I have some random things to share...
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I love sitting in front of a fire. My parents have a chiminea on their deck, and if it's summer then I'm usually drinking beer when sitting in front of it. If I know I'm gonna have a rip roaring fire going for a while, then I usually try and melt a glass bottle. It's not hard to get a fire hot enough to melt glass, but it's very hard to melt a glass bottle and then keep it from cracking or shattering. The trick is that you have to completely burry the glass in hot ash and let it cool as slow as possible. If it cools to rapidly, it will crack or shatter. After many attempts over the years of not getting a bottle out intact, I was finally able to get a couple!
Above is my best attempt so far, in terms of most melted without breaking. Below is is a super melted bottle (it was so hot it was approaching liquid) but a portion of it ended up cracking.
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I was doing a lot of tube tweaking on my guitar amp head, and the back grate is held on by wood screws. After removing/replacing the wood screws a few times, the threads were already feeling pretty loose (and I was careful to always catch the original threads when replacing the screws). So I decided to put some machine screw inserts in it, and now I don't have to worry about stripping out the wood threads! It's hard to make out in the pic, but it's the four brass inserts in each corner...
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My father wanted me to help him put in a temporary water spigot for my mother. She has a hernia right now, but they're waiting on the surgery because of the current pandemic. My mother is obsessed with watering everything with her watering can, but my father is concerned with her carrying it all around. There's only one water spigot in the backyard, and it's on one side of the house. So he wanted to put a temp spigot on the other side of the house. I helped him conceal a house from the spigot to the other side of the deck. I had some scraped of treated 2x4, so I cut a point into one end so I could hammer it into the ground. He bought a simple garden hose shutoff valve, and I installed it for him as such...
However, everything is made so poorly these days. This shutoff valve was brand new, and it leaks like crazy. It also kinda looks like hell. So he returned it, and I picked up a proper spigot with an adapter to connect a garden hose to it.
I showed this (second attempt) picture to my brother and he told me that I devalued their house. Good thing I didn't show him the first pic LOL. It's a little tacky, but I don't think it looks bad at all. It's only made to be temporary anyway. The only thing I'm embarrassed about is being too lazy to install a proper spigot on the other side of their house.
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About 3 years ago I bought a tape deck, which is the first time I've had one in many years. I've enjoyed making some mixed tapes. I've done a few the "proper" way, recording each song one at a time and minding the gaps and all of that. But I've also cheated with one...
There was a playlist on YouTube, which has since been removed, that I use to listen to. It was just a perfect list of songs for a mixed tape. The right era (for me) and as a strange coincidence there was a perfect 45 minute split in the list. Since a 90 minute tape has 45 minutes on each side, this is important to avoid either splitting a song in the middle or having large mute gaps at the end of each side. So, I ran audio out from my laptop directly into my tape deck and recorded this playlist to the tape, utilizing Dolby-C.
I even took it a step further. Tapes generally have more length then they're advertised for, CDs do too, they give you more than advertised instead of risking have less. So even though this playlist was a perfect 45 minutes per side, there was a few minutes at the end of each side. So instead of leaving the mute gaps, I decided to fill them. I recorded until the tape ran out to find out exactly how much time was left, then found something that would fill it perfectly. On side A, I recorded Roll To Me by Del Amitri. It's a tad over 2 minutes at fit perfectly. Then on Side B, there was a little less time available and I couldn't find a song that would fit. So, I recorded Nuts and Bolts from Donkey Kong Country 3. I knew the exact time that was left on the tape, so I ran a stop watch while recording it and then did a perfect fade out using the recording level control.
The J card didn't have enough room for me to handwrite in all the songs, so I decided to make a cover for it. This is the picture that was used in the YouTube video, and I included the Dolby logo for a nice touch. I think it's hilarious making a mixed tape with a mix of old and new technologies.
I missed out on this!
