In Praise of...

... just doing stuff by and for yourself. I come from a long line of working-class autodidacts, tinkerers and inquirers, many of whom would have wiped the floor with the current government's crop of insipid, uninspired and uninspiring - privileged and overpaid - halfwits; but that's another story altogether. How much longer these idiots can survive on air-ware, bullshit and bluster, I've no idea, but there's an online petition on the government website calling for an early election to bin this lot. I suggest that as many people who feel motivated to do so sign it - I did this afternoon.

However, the picture above would suggest a workshop-based post, and indeed that is exactly what this is. The component I'm holding is the extant change-wheel stud for the lathe that I've mentioned before [posts passim], and the lump of steel in the lathe chuck is the replacement for the missing stud, now in progress. I've sized up the bearing surface and am now going to rough out the spigot to take a thread, as in the original. As I've said before, the finish on the turning ain't great: the steel's not brilliant, neither is my ability with the lathe. The point of this piece of fabrication, though, is to enable me to power the feed-rate of the tool-post and ensure a more consistent end result for future fabrications. Keep you posted on progress...

In addition to making tool add-ons today, I've also managed to re-engineer the crappy plastic ball-valve in our bathroom toilet cistern, which of late has been producing the most horrendous water-hammer noises imaginable. Removing the assembly from the bog, I disassembled it and mused on its component parts, how they work and what could possibly be causing the earthquake-inducing row that we've endured for a few days now.

I figured that the obvious culprit was the rubber diaphragm that is pressed into the face of the water inlet venturi to stem the flow of water when the cistern is full. The assembly was exhibiting vibration that supported this hypothesis. The diaphragm appeared to me to be becoming resonant as a result of turbulent, high-speed water-flow, and which would require damping in some way. But this on its own would not explain the level and, to be frank, rather violent nature of the noises evident on operation of the WC.

The venturi itself was engineered to produce high velocity and hence, low pressure flow, into the valve assembly, but it appeared that the aperture was a tad too small and partially occluded by leftover sprue from its manufacture. Also, and most crucially, this - separate - component, made of hard nylon, and its housing of hard nylon, were in unmediated contact with each other. When the high-speed, turbulent water flow excited the diaphragm into turbulence, the resultant energy was passed into the body of the assembly, and the venturi itself resonated against the body in which it resides, creating the most unholy row each time the toilet was flushed.

So, I drilled out the aperture in the venturi by a couple of thousandths and made sure it was clear of crap; installed a rubber damping washer between the venturi and the body, reassembled and reinstalled the whole thing in the cistern. Silence, as they say, is golden. Job done. Now you might just wonder what exactly is the point of doing all this just to avoid forking out twenty quid on a new ball-valve assembly. It's not about the money, although incidentally I've just saved about three bottles of decent wine's worth of cash. No, it's about two things: on a global level, repairing and re-using stuff is now more important than ever in human history, and secondly, on a personal level, I just love solving problems and re-engineering bad shit.