The patch question... I ddon't think it's about bikes. Viz, pictures of bicycles are not on topic. Thoughts?

hmmm pictures of bikes that help questions are on topic, patches of bikes, not so much.

I mean "pictures of bike" as the topic. Same as "I have this model of a bike" or "I dreamed about riding a bike what does that mean".

"This is my bike (photo) identify it plz" would be on-topic IMO

I didn't realise that was up for debate. Are you just bored and being pedantic?

-grin-

there's no sewing.stackexchange.com The nearest I found was crafts.se

@Criggie Is that identify the photo? As in Canon, f4.5, 1/100 sec? That would be for photography.se :-)

I liked the patches question. We need more bicycling textile things. :-0

@RoboKaren I like all sorts of things, and happily many of them are not on-topic for bicycles.SE. Genuine issue the other day: how do we clean fresh paint spots off a painted metal sculpture of a bicycle? Someone wasn't quite as careful as she should have been while painting house parts. It's bicycle related, right?

Sounds on topic to me! :-)

answer "quickly, before it dries" and with meths or turps or water, depending on what the house paint is based on. OR don't do anything and let the sculpture bear witness forever :)

My ladder still carries house paint from ~12 years ago.

@Criggie my ladder and a lot of my tools now have silicone glue/sealant on them and that stuff is not going to go away. I am actually wondering whether I can use it to re-finish faux-silicone handles on other stuff, because those often turn sticky and awful long before the attached tool fails.

Its not great - you probably want a can of plastidip.

Apparently it comes in aerosol format now.

It's not real silicone, because that never does that (chemically it can't), but people make silicone blends (again, not truly a blend except in the sense that stripy toothpaste is a blend) and carbon-polymers that kinda look like silicone. The flame test will tell you which, but be aware that some of the polymers are very flammable, and the best case is napalm-like dripping flaming stuff.

@Criggie not great for flexible or semi-flexible tools, and I don't really like the feel of it as a handle.

It turns out that the handle of my somewhat pricey hammerdrill is actually flexible, in the sense that the rigid plastic bracket on the soft-plastic handle has cracked away from it. It is all a bit shit, but the thing is way out of the five year warranty.

heh I used my grandad's old one the other week

its all brown plastic, dates from the 70s.

and is called a "Brown Super Home Power Drill"

It works perfectly.

none of these "not for trade use" stickers

@Criggie My Black-n-Decker circular saw finally died a few years ago. I inherited it from my gandfather, but it had brushes in the motor and finally replacements were unavailable, and my attempt to fake some up using near-enough ones didn't work properly, so they burned out. I'm guessing it was made in the 1970's.

Hehehe I have two of them

do you want one ?

again, was grandad's. He bought some Good Stuff.... none of this XU1 brand.

@Criggie nah, thanks, I have a modern one. Well, two modern ones because I bought a bigger one to make the shed. Now I should sell it, because I don't need a 240mm saw very often so it'[s just money tied up in something I won't use.

My other grandad had a $14.99 jigsaw. The most useful part was the cardboard box, which holds the previous jigsaw, which still works perfectly.

It says something when the packaging outlasts the product.

I have a jack plane that I'm not sure of the origin of, it looks older than my grandfather but he never mentioned getting it from his father or anything. Still works, I keep it because a small plane is surprisingly handy. The sharpening stone I got with it has long worn out, though, and been replaced.

What amuses me is the "workshop exercise" tools that he got from his father, made himself, and my uncles also made. Most of which I have. Some nice clamps and wrenches, and the older ones display a greater complexity than schoolkids were expected to master when I was at school.

The basic machinists parallel jaw clamp I made at intermediate, for example, is one of a set of four made by all of us.

yeah - old tools are awesome.

That said - worn tools are no fun at all.

its a bit of a balancing act.... I never realised how crap my files were till I bought a new one.

Right - home time!

@Criggie bye! And yeah, files are a consumable

@Móż That was made before B&D were bought by GE, who had a name for making crap tools. They wanted to put that reputation behind them, so the bought a company with a good reputation. Before long, B&D were making crap tools. There's a lesson in there, but the corporates never learn it.

@andy256 yeah, there's a sad circularity with many of the manual workers I know - they regard all tools as disposable or consumable, so they focus on price, so they have cheap tools that fail often. From the manufacturers side, a lot of DIY level people will never wear out a tool, so selling them stuff that barely lasts through the warranty period pays off. Then trades buy those tools and the market for decent tools dies.

Albeit there are still nice tools round, but it's a bit of a game trying to find the decent tools at decent price points. Or you just flip it and buy the pricey stuff even though you don't actually need it.

I used to have a Hilti 12V battery hammer drill for putting in rock climbing anchors. I sold it after a few years for basically what I paid, because normal use doesn't affect them in any way. Normal use including running it off a car battery, in a cave, putting bolts in under a small waterfall :)

I know a few people who have whole wood workshops full of Festool gear because they have the cash and just can't be bothered playing the "will this work" game.

(heart) festool. Would love to have the money to afford them. Sigh. Someday.

@RoboKaren he's wiesmann, so the "wie" matches his name.

@RoboKaren yeah. Although for some tools I just buy the good one. The trouble with battery tools is that it's the batteries that become the limiting factor. My 12V Panasonic drill is still fine, except that it uses NiMH batteries (repacked from the original NiCd) and I can't buy new batteries any more. I fear that the replacement 14.4V LiIon tools will go the same way after 15 or 20 years.

Oh, your comment misspells him as Weisman. Makes sense, turn it into an answer and delete the comment?

With hand tools and mains tools, I often just suck it up. I have a slowly-growing collection of good tools that are only really scary at insurance time. I made a list, took photos, then wandered round websites getting prices. Turns out that after ~30 years of buying the occasional good tool I am now up for about $30k to replace them should they get stolen or destroyed.

@RoboKaren ooops.

Where did you live again, Moz? And what was the security code on that shed? :-)

I always pronounced Wiesman as "Wise-man" - shows how much I know.

@RoboKaren It's less the security code and more that all the good stuff is in solid metal boxes that are dynabolted to the floor. I'm not sure whether it'd be easier to cut the box open or cut the floor and move the box+floor. I have a bit of experience at making barriers to people willing to use power tools to break through things.

The trick is to start with something that looks cheap and easy, so people who don't already know that there's good stuff won't even bother. Then inside you put a decent series of barriers. In my case I like to do stuff like steel plates held in place with carbon fibre and epoxy, then sprinkle broken glass into the epoxy before compressing it and covering it with old carpet. That gives a nice surface inside the box, but there's no tool that's good for cutting all of those.

The hard part is the hinges and lock+lock mounts. So I have a second lid+hinges inside, and a proper deadbolt holding it shut. Given time and tools you can get in there, but the tools you need are on the inside :) The hinges are hard, in more than one sense... pricey hardened ones.

I'd go for the hinges

Hang on - isn't the whole shed designed to be moveable ?

swipe

@Criggie nah, different shed. In this case, the boxes are in the garage and I know that the concrete slab is only 75mm thick because the drill went straight through it. There is reo, though, which you don't always get. So someone could just hammer round the boxes, cut the reo, and they'd only add about 50kg or so to each box with the concrete floor still attached.

I could put the boxes in the new shed as ballast, except I think they'd fall through the floor. It's not designed for that weight.

The sad part is when we moved and I had to empty the boxes and the movers still did not like them. They're not all that big, but they weigh about 80kg each. They don't look as though they weigh that, but they do. And the handles are not rated to carry that weight, but the boxes came with handles...

-grin- Movers can be such pussies.

as two of them carry a piano into the truck

Hopefully when we build the famed house of the future I will be able to have a proper safe built in. One in an inconspicuous part of the floor for the NAS with a wee UPS and whatever important paper documents I need. Then one or two cabinets that are also part of the concrete pour for the slab. I'd like upright, but I suspect chest freezer style will be easier. Or I could just buy a proper safe, I suppose.

@Criggie The ones going TO Melbourne were great. They looked at the pile of stuff, looked at the stuff in the shed that I wasn't going to take, and said "nice workbench. We will put that in first"... it came in under the quote anyway, because I estimated accurately and they quote on ~20% over the estimate because most people have NFI. I used a tape measure and a spreadsheet.

Coming back, not so much. The original lot were not available, and the new ones screwed up. So the truck was half full when it arrived and they didn't have the quoted space left in the truck. So most of our stuff went. The rest sad in the unlocked garage for a week until they came back for the next run. And they bitched like genuine pussies about the tool boxes, and the drill press, and the workbench. Anyone would think a 100kg workbench was OTT.

Also, I made them part unload the truck so they could get my workbench in. They wanted to leave it behind and I started to get quite grumpy with them. Once I explained to their boss that I was quite happy to write them off as unable to carry out the move as quoted, that I expected a full refund of the deposit and that I would publicise their incompetence they became a little more reasonable.

@RoboKaren oh, it's also worth having cheap tools, it gives casual thieves something to run off with. And they are great for jobs where you want to misuse the tools. A $10 set of screwdrives, sharpened, gives you an excellent cheap chisel or odd-tip screwdriver. Trying to extract a tiny pentagon-head screw with bar? File down a $1 screwdriver...

I found a socket head screw like this, about 2mm across the vertical line. Which only used half the shallow indent, so it was a bit of a pain to get out (I am guessing that that was the intent)

Moz: off topic question - but your photos are neat and tidy

Is there a colour coding scheme for metric vs imperial vs whitworth ?

I'm guessing its red for metric and blue for imperial

sheldonbrown.com/colorcode.html <-- not what I mean

@Criggie not that I'm aware of. I haven't used a workshop with coding like Sheldon's but I can see the appeal. I have good positional memory and work by myself so don't bother. Most places I've worked/shared have just used "a place for everything and everything in its place"

Photos... Not sure what your question is

Good news is that I have moved my shed into position and Tek screwed it to the tent pegs. Pegs made of 50mm angle iron😀

Housemate helped, was quite excited at the ability of levers to enable two people to lift a shed. And wiggle it round. I'm guessing 40kg of water to hold one side up using about 8:1 leverage, so maybe 500kg total mass. I could actually weigh it that way but can't be bothered

I don't have a question about photos - I meant that your recent shed photos show a tidy workspace, which lead to the question about colour coding. So red and blue are common but there's no agrement over which is which, and there's no common colour for whitworth,

@Criggie I don't think there's a colour standard at all, ever. Workshops tend to be idiosyncratic, and even basic stuff like layout various wildly across bike shops in Australia, and even when the same people set up different workshops I see a lot of variation.

I suspect it doesn't matter very much, so people just go with what's easiest in the space they have. My stepfather grouped tools by what he used them for, and actually had duplicates of some cheaper stuff just so "fixing the tractor" didn't mean taking tools from "fixing the fruit grader" at the other end of the shed.