With the cable in place, next up was the main switch, a Gigabit Ethernet switch in Tanya’s room.
I made this panel with, from left to right — the alarm box, power supply for alarm, GE switch + power supply brick, and three RJ-45 boxes (feeding the two kids’ rooms and the man cave).
I had to make a couple of short patch cables to run between the switch and the network boxes.
So now we’re rid of the patch cable that ran across the driveway, but I still have to install a power point and a network point in each of the kids’ rooms. And I have to install the rest of the alarm system, of course.
A while ago, I got my Malawians to install a piece of gutter drain pipe from the roof of the main house, down the wall, under the path, and up into the (free standing) garage roof.
I finally got around to putting some cabling into this pipe.
Three lengths of CAT-5, one 4-conductor telephone line, one eight conductor bundle for the alarm system, and a piece of five core trailer wire for one day when I want to put some of the lights in the house on a 12V UPS type system.
I had to cut a hole halfway and pull the wire through in stages — too much friction around the corners. (Don’t mind Tanya’s pet plastic bag blowing in the wind).
Now to wire up the network points on both sides, so we can get rid of the patch cable going out the garage window, across the driveway, and into Tanya’s room.
For your edification. The pad on the left is what they’ll give you if you mosey on down to Goldwagen and say “brake pads, Opel Astra Classic”.
The one on the right is what you want if you have Lucas calipers. This will entail printing out above picture (because the sample has to go back in the car so that Tanya can get to work) and taking it to Masterparts, then waiting for half an hour while the fellow finds the right thing.
Don’t ask me how I know.
Another tip: don’t believe the manual when it tells you to line up some indent with some boss when compressing the piston back into the caliper. Apply force with a G-clamp and turn the pistol with a waterpomp tang.
So there I was, pottering around home yesterday morning, and suddenly the lights go out. And the bleating of the UPS reaches my ear. Some inspection shows that the fridge is still working, Tamsyn is still happily playing on her computer, and all the trip switches including the big ones in the box outside are happy.
Further inspection shows that we have one phase of the three phase circuit, and even further inspection shows some very dodgy looking wiring on the pole side of the feed.
So Tanya gets instructions to phone council and I bugger off to work.
Long story short, at 1800 it was starting to get dark inside the house, and we still had only the one phase.
Battleshort! I disconnected the two dead phases, and shorted all three phases together on “my” side of the mains breaker (which is the bottom of the bottom left switch in the first picture, but I did it at the input side of the breaker that feeds the garage, just because it was more convenient.
So around quarter past eight, just as I’ve put the bread in the oven [1], the crew pitches.
Of course, they had to cut all power to fix the feed, and when they reconnected the power everything now hanging off the one phase was cold, so that tripped the outside breaker, which lead to the quickest removal of a kludge you can think of (figured I had to remove all evidence of my meddling before they came inside to look why the lights were not burning…)
So I could shoot my 1911 and my Winchester ’94 on Saturday the 23rd of January.
Post ’64 Winchester ’94 in .44 Magnum. Not a particularly good example of a Winchester, the beancounters got involved and the post ’64 Winchesters are cheap (the beancounters were supposed to make things less expensive, and got confused about the difference between cheap and inexpensive).
1944 Remington-Rand produced M1911A1. Carries British proof marks on the barrel. An excellent example of a 1911. Made towards the end of the Second World War, I’m pretty sure this pistol never saw service. Sat around in stock until being sold as war surplus.
My friend Etienne bought it and fitted the Pachmayr grip and magazine. I liked the gun so much I told him if he ever wanted to sell it I wanted it. He emigrated to the USA, the 1911 stayed behind.
I added two switches, one for the undercounter light, the other for a downlighter I still need to fit. Not the most professional installation, but it’ll work.
Remember the bathroom we built from scratch back in November 2008? I ripped it all apart again. The bath (a Libra Neptune Euro) was too big for Tanya, so Frank and I fitted a smaller (1700 x 700 as opposed to 1800 x 800) and much cheaper bath.
Here’s the redone tiling. Look at the clever gyppo [1] in the corner. The grout line would have been on the edge of the bath, so we made a cut-out in the front tile so that the front edge matches the rear wall.
If the front edge looks like it gets narrower towards the right, that’s because… it gets narrower towards the right. The (professional) tiler tiled the rear wall at an angle (I know I built the box square to the rear wall, before the tiling happened) and I opted to square the bath at the back. I’m sure by next week I won’t notice it any longer.
I mentioned the worm farm before. Turns out, if you feed them bits of tomato, you get a garden full of tomato plants. And that leads to lots and lots of tomatoes :-)
OK, so I’ve now also joined the eee-crowd. By design, mostly — Tanya didn’t like the Linux part of her eeePC, so the deal was, I get her a Windoze netbook and she gives me the eee.
With the result that I’ve had to restore factory settings with F9 / format disk / re-install Linux about four times already. At least the process is easy and elegant. I’m storing my stuff on a 1 GB SD card, but I can see a bigger card making this a useful system.
