Lego portrait of.....

Don't ask me what brought this on but I spent about 4 hours making this lego portrait two days ago.  I used up all of the kids black & white lego. 

It would cost me £63 to buy the pieces to make it out of new lego!!!  But I might have to do it to keep the kids happy.

If you look at it too close-up then it doesn't look very good, but from across the room it looks great.

I am taking orders if anyone wants to commission a portrait, the normal price is £499, but for family it is only £450 ;-)

Lego timer for Scalextric track

Zac got Scalextric for Xmas and Liam got Mindstorms NXT so the obvious thing to do was to built a lap timer!  It worked so much better than we could have hoped. We used a light sensor from the lego which was sampling every 3 thousands of a second which meant the lap times were accurate to more than a hundredth of a second!!!

Poor Zac was eventually begging me to stop racing his cars at their limit as I was crashing them every few laps at high speed trying to get a faster lap time ;-)  Thank goodness my brother or dad aren't here else we would still be racing!

I might add a video if I get the chance.

Wood turning bowl

This was my first wood turning attempt, it ended up being Alison's Xmas present :-)  It was made from rosewood I was given by a friend a few years ago and the turning tools came from Alison's dad.

Draining the flood

It took a while but we managed to dig a trench in order to drain the bottom of the garden. It flowed for 45minutes!!! but it took a lot longer to dig the trench.

Flooding in garden!

The constant rain yesterday flooded the bottom of the garden all the way up to the brick pile.
 

 

Push lawn mower

This is the new grassbox we made for the push lawn mower.

 

And these are the stipes in the lawn we managed after a lot of sweat and hard work!
 

Electric gates and slugs

A little while back I helped someone sort out their electric gate, a slug had got into the box and crawled over the 240V input wires, and this was the result!
 

This is the back of the board that I bypassed the damaged section with brown & blue wires.  You can see where the slug destroyed the copper on the circuit board (just below the brown wire).

 

New patio (old dumping ground)

When Wayne helped me take down the chiminey we dumped everything in one pile and that has now been sorted out and flatterened ready for paving stones to be laid down.

 

Using the old chicken gate for a seive
 

 

Fuse board change

This is what happened to our dishwasher socket!  It looks like it was  a loose wire that got very hot and melted the insulation.

So it was decided that perhaps we should change the old fuse board and replace it with a newer RCBO type board that was donated by Carey. 

New board fitted (without cover), I am also missing earth sleeve which I ran out of and still need to fit.

 

TV Shelf

I knocked together a shelf in the corner for the TV and PVR (video machine), as we were struggling to find a place to put it.  It is made of MDF that I rescued from a skip in Coventry a few months ago.  It now needs filling, sanding & painting.

Taking down chimeny 2

My free labourer from Surrey.  We put planks on the ladder to make a slide for the bricks to slide down, it was a lot faster than the method used on the first chimeny.

Wayne and I took it down to ceiling height inside the loft. This is a picture of the last few rows of bicks, the chair is on top of them as I was still climbing through the hole in the roof to get access to the loft.

Then on another weekend when Wayne and family were visiting us we took down the rest of the chimeny all the way to the ground. This is early morning as we are about to start.

Before picture

After picture, the only thing that is the same in both pictures is the window on the far left (night time above, daylight below) 

 

Chicken enclosure

These little girls have now grown big and need a place to live and make eggs, so we built an enclosure that needs to be very fox proof.
 

Trench to bury fence.

Root, and more roots!

I dug down 70cm for the bottom of the fence so hopefully no fox will dig that deep to get the chickens.

 

More photos of Selsey Close

The pictures are on my Picasa album so click here to view them.

Fitting extractor fan to Selsey

This is the very large drill bit I used to remove some of the brick,

but most of the holes are 10mm. I drilled all the way around the circle and then using a chisel and hammer, I removed the plaster and brick.

If I do this again I will make the hole slightly smaller, I left too much clearance. Once I broke through the inside bricks I was able to drill a hole though the outside layer of bricks so I could work out where to start drilling from the outside. You can see the sunlight in the small hole in the centre.

This is on the outside wall, same story all over again.... Have a look at the pile of brick dust resting on the top of the ladder in the bottom of this photo.

Finally finished!

Walking on ice!

When we had the very cold weather, the canal crossing under Station road froze so we went up to see if we could walk on it. You can see lots of rocks and sticks behind Zac that people have thrown on the canal to try and break the ice.

I think we need to design and build a boat/craft with ice skates on it to play on the frozen canal, but we will have to wait till next year.

Bricks on roof

Dad (Soutter), remember we used bricks on the roof to keep the insulation down. Well the cement on them is just falling off. I guess it is from the wet and very cold weather???

Rat issues...

So we have some new residents, and this is one of them. Look how cute and curious he is!!!

Not very cute any more. This guy was hiding outside under our decking and we watched him on a infra red camera (borrowed from Wayne). It took a few days before I got him in the trap.
We have been hearing them run on the ceiling for a while now. I setup the camera in the loft.
I put the trap in the loft, but I haven't set it yet and I put a biscuit next to the trap. It is the round thing on the right of the trap. The council rat man said to do this, then if the biscuit goes you know it is a rat (mice can't carry a big biscuit).
Next morning when I checked the camera, the biscuit was gone!!! Time to set the trap!