Hiya Folks, Yep it's the madman Dr. Jekyll here again, but unlike my normal madcap humour I've decided to try and bring a bit of serious culture into THE CRYPT. Y'see, the problem with being part of such a great diskmag/webmag as THE CRYPT is that not only, for me, but also for the other lads, It sometimes gets a bit difficult to get the old "Grey Matter" firing on all cylinders as they say.
Referring back for a few seconds, To one of my "All Time Favourite" diskmags called "Grapevine", which covered such a bloody wide spectrum of subjects from the normal Miggy stuff, Jokes, in fact virtually any articles on almost any subject, and at some stage or other in a staff-writers life or indeed any of the others diskmag lives, there comes the time or two when we get a little lost on what to to write about. Ok, so we could all do articles on miggy stuff alone, but even being part of thousands of miggy users who love his/her machines doing articles week in and week out on just miggy stuff alone, would, I think be a bit boring. After all, we all do have our own lives outside of our miggy's. Our machines are our hobbies, not our lives, Well, I've got a life as well as having my towered A1200.
So, trying to think of new articles to write about, for each new issue of THE CRYPT is a task in itself, and even with a wide- range of various subjects to write about, the old saying goes as such, "You can please some of the people sometime, but you can please all of the people all of the time". So apart from what the lads on THE CRYPT team have said countless times, in as much as we, that is the Mag needs "YOUR INPUT", We, the lads, that is will and have always tried to bring you a very varied selection of articles. But even as great as us lads are, we are not superhuman, we need YOUR help in order that we can hopefully give you a great read in every issue of our mag.
Anyway! enough of all this bloody nonsense. As the above heading states, this article is a bit of DIY on various subjects. I don't watch the telly very much, well, apart from Star Trek Voyager, Buffy The vampire Slayer (not because the young lass has got one wicked sexy body mind you, oh no,) but because the stories are pretty interesting....And if you believe that then your as much a liar as I am, but never mind that. Anyway! I like watching some of these DIY proggies, not so much the DIYers from hell, but that proggy is partly why I decided to write this article, but also because I watch a DIY proggy called "Big Boys". Now, that fella in there called Jake, I think is one hell of an expert, especially in the carpentry department. What this guy can do with a few power tools, some glue and nails and MDF is poetry in motion in itself.
The best part is when Jake asks the husband of the woman that Jake's team is working for, Is the hubby to help Jake out? God! some of those blokes deserve a black belt in being total pricks, you don't need an IQ of 3000 to be a good DIYer, you only need a bit of common sense and a willingness to work a bit, God! some of those blokes need a new brain transplant, and I thought that I was thick, well I am really, but that's beside the point.
So! why do we all like or prefer to do our own DIY, well, for men it's partly a "Man Thing", if a man can put up a shelf and it stays up and solid for X amount of months or years then great, he's good at DIY, if a man can fully paint & paper a room or staircase and the job looks the bis and the paper stays up then he's good and it's all cool, speaking as what I'd call myself as a pretty all round capable DIYer. I personally reckon that any man who isn't capable of even the very basic DIY skills( of let's say putting a new plug on an appliance) isn't worth the title of being called "A MAN", being a fully qualified Painter and Decorator I have been asked, and am very capable of doing all aspects of P&D and over the years have also picked up a few extra skills due to my own desire to learn more. I can now quite easily mark out, cut up and mitre wood for dado rails, either around the wall in a lounge, bedroom or even a staircase.
Changing a plug or fitting a new one to an appliance, Huh, piss easy, I was doing that when I was still in my pram, well, almost. Adding new electric sockets to a room, which might need one or two more is pretty easy as well, in such a case, you can't add a new socket to a room by simply running an electric supply from just any original socket, if after undoing the screws on a sockets faceplate in order to pull the faceplate away from a wall to see it's wiring, If there is just a single 3-way cable feeding the socket then this means that this particular socket is on a spur and can't be used, there again, if there are 3 3- way cables feeding the socket this means that the socket is feeding a spur (a second socket) so this socket can't be used either, if there are only two 3-way cables feeding the socket then this socket might be suitable.
When you find a suitable supply socket to spur from, firstly switch off the electricity at the fuse box, Or on trip switch fuse boxes turn the relevant socket circuit off, for the socket your working on, but before you actually expose any wire of the sockets just plug in a lamp or radio, just to make sure that the circuit is dead. Then unscrew the faceplate and you should see two RED wires, fasten one crocodile clip of a circuit tester to one red wire, and then with the probe end of the tester touch the second red wire, if the socket is part of a ring circuit the bulb on the tester will or should light up because you have completed the circuit, in this case, this socket is suitable for a spur. However, if the tester does NOT light up, the socket itself is a spur and therefore not a suitable supply socket....easy isn't it.
Now, even with all the amount of DIY skills I possess, there are times when I need more help, so apart from getting in touch with a tradesman for the trade your hoping to do for yourself. Which will cost you big time, ( but for big jobs in by far the best and safest route to take), You could buy one of the many DIY books that are for sale, I was given a New Revised Readers Digest Complete DIY manual as part of my Christmas 2000, No, please don't laugh, we all take the piss out of the Readers Digest books, but this DIY one is a very comprehensive, full of info. for nearly all aspects of DIY.
I reckon that I can safely say from my own personal experience, of some of my customers attempts at their own DIY, if your unsure or scared of any damage you might do whilst trying to do your own DIY jobs around your homes, then call in a tradesman, OK, so they will cost you a bit, but with all the various trades cowboys, even the most easily fooled amongst us will hopefully know the difference between a cowboy and a real tradesman.( A cowboy will quite possibly turn up on a horse, or wear a set of guns and) joking apart, a good tradesman will not only (hopefully) know what he's talking about and advise you as the customer the best way that the job you want doing, should be done.
Where as, A cowboy will mostly avoid giving you proper answers to the questions you ask him about the job, or put his replies in such a way that your lost with his answers. A cowboy when pricing a job up will very rarely measure up a job that needs to be measured up, and/or they very rarely write things down, and in most occasions in my experience not give you an estimate of any sorts on how much the job will cost you, while he's at your home. He most probably says that he's busy and he'll send you a quote in the post, in fact, in most cases, he'll go back to his home and think of a price that sounds good, then add on an extra few quid just for the fun of it.
Fuses in appliances, are there for one reason only, to cut off power to a given appliance when a fault occurs. An appliance that needs to have a 3 amp fuse fitted to it, must have the relevant fuse ampage fitted to it. OK! so lets say that your electric iron keeps shorting out and blowing the fuse, then there's a fault with the iron, for the price of irons nowadays it's far safer just to buy a new one, especially where water and electrics are in close proximity to each other. Some people I've worked for in the past, have tried to be clever sods by putting higher ampage fuses in appliances to try to stop fuses blowing or trip switches tripping. Stupid stupid sods! So with a higher fuse rating in an appliance that is recommended, a fuse on a dodgy appliance won't blow, but the actual appliance will blow or burn up, please, for your own safety, NEVER exceed stipulated fuse ratings, they are put there by experts, if you do exceed recommended fuse ratings, do it at your own risk, OK.
All the worst possible scenarios I've seen in my years as a Painter & Decorator, is people who have run out of specific fuses and replacing a blown fuse with (wait for it) silver paper out of a fag packet, (wrapped around the fuse). I shudder to think of the damage that could be caused by such stupidity, in the most extreme case of an appliance blowing a fuse and you not having the correct fuse to replace the old one with,( I did say IN THE MOST EXTREME CASES), You can use strands of the copper wire found in normal cables, Now! I think that each fine strand of copper wire found in normal 2 or 3-way cable is rated at about 1 amp, so for a temporary solution overnight (lets say), To make up for the loss of a 3-amp fuse, carefully twist just 3 fine strands of copper wire together, then place this twisted copper wire into the housing on a plug where a fuse normally goes, and trap this wire into place with the original blown fuse so that the wire won't work free, (but as I've said above), This is purely a very temporary last effort, your best bet is to make sure that you've got a wide range of fuses already, they're cheap enough to buy.
Bloody hell! or even worse! is what you might shout when whilst typing out a letter or playing a game on your computer and it crashes. Whilst someone in the house, (in another room) turns the telly on or off, or the automatic kettle turns itself off. When an appliance is turned on or off, or in the case of an automatic appliance like a kettle or a washing machine or whatever, turning itself off causes a small surge or "Spike" in the flow of the current. Although these surge's are low they can cause a computer system to crash and reset itself, of course the downside to this is, that at the time of a surge you just might be booting your system up, which in turn might reset the computer in mid-bootup, hence, you might just end up with a invalidated hard drive.
The only real solution or safeguard against this type of occurrence happening is to invest in an "Anti-Surge" plug/socket or a 4 way or 6 way "Anti-Surge" extension cable. These 4 or 6 way extension cables are almost the same as the normal 4/6 way extension connectors that allows you to plug in 4 or 6 appliance on into a long flat plastic strip, the only difference with the "Anti-Surge" connectors is that they a specifically designed to compensate for spikes in the electric current due to appliance being switched on or off. Even a simple thing like a fridge can cause a spike, a fridges thermostat will switch the motor off and on during the course of a day when the recommended temperature of the fridge is reached, in this case the thermostat switches the motor off, then back on again a few minutes later.
This constant on and off mode causes slight surges or spikes in the electric current, these can cause crashes on computer systems that aren't "Anti-Surge" protected, so for your own benefit and peace of mind, buy an Anti-Surge plug or extension cable ASAP (As Soon As Possible).
All hobbies are expensive, In one way or another, but I think that probably one of the top 5 hobbies is computers/computing, and not only the buying of the basic system, but future upgrades etc., and another part of computing which can, over a short period of time, start to run into quite a few quid is general maintenance and repair. I dare say that for most of us, there are times where we need to/or are confident at doing our own repairs/maintenance, and in these time I think that its realistic to say that there are the few times where we need to do a bit of soldering. You might want to fit a jack plug/socket to a lead for headphones, or solder some sort of connector to wherever. The problem is that, I think there are quite a few lads or older blokes who can't solder for whatever reason.
If It's simply because you don't know? then maybe this small article will give you the confidence to practice and hopefully allow you to learn this somewhat easy but necessary electronics skill.
In soldering, the terminology "Tinning" is used a fair bit, for the uniniciated Tinning means that after you've stripped the outer plastic shielding from the relevant wires to be soldered you run a thin coat of solder over the wires in order to stop then splitting, and also to give then a better rate of conductivity, when soldering. Especially with computer stuff, it's best to use only a low wattage soldering iron, being a smart arse bugger, I've recently bought a soldering kit from my local Rugby Argos store. It cost me about �17, but it was a bloody good buy, the kit consists of a low wattage soldering iron, a soldering gun (great little device, instant heat), a small set of mixed screwdrivers like posidrive/philips, and flathead screwdrivers, a small stand to rest the hot iron on.
A small tube of solder with flux already in it, and a combination wire stripper-wire cutter-crimper etc., also an another essential bit of soldering kit that I fully recommend you get is a solder sucker. This item does exactly what the name says it does, "Sucks Solder", if when soldering you put to much solder onto a contact in such a way that the soldered contact might interfere with another contact then in this case you need to take away or suck away the surplus solder, a solder sucker does this job.
And when soldering anything on a computer, never keep the soldering iron/gun on a contact too long, apart from getting the relevant job too hot to handle, you'll end up frying part of the computer your working on, short burst's of heat is better than one all out nuclear attack.
How many of you DIYers don't really know where to start papering in a room? Lets say that you want to paper your lounge, do you just pick a place to start and there you go! WRONG.....OK, so your papering your lounge, there's a chimney breast in the room, you start on the chimney breast, most of the time a chimney breast will allow for three drops of wallpaper to be hung from it, the first drop should be from the dead centre of the chimney breast. With drops one and turn either side of the first drop and going round the left and right side of the chimney breast no more than about and inch at the most, 2" or more papered round a corner will most probably result in a crease in the paper that you won't be able to lose unless you know how to get round that sort of problem.
Papering in a room without a chimney breast is done like so, it's normal practise to hand the first drop (piece) of wallpaper to the first fullest wall to the RIGHT of a window, measure the width of the roll of paper, (it's normally about 20� inches), then I normally measure from the internal corner of that wall about 19" or 19�", using a plumbob, strike a line on the wall from the top of the wall to the bottom, then paste your first bit of paper and allow it to soak for the relevant time as it normally states on the rolls info label. Then finally hang this first piece/drop of paper from this line and onto the wall to the right of you, not from the line and to the left of you into the corner. The 2nd piece of paper should be then hung from this same line and brushed out onto the wall and into the corner, if you started your run of wallpapering from the corner, you'd probably find that after three runs or drops of wallpaper your paper would look as though it's started to lean to either the right of the left.
Never use one piece of wallpaper to paper into and around any internal corners, this is because most corners are very rarely square, also, to much of an overhang coming out of an internal corner will more likely than not cause an unloseable crease in the paper, always work out carefully when papering into any internal corners and make sure that you cut the paper to suit to allow you to paper into a corner with part of the drop and then paper out of the corner with the remainder of the same drop, that you used to paper into the corner. But plumbline each piece of paper in order to make sure they are exactly vertical.
When papering into an internal corner, measure the width of the drop in three places. Top middle and bottom and then cut the paper to suit, and whatever the width is, always add an extra couple of millimeters just to go round the internal corner a bit, then once plumbed the line for the papering out of the corner, put this piece of paper on the plumbline and brush paper into the corner and trim to suit.
When papering vinyl paper, always apply overlap or border adhesive to all overlaps, always apply border adhesive to dado borders you decide to hang on top of vinyl papers.
After I've finished papering a room, with the aid of a mastic or silicone gun I prefer to run a very small bead of flexible filler (Decorators Caulk) around all door and window frames then wipe off any surplus with a clean wet but warm sponge, this way you'll ensure a nice clean and tidy finish between door/window frames and the wall.
When papering, always make sure that you've got all your tools to hand, and always make sure that you've got a clean bucket of warm or hot water with a sponge in it, in order to wipe away any surplus paste from light switches, ceiling coving, ceilings or whatever. Leaving surplus paste behind will more than likely result in a yellowish tinge or stain when it's dry, no, not a very nice sight to see, and not very professional looking either.
Cross lining is done normally with lining paper, lining paper comes in various grades, but on the odd occasion where I've had to use this paper I've only used either an 800 or 1000 grade, any less grades isn't really worth bothering with I think. Lining paper does or is supposed to do what it's name suggest's "Line". The use of this paper is purely to cover walls prior to hanging finish paper, that are normally to uneven to hang finish paper directly onto. I suppose you can say that lining paper is a sort of undercoat paper, normally, on walls where a finish paper is to be hung, lining paper is hung the opposite way, finish paper is hung vertical, so lining paper is hung horizontal, this is called "Cross-lining".
Normally a single hang crossline of lining paper, would be sufficient to cover most averagely bad surfaces, but on the odd occasion a single crossline of lining paper might not be enough. In which case a double crossline of lining paper might be needed. This is where your skill of paperhanging needs to be at it premium, double crosslining means that 2 (not 1) layers of lining paper needs to be hung before the actual finish paper, so how do you hang two layers of cross lining paper, no, you don't hang both layers horizontal, the first layer needs to be hung the same way as most all finished papers are hung, "Vertical", the second layer of lining paper is then hung horizontal, then the third layer of paper is your actual finished paper.
Now, being a fully qualified Painter & Decorator I find this particular job piss easy but very boring, and one which I haven't had to do many times. I personally think and recommend to any of you, that if your working on any walls that need at least a double cross line then it might be a lot less hassle (but more expensive) but! with a far better finish, to call a plasterer in to skim the walls with a finish coat of plaster. Or if you can plaster then key the walls first with a greatly watered down solution of PVA bonding which needs to be painted onto the area in question, then a thin coat of finish plaster can be skimmed over the area, the result will or should be a prefect finish, ( one ready to paper onto) well, of course when the finish coat of plaster is thoroughly dry you'll need to key the surface of the wall by applying a thin coat of emulsion, or thinned down wallpaper paste to act like a paste size.
When paperhanging, even after I've stripped the old paper off I normally size the walls ready to hang the new paper, this does two things, firstly it helps to key the paper to the wall better especially on the seams or joint of paper, and it also help you to slide the paper better to help you match patterns up far easier
On ceilings that had been previously artexed but you want to paper them, providing you scrape off as much as the artex as you can to make a reasonably flatish surface for papering. You can then paper with a heavy patterned blown vinyl paper. The best type of scraper to use, I think, is not the normal type you can buy, but ones called "Heavy Duty". They will have a very long handle, and will have a very sharp separate flat but oblong blade that you clamp into the scraper itself by means of unscrewing a single screw or two screws, or by a twist of the handle to clamp the sharp blade into place. The blades range in prices from about �2.50 per packet of five (no jokes please, most of the blokes know what else can be bought in packs of five), since using my heavy duty scraper I've very rarely need to use a steam stripper to strip off old paper from any of my jobs.
I think that a dry wallpaper strip is cleaner and easier than one where you need to use loads of water/steam, (A) you get too bloody hot with all that steam, (B) you need to sheet all the working area floor with polythene sheets and dust sheets to stop the water and the steam doing any damage to floors/carpets, and also to much steam/water doesn't go very well will plug sockets and lights switches.
This terminology isn't actually correct, if you literally burn paint off any woodwork you end up with charred wood which is ok I suppose if the woodwork is to be re-painted, but if the woodwork is to be stained and/or varnished then you've stuff up as they say. The terminology "Burning Off" is only a figure of speech amongst Painters & Decorators, in fact, the paint or varnished to be stripped off needs only a bit of heat from a Painters & Decorators blowlamp or a heatgun, just enough heat though to literally start melting the paint or varnish, then using a decent scraper or shavehook you can simply scrape small areas of paint or varnish off at a time. Done the proper way and melting the paint or varnish is quite time consuming, but you should be left with an almost burn-free area, but if you take the name "Burning Off" literally you left with a badly charred area where preparation to make the area into a decent repaintable or revarnishable one will take hours, be careful, if all else fails, phone 999 for the fire service.
Well, I hope that article has been of some use in any way at all to any one of you. Now, as far as my Painting & Decorating knowledge skills are concerned I know that what I've told you about this aspect of my article is correct. Ways of other decorators might vary from decorator to decorator, but the end result will be or mostly end up the same, but on the other hand I'm no genius at electrics, so, I can say for certain that my tips for adding extra sockets to a room are 100% reliable, however, after checking what I've stated on this subject against a DIY manual that cover all home DIYing, what I've written seems to be the same as the experts say. So I think that I can safely say that I'm correct, but please don't hold me responsible for any damage you might cause yourself or your home by following my DIY tutorial, as they say, "If in Doubt, consult an expert", OK.