The Repair Shop

 I came across an interesting television show on The Discovery channel on Friday - The Repair Shop. It's filmed at the Weald & Downland Living Museum in England and features a group of top-notch craftspeople repairing all sorts of household items - clocks, bicycles, furniture, pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. The quality of the work is amazing. I binge-watched about six hours worth on Friday and a couple more hours on Christmas morning. It was really nice to see people at the top of their game fixing and repairing things, many of which had great sentimental value to the people who brought them in, without all the drama usually associated with "television craftsmanship". YouTube has a bunch of short clips as well as full episodes. With the short clips you can see the project start to finish and no commercials.

I had to do a little quick repair job of my own the other night. The thermocouple on the furnace gave up the ghost. Not a big problem, even though it was 10:30 at night. I always keep a spare, but I had taken the adjustable wrench I normally keep down the basement and put it in the tool roll on my motorcycle. I got it swapped out in less than ten minutes, just the same, but I need to remember to keep an eye on that sort of thing so I don't come up short sometime when it's an actual emergency. 

I found an old end wrench that's the right size to change the thermocouple in the future that I'll keep with the spares. I'm also going to put the adjustable wrench in the tool bucket so I'll have one in the house again. That one came out of the tool box I used at the side gig. I should go through my other tool boxes and see if I should buy another one to put back in the side hustle box. 

Also in the photo is a pattern I made up for the shock mount. I'm thinking maybe buy a couple of headlights before I finalize the design. I saw some on Ebay that would do the trick. They're stud mounts which would allow me to point them left or right as need be, plus, they'll pivot up and down that way. I don't know that I'll ever need lights, but if I decide to get it registered for the street, I'll need lights.

I made the two filler pieces to connect the back cab to the dash hood. I put a "joggle" on both of the mating edges. I'll rivet one side and use Dzus fasteners on the other so I can remove the dash hood to make it easy to service the wiring, etc.

In the bottom photo you can see the bead I rolled in a practice piece. I want to make a wired edge around the top of the cab sheet. That will strengthen the edge and eliminate a sharp edge. The top edge needs to be annealed to make it easy to close up around the round stock. I don't know if I should anneal the edge before rolling the bead or after. One more thing to figure out.

Surly's going to fix me up on the thrust washer for the vise, so that'll be finished up soon enough. Time to start making some progress on the jobs on the basement workbench as well.