15 June 2014

Dropping Ducks

I happened to be doing a little machining today on some odds n'sods and noticed that despite my best efforts,  the Camvac 286 wasn't quite producing as much suckage as it ought, which was mildly disconcerting to say the least….stuff was flowing, but not nearly with the same gusto as before.

Puzzled, I was….

I started to look at the joints between all the gates, 'T's and pipes etc and all seemed tight.  All nicely bound with duct tape, with a pair of plastic ties on each to make them air tight  Then I noticed a couple of gates weren't closing properly by around 3mm, allowing air to leak past….not much, but enough.

The gates in question opened horizontally, allowing a build up of grunge in the groove, so there was nothing for it but to remove the culprits , clean them out with a 2mm Allen key and re-assemble the system so that all the gates, including the two offending ones, now opened by pulling vertically downwards.

It's little things like this that make all the difference, so it's worth paying a bit of attention and getting all one's 'ducks in a row' when the system's installed.

Which I clearly didn't first time round.

Again.

11 June 2014

Normal service will resume shortly…..

Many years ago, if my ongoing decrepitude still serves me, the TV wasn't too reliable and seemed to me, at the time, to be always going 'off-air'.  You'd then here a frightfully posh, perfectly articulated, genuine BBC Queen's English announcer saying that …

…."normal service will resume shortly" or so I seem to remember at the time.

The delivery yesterday of this bad boy from Axminster...

















….means that like the early days of the BBC, normal service will be resumed shortly in the 'shop.  At present, I've got around five jobs stacked up all over the place that need the services of this bit of kit. They include, in no particular order, a picture frame, a jewellery box, a big Alan Peters style cabinet, and a large chest of drawers as well as load of little boxes for the craft fair next month.

Onwards and upwards...