Jungle Freedom Fighters

I might have accidentally left the sail shade up when it started to rain and I might also have made a minor engineering faux pas by forgetting to put a 1 metre drop on the fabric to allow rain to run off. Fear not, I have a cunning plan

After 8 years of butchering my lawn with a second hand e-bay beast – I finally got around to stumping up for a new mower. Sweeeeet

This is as good as it’s ever going to get!

Know your limits!

My Uncle Barry donated some radio controlled cars that his boys [ now in their 20’s ] used to play with. They didn’t work. Even after charging the Ni-Cd battery there was nothing. So I ripped the battery apart, hooked it up to my bench power supply and cranked up the max current….bingo!

A new battery has just been ordered!

It all started when I was chatting with one of the Mums at Amelia’s school and she happened to mention she’d bought a sail shade but it was too big for her garden. Smelling a bargain I got stuck in.

My initial thought was to just fasten it to trees and bushes with ropes. That…just…wasn’t going to work…at all. We needed posts. Massive, strong posts. We needed to bury the posts 80cm into the ground which meant we ended up needing 4.2m posts at a 10degree angle which lead to some pretty tricky [ for me ] maths.

Then I cleared the area in preparation for getting going

I put the rather expensive eye things into the posts whilst they were on the ground hoping that I wouldn’t be a complete moron and concrete them in facing the wrong way. Thankfully I didn’t.

Next I had to dig 40cm x 40cm x 80cm holes. 80cm deep is flipping deep when it’s just you and a spade. Anyway, holes dug, posts dropped in and braces made…

Finally, on a really rather warm day in September I had to mix 300kg of concrete by hand. I initially started off with one bag of aggregate and two bags of ready mix concrete. I thought this might be all I needed, but it seems I was a touch mistaken. I needed an additional 3 bags of bedding aggregate, 8 bags of 10mm limestone chippings, 4 bags of sand and 2 bags of cement.

Here’s Oliver helping remove the braces

Finally, the concrete had set and my calculations proved to be pretty accurate!

Emma pointed out that one of the beams [ or trusses or whatever ] in the arbour had cracked due to the weight of the climbers growing across the top. “You’ll have to replace that beam” she said. “I’ll have to replace them all and get rid of that climber” replies I. I had good reason to want to tidy the whole arbour up since we eat out there in the Summer. Last time we had friends over for dinner we put some braziers in the arbour to get some heat going and we had a succession of snails dropping onto our heads from the climbers above. It was definitely not cool.

In my usual style I totally forgot to get pictures of it “before”, so here are the “midway” and “after” pictures…

What you can’t see in these is that I also had to rebuild all the walls around the arbour too since they’d all crumbled away…and we now have bark chippings and new plants all around the edges. It’s all lovely!

You was a learner once too… Jesus…. Just…. Jesus!

After quite a long hiatus from cooking I finally got back in the mood after being inspired by Nigel Slater

The arbour is slowly falling apart beneath the weight of several years of plant growth. So it’s all being pulled apart, plants being removed and new beams put in place. These are the beams about to be treated. Thank the good lord and baby Jesus for big sheds.

The latest in a long series of tractor repairs has been completed. In usual style it involves a tie-wrap…and as a new entry into the “crap Darren repairs stuff with” collection, we make use of a brake block from Amelia’s old bike.

Proper engineering that y’know – if you’ve never repaired something with a recycled brake block then you’ve never lived!

Just one more thing goes wrong with this tractor and then I’m off shopping for a new one….unless I can fix it with a rotary washing line and a balloon.

I had to repair the arbour and in doing so it was necessary to chop a funny angle bit onto the end of a bit of wood. I tried doing this with a saw but everything was just all over the place….and it was really really really hot. So I got sick of that and bought the beast above! I used to believe that all men had to own a tape measure. Now I firmly believe that all men have to own a Compound Mitre Saw. It took about 4 minutes to chop 10 err funny angle bits onto the ends of the wood pole things. I only ballsed up one of them by chopping bits out of opposite sides of the beam thing rather than the same side. Still, it wouldn’t be a steeley production if something didn’t go wrong along the way.

We had a night of the whole family camping in the garden. It was a great success and everybody enjoyed themselves and more importantly…slept!

At one point the children and I decided to draw on each others faces with burnt sticks. I opted for the Tom Selleck moustache

I do occasionally wear suits, but since it was Aggy’s wedding a flowery shirt had to be worn underneath

Not sure if this is illegal as such but I’m glad we didn’t bump into any police people on the journey back. The wood is to repair my arbour which is struggling under the weight of our climbing stuff

A weekend of fun in Prague to celebrate Michal’s forthcoming wedding.

The whole chicken coop escapade even made it on to the BBC website…

The cunning plan finally comes to fruition. Yesterday Elaine Dunkley of North West Tonight came to my house and filmed a piece about the hen house hoist chickens in space project. My life is now complete. They broadcast three segments all of which have been stitched together below. My favourite bit is when the bottom bar is on screen showing “Darren Steele, Inventor” or as my buddy Chris Phelan points out it should have said “Darren Steele, Eejit”

Aggy is getting married soon so his suggestion was that we all go and climb a mountain in Wales, and then drink beer. I just heard the bit about beer.

This is us just before we reached the summit. We’d all just had some sandwiches and crisps and were feeling a little more human…

This is the nutter slope we had to slide down. From the top you could make out the A487 below, far far below. So far below that you could make out the road but not any cars travelling on it. It was stupidly high and stupidly steep – but was our best option for getting off the mountain and into the pub.

…and this is the same slope viewed from the road…

Finally a picture of my breakfast making facilities:

This will hopefully form part of my ongoing raspberry pi fun. However in between now and said fun there has to be an element of soldering. Oh dear.

The first two solders went OK. Only 24 more left to do

My electronics teacher would still despair at my soldering skills. They haven’t improved much in twenty years

I’m actually quite proud of this bit of soldering. I may well be getting the hang of it!

The finished project. A raspberry pi controlled digital thermometer for my office. I now have to write a bit of code to log it to a php graph page but that’s the easy bit 🙂