I never thought it’d be this hard…

I gave away my C-Spanner that came with the MZ, with the MZ. It was part of the tool roll, and while I delighted in it being a bit of East German history, I felt it was fair that it stayed with the bike. I thought about it and, having sold the DAF, had no other vehicles that had, or were likely to need a C-Spanner.

And I thought, it’s only a C-Spanner. Hardly impossible to obtain.

Apparently that was an inaccurate assumption.

Rather than use the internet, I decided I’d get it from a local supplier. Foolish, apparently. And indeed, I assumed that it’d be easy to do. I mean, it’s a C-spanner (or hook wrench), how hard can it be.

So I went to Bristol Bike Workshop. They could order them for me, or I could bring my bike in and they’d let me use the workshop tools… which is very lovely, but not really a long term solution and involves me putting the bike into and out of the car several times, and several trips across bristol. So I rang around, and Halfords, oddly enough said ‘oh yes, we have several options for them’. This morning I trecked, following this misspoken evidence to Halfords, who do have one of them as a part of a 35 quid set of bicycle tools.

Feh, I thought. It’s not even a decent quality one, and since the bracket’s probably not moved since about 1940 it’s probably going to need a fair bit of welly applied to it. I’ll ring around the bike shops, one of them is sure to have one.

Lots of bike shops informed me that yes, they have them in the workshop, but no, they don’t sell them.

Lots of them.

A few could order them in…in a few days.

Unfortunately, I finished my quest after 12, when I finally gave in and rang back Bristol Bike Workshop, who informed me that sadly, because it’s after 12, it wouldn’t be in until Thursday. When I’m at work. Which is no use at all for me, because at that point I might as well buy the damn thing off E-bay where it’s half the price.

Gaaaah.

I’m now waiting on Bristol Tools who said they might be able to get it by tomorrow. They’re trying their suppliers.

I learn from this that you should never, ever, get rid of tools.

ETA: Bristol Tools Fucking ROCK. 10 minutes later, and they ring back and say ‘we have one place that has it in stock, and can get you it for tomorrow before lunch’. It is, however, 10 quid extra delivery, which is a bit painful. But it means I can sort my bike before I have to go back to work :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

More geekery…

So, while I was digging up the pile of stuff which allows me to hit a local webserver and…theoretically get a view of the garage* John gave me some speakers, which had been gifted him. These speakers are of the variety that you used to get and attach to your PC so you could listen to the new-fangled MP3s and listen to the sounds from Quake. That sort of age.

However, they lacked some important things.

A power supply and a cable with which to connect them to said PC.

Now, where John works they make stuff, and they found it’s cheaper to buy some of the components with a power supply, which then goes straight into the electrical waste, than to buy them without a power supply. We won’t get into the mental pain about the way the world works these days, but anyhow, with his bosses permission, John saves some of these brand-new unused power supplies. But they’re a stupid, fairly useless voltage. However, John is t’awesome.

He looked at the design, and realised that by changing two resistors (and sometimes a capacitor) you could get anything, pretty much, between 5 and 20volts from these.

This is handy.

I needed a 6 volt supply, so he gave me one of these little boxen and some destructions, and I sat down at home and broke out the tools.

Now, being as I’m me, I then wandered down to the garage muttering resistor colour codes under my breath and fished through my dad’s box of resistors. Some of these are ‘new’, for definitions of ‘new’ ending sometime in the 80s, most are probably around 1960-70, a few are 1950s resistors. Some predate colour coding.

In a ‘probably for the best’ situation, the ones I found that matched the requirements for making 6 volts were fairly modern, but still there was a small size difference:

As you can see, my ‘new’ one is on at least it’s second use. Dunno what it was salvaged from before…

So, with some bending, and some coaxing, I made this happen:

And with some trepidation I connected it (the lead that comes with the cables does not meet British Standards, in that the fuse is…missing). It has a dinky 1/3 size plug that’s very cute, and it’s very clever. But there’s no fuse, which means it’s only fused on the extension lead, which is fused at 13a.

Out came, approximately, 6 volts. I say approximately, because my Altai meter, which remains the only one I’ve not managed to kill reads with roughly the same accuracy as me waving my finger at it with my eyes closed and going ‘Uh, there’. Never mind. It was in the 6 volts region, and less than the 7 volts it had been producing.

Annnyhow. I then modded the speakers to have a very long audio cable, this is because the garage PC is located in the roof of the garage, out of the way. And then I tested it. Obviously, being a numpty I’d managed to do something wrong, I’d screwed up connecting the audio lead. The easy bit, as it were. But, that is now fixed and I can listen to audio in the garage. If I can get any audio to the garage.

I actually listened to my iPhone today, which has podcasts, which are the win :)

* It turns out the 802.11b WAP is fast enough, just about, for it to manage to throw the data across from motion detection – over the periods of time in between detecting motion – but not fast enough to actually get the data across the in real time. It’s certainly not fast enough to stream audio data down to the garage, but I can pull up web pages. Nikki thinks she has an 802.11g thing that she’s not using that I can abuse into being a WAP point, which would rock. Once this is working I may well tweak things so that the cheap camera is actually used for motion detection, because it’s the only one with night vision. Either that or I may pick up another night vision webcam. I also need to get my beloved to help me set it up at some point, because it’s hideously out of focus, and I’ve tried focusing it and then checking, and, probably because it’s a grotty cheap piece of crap it’s a tiny range over which ‘in focus’ and ‘massively out of focus’ are close friends, and I never managed to get it decently in focus**
** This is assuming ‘in focus’ is an available feature, a fact of which I’m not certain.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.