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I refuse to get involved in panic buying or "hamstering" as the Germans call it. Two things seem to be flying off the shelves: toilet paper rolls. A bit odd: I could understand it if one of the symptoms was diarrhoea but people can be strange. The really baffling one is flour for baking bread...

I suspect that any half-competent western government (I do not include countries with mediterranean coastlines or Balkan countries in that category) would have done much better in the initial stages, simply because in democracies govts are forced to address issues in a critical environment. In...

This thread triggered a memory. Years ago there was a humorous magazine called Punch which had been going for over a century and it used to have a cartoon caption competition whereby they published one of the old cartoons without a caption and readers were invited to come up with one. One...

Look at MikeG's post which is four above yours. He's offering firm, clear advice and is justifying it. If you believe that somebody is set on a course which you believe will lead them to disappointment, what else can you do? It would be doing the OP a gross disservice to be positive about his...

So that's how they used to do it! Thanks very much for the link. I think that's one to file away for learning to do some time.

If I've visualised correctly what you describe, the critical thing is surely to get the reference face and edge dead square to each other. You could plane the second face more or less flat and square (you'll want to get it bang on at some stage) but the width will be determined by marking both...

Sheffield Tony, thanks for the link. Andy T, the reason I was baffled by your reference to a wallpaper stripper was because I thought you meant one of those scrapers. Oops. Marcros, not terribly bendy. I'm thinking of having a go at one of Christopher Schwarz's staked chairs and it would be...

Yoyevol, now I understand the reference to the wallpaper stripper! Argus, here's a bloke going through much of what you said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lpu8w_QLng Research continues, as they say.

Andy, thanks: but what about the nitty gritty of getting the steam into the pipe? Or does one heat the pipe up? I've got a fairly powerful camping cooker with which I could heat up water in a vessel to produce steam. And how does the wallpaper stripper come into it? The wood I was thinking of...

I'm thinking of making some things that require curved bits of wood. The conventional method appears to be steaming. Does anybody know of a safe set up for doing this? I envisage bending nothing longer than 3 feet. What are the normal parameters e.g. if you had a two foot bit of hardwood 1" x...

I know what you mean. It's possible to say almost anything without getting people's backs up. Lord alone knows who he thought is target audience was.

As a sort of postscript to the discussion, I stumbled on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA7b7Zxi7A After about 90 secs I wanted to murder the smug little w**ker :mrgreen: and that for a whole host of reasons and not just for his approach to the pronunciation of the word in question...

Oh yes it can! Here's a link to the Danish trailer of the film of one of my favourite thriller books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgS7L8Y2fpE The subtitles are not related to what is being said on the screen.* I reckon it's easier to decode written Danish than it is spoken Danish. *I've...

I can see what your wife is getting at. I teach English to Germans and I've come to the view that whereas German is like a stone which has been cut and polished with clear edges, English is like a pebble that has become smoothly rounded off after years on the beach. That said if your wife thinks...

It's "mispronunciation" that leads to differences between languages, dialects and accents. Consider a word which is different in at least three languages: Dorf in German, Thorpe in English and if I remember rightly, there's a variant in Dutch. Did a German start mispronouncing the initial "th"...

This evening my block plane was the ideal tool for a task and I thought of this thread. As many have pointed out, you can get by without one but in my opinion for some things they are optimal. Today I needed to trim an edge which was a bit more than 3/8" wide and about 18" long. The block plane...

OK, it's confession time. This thread is a good thickness detector (thickness in the sense of dim-wittedness). I looked at the picture, thought it an act of minor vandalism and that it had inbuilt irony: the pointless, air-headed destruction of a good tool to make objects which prop up books...

Some people seek celebrity, some have it thrust upon them. I have a lot of sympathy for those of the latter group who are subject to intrusive press coverage and little for the former group. Those who seek celebrity are in my opinion like politicians, artists and criminals i.e. they're all...

I think that a lot of people don't understand that there are two aspects to language: speaking and hearing. Many would say that reading and writing are involved as well but the written word is just an attempt to get the spoken word down on paper. In principle that works perfectly if: a. Your...

That's dialect as opposed to inability to pronounce and it preserves the old Anglo-Saxon pronunciation, a bit like the lowland Scots do with moose and hoose.