mending things

In the UK  most houses appear to use some form of modular plastic guttering. It comes in different colours and cross sections. Pieces are held up using brackets. Where sections join together a connecting pice is used which clamps beneath the two sections  coupling them together, and an outer clip piece binds both pieces together with a rubber seal as the filling in this sandwich.  The rubber seal consist of a length of rubber strip which sits in a groove in the juntion piece. In the picture above you can see a corner section, below you see a mid section join between two longer lengths. I routinely find persistent drips from these junction points. This is not great as where the water lands you get splashing, which over time can soak the walls close to the splash point. It can also start to damage wooden paint work. if your in a room  nearby a persistent drip-drip-drip is also annoying. So dripping gutters are a bad thing. I have repaired gutters in 3 house...

Last year I acquired a Pioneer PL-12D turntable which I restored and runs very well. In the blog describing the process I mentioned that I believed that much of the content would be suitable for a wide range of 1970's Japanese belt drive turntables from the likes of Pioneer, Sony, Sansui , Kenwood/Trio etc.  A few weeks ago I spotted another turntable being auctioned locally on ebay. The price seemed very good and I bid for it and won. It was a JVC JL-A1 which I got for a very reasonable £20 and was able to collect. The unit had been in the family from new and was in very good condition. Just a few issues due to age , namely the hardening of both rubber and lubricants with age. I had read in the vinyl engine forum that it was similar to the PL-12 and I wanted to find out, plus I enjoy working on decks. As you can see from the pictures it is very similar. Speed change on the left (buttons rather than levers) with cueing lever on the right. S-shaped arm with removable heads...

Common themes across most of my posts are energy conservation , its monitoring and technology. This post sort of combines all three in one. We have a Sky+ satellite unit with integral hard disk recorder. In the UK this is known as a Sky+ box. The unit can be programmed to easily record programmes 24 hours per day and record complete series at a repeating time. It has lots of features, including OnDemand  services where a wide range of channels are recorded on the off chance you might want to watch them. My specific Model Sky + HD unit is made by Amstrad We also have a 46" Samsung LED TV which is hooked up to the Sky+ unit . I use a CurrentCost household energy monitor, which is hooked up to the internet via a unit called a netsmart, also from CurrentCost (see my other post on currentcost). I can see on a web page a graph of my household energy consumption in close to real time. A 3rd type of device from CurrentCost is the Individual Alliance Monitor (IAM) which is a unit whi...

 I got back into vinyl records about 18 months ago, and have collected a few hundred albums, mostly second hand. I have a number of turntables (NAD 5120, Ariston QDeck, Pioneer PL12D ) which I got also second hand. I keep a few, some end up passed onto friends, some that are too far gone are kept for spares. In most cases they have required a little work to get them running again. Last week I was lucky enough to get a Pioneer PL-12D turntable from freecycle. The lady who offered it, said that she in turn had received it from freecycle , and had replaced the belt but couldn't get on with the springiness of it, and had got a modern USB turntable. I have previously worked on one of these decks, and know what she means about the suspension system used. While this blog is specifically about this particular model of deck, many of the concepts are similar to others from this vintage. Many Japanese belt drive decks throughout the  1970's shared very similar construction, so this m...