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Cats are fascinating creatures. I went to the trouble of building my two indoor only cats a 'catio' the year before last and it's only really this year that one of them has made actual use of it, before that I might as well not have wasted my time and money.. The other cat may occasionally...

I know them as lump or club hammers, I've never heard them referred to as drilling hammers. I do remember the days before power drills were popular that we used a a tool together with a club/lump hammer to fashion a hole to accept a Rawlplug but those hammers were also used with a bolster to cut...

Saw pits were often used to cut off and thickness boards from larger pieces of timber before the age of mechanisation. They had to be fairly accurate in their cuts too so as not to expend energy with other tools finishing to the required thickness. Not a job I would have enjoyed but it was done...

Each to their own. If people want to wash their cars three times a week then it's their choice. I personally don't think it's necessary in fact the last time I took mine to a car wash was sometime last year but I'd never condemn anyone for doing so. For decades I would never let anyone clean my...

I have two long case clocks. One was made between 1690 and 1710 which would originally have housed a single hander clock mechanism (country clock). It's been restored two probably or even three times in it's lifetime. It had the innards replaced maybe mid-18th Century with a double handed...

I still have an older Canon i965 printer which was effectively a pro-level photo printer back in its day. It produced superb images up to A4. The original equipment cartridges (BC16) are still available with a genuine set costing around getting on for £80.00 but as the cartridges contain no...

With regard to reporting news. What I'd like to see is more scrutiny of the private lives and professionalism of the TV reporters and presenters for a change, many of whom it seems take a delight in harassing and effectively vilifying MPs etc who they very often ambush during an interview about...

I certainly wouldn't trust either the BBC nor the Channel 4 news teams to report in an unbiased manner especially when it comes to politics and the Conservative party, not that I'm a Conservative supporter myself I might point out. Far from it in fact as I'm not a fan of the current government...

I do quite a bit of fret levelling on guitars. Briefly after masking the entire fretboard, I use a one or more Sharpies to mark the tops of the frets and then lightly run the levelling beam over the frets. The Sharpie marking lets me know which frets have been rubbed by the levelling beam. I...

It's good to see that I'm not the only one into guitars. I have 10 electric and a couple of acoustics. I always dress and level the frets of almost every guitar I own. The Gretsch in the image I bought about three years ago after it was advertised for 6 months with no takers even at a very...

In my organ builder days, we regularly had to deal with very old, often hand cut rusted in screws or screws that were just generally very difficult to remove from wood through previous poor workmanship. We usually managed to remove them without breaking the heads off or damaging the wood but the...

I haven't bought many tools from LIDL but I did purchase two right-angled 'Parkside' attachments for my cordless drills. One is for drilling and the other for screwdriving and you never realise how useful they are and how often you will find a use for them until you own one. They make life so...

My thoughts and practical experience of using business cards. If one is in business then every avenue with regard to getting one's name out there should be explored. Business cards are just one of the avenues and while gone are the days when a person visiting a wealthy household would give a...

I always remember the old saying before buying anything s/h..if anything seems too good to be true, usually it is. There's often a catch somewhere. Very often sellers of new and second hand equipment in some instances, fail to show the price including VAT to attract buyers. What seems like a...

Thank you. ;)

There is no obligation to read this post so please ignore and all I can do is apologise for it's length. No doubt I'll offend many people by saying this but as someone who held an ADI certificate for well over 30 years and instructed on a daily basis over that time period, my experience of...

ALL ROAD USERS irrespective of whether a pedestrian, cyclist, horse rider or vehicle driver have a duty of care towards others and in theory others have a right to expect responsible and appropriate behaviour from others using the roads. Unfortunately that isn't happening in many instances...

Coming from an organ building background, the first picture really says it all for me. Those squares are adjustable and therefore prone to inaccuracy and were never considered a good enough tool for the precision work that was involved in organ building and back then, no self respecting organ...

A shooting board is simply another useful tool in the woodworker's arsenal which costs little to make but is very important if exposed end grain is a feature. If you get a clunk when the plane meets the leading edge of the piece of wood being trimmed in a shooting board and the plane blade is...

It's often difficult to identify wood just from a photograph but my guess would be Parana Pine.