressive organisation. Lots and lots of money has been poured into the company - the second runway at Leipzig airport was apparently paid for by DHL for their freight operations).

Re Covid, yes I always use a mask when required to and when entering shops and pubs etc, even though many people have stopped doing so. On the London tube system last time I was there, most young people were not bothering with masks - even though it is a condition of carriage. (5 people in my own family, old and young have had Covid and survived, without any hospital intervention).

If employers require a verified, positive lateral flow test under controlled conditions, then fair enough - I am just worried that the Covid situation could be abused by self reporting. Sickness from work seems to mysteriously increase whenever there is a significant Cup Final on!

Edited By John Doe 2 on 02/02/2022 14:47:47

Edited By John Doe 2 on 02/02/2022 14:49:18

Hi peak4. Nice set-up ! Just wondering: have you ever used a trolley jack or axle stand on your tiles? If so, do the tiles stand up to the highly concentrated load, and does a loaded trolley jack sink into the tiles at all and make it difficult to roll when loaded?

Do the tiles recover from a heavy point load or does it leave a 'dent' in the tile surface?

Thanks.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 31/01/2022 12:51:47

Edited By John Doe 2 on 31/01/2022 12:53:16

Chris, you can get vehicle wiring diagrams and locations of components. You will have to pay, but it will be a lot less than £90. (I realise this information is too late for this fault of yours but might be useful in the future).

If you have a minute, check this out:

https://youtu.be/L1FxoQI_Fw4

(If we are not allowed to post links to youtube, please accept my apologies Mods).

Eric Obrochta is a really clever and genuine guy and he fixes cars at South Main Auto, near New York. He looks and sounds gruff, but don't be fooled, he is a really clever and honest guy. He can do everything on a car from air hammering off a rusty wheel bearing, to diagnosing complex electrical faults using oscilloscopes. He gets his wiring diagrams from an online subscription service. You can sign up for a day, a week, a month etc and download all the diags you need.

And his videos are very well made - he is quiet and informative, with no mucking about or annoying editing that you see on some youtube videos.

Coincidentally, Eric O's latest video shows a fault similar to yours (but not on a Volvo), which he traced to a faulty side marker light with a rusted connector that was dragging the volts down so the car 'brain' turned that circuit off. So your fault might not have been a traditional fuse.

.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 31/01/2022 09:54:07

Edited By John Doe 2 on 31/01/2022 09:58:29

I would imagine the number of people affected by the lead in solder would be a small number, but I wonder if the huge increase in dementia in our populations can be attributed to the lead in paint and petrol as there used to be? And amongst plumbers who of course used to use heated lead to make joints.

John, what about using one of those "handheld" bandsaws? - with a horizontal blade like a mini machine hacksaw.

If you fabricated a suitable clamp fixed to the bandsaw bed to hold each strip securely along its length, then the saw blade would accurately cut along the strip instead of across it, so distortion and burring would be minimal, and easily honed off.

You could make a production line with a length of your sheet with a width the same as the length of the strips you require and feed the sheet through your clamp up to the horizontal bandsaw blade and make alternate 45° and 90° cuts with the bandsaw to end up with the thin strips you need.

PS, Will we all get royalties for your invention when you put it into production ?

Edited By John Doe 2 on 28/01/2022 15:31:27

A very general comment: Depending on the design, power switching circuits can fail catastrophically if one element fails, and a fault can easily kill many other components around the failed one, faster than any fuse can operate.

At work many moons ago, I took over a colleague's repair of a switching power supply in a television monitor. I had to replace about four beefy output transistors that had failed. My colleague walked in and said "I just changed all those". "Yes, says I, and yours all blew again", (because the original fault had still been present.)

Hopefully not the case here, but just to warn you.

I don't know what they are called but you can get background heaters consisting of a roughly metre long, completely enclosed metal tube, (i.e., no vents), containing a mains electric heating element.

They can be clipped to a wall and provide low level heat for greenhouses etc. to prevent frost. I imagine you could fix one under a lathe and after a day or so, the whole lathe would warm up to a few degrees above ambient.

My garage is buried in the earth under the house, apart from the doorway, and never gets colder than 11°C despite no insulation. It has a membrane all around between the earth and the blocks and concrete. I have a dehumidifier with external drain and I keep it on 24/7. It ran for about 2 weeks initially while it dried out everything in the garage, but now only runs for a short while after I've opened the door - I keep the door closed as much as possible.

A bucket left with one cm of water in it was bone dry in a couple of days. But do buy a decent quality dehumidifier, not a toy one - mine cost about £250.

Have you tried Machine wax? Rutlands sell a 'Premium machine & tool wax' it and it has no silicon, so will not stain wood. It simply buffs on with a cloth and leaves a smooth dry finish. (I have no connection with Rutlands.)

I hope the OP doesn't mind if I piggy-back this thread:

Not a machinist, so can I ask those with experience - if I use my angle grinder to quickly dry-grind* an approximate 25° angle on the end of my wood chisels before diamond grinding them to the correct final dimensions in a Trend diamond chisel hone: will I bugger the temper of the chisel steel with the angle grinding step?

Secondly, when I sharpen my DIY HSS drill bits in a Martek drill bit sharpener containing a small drill-powered dry grinding wheel, (below), should I be dipping the drill bit end in water for similar reasons?

Finally, how do I sharpen the type of tool shown next to the drill sharpener without a mill? (It cuts a clearance hole and counter-sink as well as the hole, in one operation). The drill bit is removable but the cutting body has a ground cut-out that forms the cutting surface, but I only have a drill press?

Or a can you please recommend a good book on tool sharpening for the amateur. Many thanks.

*for example to remove a notch in the blade.

Aha ! With his photo of the hinge on this thread, we now know why John 47 is asking on another thread how to make those very thin metal strips with an angle on one edge ! One can be seen here as part of a hinge seating mechanism or somesuch.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 23/01/2022 15:08:39

Hi John,

I am not a machinist, but I think that such tiny strips will need grinding to shape - along their length rather than across, as cutting of any sort will impart too much mechanical force and distort the strip. A couple of thoughts:

a) Buy laser cut strips or stock to size but with a rectangular cross section, and grind the angled edge yourself using a belt sander with a very fine belt. You will need to make some sort of holder to grip the strip along its length and hold it against the belt. You could also make an angled rest to ensure the correct angle.

You could even clamp a number of strips together, side by side in a pack, and grind the angle across all their lower faces. That way, the strips will support each other during the grinding process.

b) Ditto as (a), but instead of a belt sander use those flat metal honing blocks I have seen. People use them for truing flat surfaces and honing chisels, but I don't know what they are called. They are about 200mm x 80mm and about 8mm thick in size and various grades are available from coarse to very fine. I think they have a fine diamond grinding surface of some sort?

c) What are your strips actually for ? If you explained what their purpose is, some here might be able to offer a different way of achieving what you need.

d) Invest in some (more) decent lighting.

e) Buy or make an EDM machine - expensive and very time consuming, but puts no mechanical strain at all on the workpiece and can make incredibly fine cuts.

Not iPhone to iPhone. I assume both phones are on the latest iOS? Have you checked the Apple App store for updates to the NHS App?

Otherwise unless the 'new' phone is quite old, it might possibly have been refurbished with non Apple parts? Maybe not the vendor, but someone they bought it from.

I would not be surprised if Apple have a software means of identifying non Apple parts.

I think I would return the phone to the vendor and get your money back. They have sold you a product which is not fit for purpose - research the UK sale of goods act.

Interestingly, I recently had a (different) issue with my Apple ID, which two Apple geniuses at the Apple shop and two Apple telephone geniuses have not resolved. I am waiting for my son to visit to sort it.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 13:36:52

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 13:40:42

Ordered a photographic filter from Watford yesterday lunchtime. Arrived (SW UK, west of Plymouth) first thing this morning, via Royal Mail.

I won't buy anything on-line if it will be posted by the other fly-by-night companies. They are cheap for a reason !! And very hard to get a response or compensation.

This Covid nonsense is becoming a menace - anyone can presumably say they have tested positive and get 10 days off work, or whatever it is? A lazy person's charter.

We have surely all been jabbed three times by now. Time to remove the masks and the restrictions. Any one who is vulnerable or worried or refuses to get vaccinated; they are the ones who should be taking precautions. The rest of us need to get on with rebuilding our economy.

My 2p:

Anyone who has watched television in the USA will know what total rubbish television can become when it is all funded purely by advertising. So many adverts that a 1 hour program has only about 10 mins of actual content, and 50 mins of adverts, trailers, recaps on the program etc. It is banal and unwatchable.

The BBC is far from perfect right now, and needs a really good shake up. In our household we pay our licence fee and watch only Freeview, and most of the good drama is on ITV: Foyles War, Vera, Endeavour, Morse, Poirot, Marple, etc. (and has almost no swearing, sex or violence).

The BBC receives the licence fee, the commercial channels receive the advertising revenue. If the licence fee was abolished and the BBC had to take advertising, all the channels would suffer because the advertisers would want to be on the Beeb, so the advertising revenue would be reduced for everyone.

The BBC sets a technical and content standard, which the advertising funded stations match (or exceed). If the BBC disappeared, the other stations would not necessarily need to keep that standard up, witness television in the USA.

The BBC lost out when sport decided it could make millions out of television rights and subscription television. The BBC cannot compete with subscription services such as Sky and BT. Now if you want a lot of sport you have to pay an expensive subscription, so everybody has lost out, except the SKY, BT and sport club executives.

Many say the licence fee is a tax. It could be taken out of our income tax, but you could argue that the BBC are being honest and open by declaring it. People moan about £150 a year but spend much more than that on mobile phones, satellite subscriptions, car loans, gym membership etc etc. Having said that, most presenter salaries are frankly ludicrous and offensive. Engineering staff at the BBC used to earn about half what you could earn by going to ITV, but only the BBC trained the engineers.

The BBC has a World wide network of journalists, stringers and other news gathering facilities. The BBC and its authority is/was one thing that makes our country different to others. Most other countries know who the BBC are. Like the monarchy - very far from perfect in recent years, but it helps make our country what it is.

As SoD says, be careful what you wish for. The BBC used to be great - think about our childhoods. I personally would rather we kept the BBC and fixed it, rather than getting rid of it.

The licence fee has just been frozen for the next two years, and the Government has said the next licence fee review will be its last.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 10:29:58

Edited By John Doe 2 on 18/01/2022 10:33:04

@ Callum, yes, this could be a reason in the smaller companies. I did 16 years as an engineer in TV broadcasting. I was working freelance the other day at a venue, and the "technical" youngsters there had only vaguely heard of Ohms law, but did not really know what it was or what it meant. (Not relevant to sound levels, but an indication of how training focus has changed).

@ Brian, it probably is though, that's the point. Can you give an example? Purely out of interest - I might not have watched the same programs as you.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 17/01/2022 18:19:57

Edited By John Doe 2 on 17/01/2022 18:20:38

Regarding loudness wars, yes, the basic compressor limiters used in the past regulated the whole audio spectrum as one, and this could cause problems in that a bass sound could cause the more audible frequencies to 'pump' or vary in level*. Modern versions compress the audio in lots of narrow frequency bands which avoids this and also has much more loudness effect. This is now used to make pop and rock music seem louder. Listening to Led Zepp just the other day, it sounds slightly tame and subdued (!!) in comparison to modern tracks which have the multi-band compression.

Ironically for our discussion, compression can be useful when listening to the spoken word in the car for example. Radio 2 is extremely compressed: the natural dynamic range of natural voice and music can be 60-100dB, but Radio 2 is transmitted with barely 6dBs range. Compare that with orchestral music on Radio 3 which is hard to hear properly in the car, because the quieter parts are drowned out by road noise etc. (I don't know how much, if any, compression is used on Radio 3).

Compression makes audio fatiguing to listen to after a while.

With adverts, compression is applied at the max, so they sound very loud - to get our attention of course.

*This might have been the cause of the fading voice level mentioned in the thread earlier - the sound tech might have only had basic compressors while out on location.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 17/01/2022 13:57:33