Jimby's now on the NBN.

Finally after the rest of Ingham was connected to the NBN a year ago our end of town has been switched on.
I used to get a pretty good ADSL connection with about a 16 Mbps download, and now despite having the inferior fibre to the node optical connection I'm getting a pretty impressive speed.
The added bonus is this being cheaper than the old service if you take the VOIP phone service into account.

7th anniversary.

Dad brought up a coffee machine with him and this coffee, I thought it might be a fair idea to try it before it got old enough to vote.
It was OK but OK isn't the reason for making fancy coffee, a wow factor is what's desired but it won't be wasted.
Amazing coincidence the date, I only noticed after taking the photo since my eyes don't manage so well these days.

Ready to bolt back on.

Another little problem on Dad's drive here was the mudguards had broken off the trailer.
I've welded the broken bits back together in my Mr Blobby fashion and hope it'll stay in place for a while.
I know I'll have to do a bit of work to my welding mask so perhaps I might be able to see what I'm doing next time, but then it just wouldn't be me if my work had a professional neat look to it.
Americans also deserve a little bit of credit for naming the welding tool a stick welder, quite clever actually, we merely call them arc welders which is only half as descriptive, but at least our native 230 Volts is better suited to them.

A real convolution.

At enormous expense I managed to find a new belt and pulley this morning, it would have been much easier if the belt was ~15mm longer but it's fitted and things are good again.

New pulley and belt required.

This calamitous ruin is what was on Dad's Commodore when he arrived, incredibly it was still operating the things it needed to, a very lucky lad was he.
I'm off shopping in a few minutes to source replacements.

Jimby attacks a VT Commodore fuel flap.

My Dad Fred has driven up here in what may not be just a little visit but I have a few things on his car that I have to sort out, more to follow.
The catch of the fuel flap was broken and held on with *shudder* duct tape (naturally it's pronounced duck tape but I shouldn't write that), since the car is pretty badly marked these days I just used some steel I've bent and a couple of pop rivets (not rivots as I've seen in a Ford manual).

Just to make them a little less obvious I sprayed a bit of blue paint over them, blue being the closest colour I have to purple. The scratch here is part of the reason I'm not bothered about changing my leopard spots to pretty boy Jimby.
There'll be more to come with this little tale.

"I can't see a bl**dy thing"

A capture from the classic film The Great Escape, I post this because the way my eyes are now I'm saying the same thing as Donald Pleasence did here.
I've been meaning to wait another year until seeing an eye doctor again but this may be a difficult thing to do if Olivia leans on me a bit to do something, a man has to follow the easiest option and face his fears of the system feeding off medicare. It's only been nine years since I did an eye test and I wanted to last a whole decade, although I know a standard test is useless to me as my issue is rather deeper and I don't have any faith in the system.
I need to do something about my hearing too, my ears hear loud enough but too often what my they decode is a scrambled mess, hence why I've given up on phones.

I hope this restrains a naughty washing machine.

Our washing machine wanders about a bit so I wired it up to a screw I put in the wall.
Of course a plain screw wouldn't warrant any attention, so I welded a bit of scrap steel onto the end to help me feel a bit more useful.
There's never much danger of my handiwork ever looking pretty.

Jimby makes a face.

I put a face on this clock the other day, I even got fancy by penning in some hour markers. Dunno what was on the disk but I can always burn another if needed.

This works, for now.

My old wire brush failed me when I wanted to use it the other day, while I'm waiting for a new one to arrive a brain wave just struck me to try welding a nut over the failed thread section.

It works but I don't think it'll be long before it fails again, the extra length of the assembly will doubtless add enough extra stress to cause issues but we'll try to get another job out of it.
I was welding a bit blind too due to the nature of these modern automatic shades, I'll have to try and fit a battery holder into one so a measure of reliability can be gained.

A surprise date.

Olivia bought this pack of shaving irons today at a very good price, I would never have thought shaving irons would have a best before date but was it sheer coincidence it was date stamped with today's date?
Today the 5th of September also marks our faithful carriage Daisy's 3rd birthday, which also means the warranty has expired, since I haven't made any claims in that time it has been a fairly meaningless warranty, but then again I usually find all warranties rather more a nuisance than a help.