Recent content by simoncmason

I used this years ago in a house with steel crittal window frames and single glazing - it did make a small difference. The old house we live in now has single glazed windows as well, in the bathroom I have attached twin wall poly to the outside of the windows - this has made a massive...

Similar to the one in our house, except the meter is a Linky outside on a pole and the supply comes through a main switch - installed and maintained by EDF - so the consumer unit itself just has the four 10mm supply cables coming in the top onto to four distribution points which have 6mm cable...

In France each appliance is on it's own line back to the consumer unit. But you can have up to 12 single sockets on 2.5mm cable or 6 on 1.5mm. Everything is a radial. The consumer units end up being huge in a modern house - ours is two boxes with 7 rows of MCBs. Also common to see 3 phase...

I mix what I need - normally a bucket of lime and three buckets of sharp sand - which will keep me going for a few hours. If you mix a bigger load and then add a bit of water to it you can just about get away with leaving it over night if it is cool - but not freezing. But I don't think it is...

I have been restoring an old farmhouse and barn in central France over the last 3 years. All the mortar round here is lime, so the local builders merchants are full of it. We have used mostly NHL 3.5 with NHL 5 on one more exposed area as recommended by an experienced builder. I mix it in a...

A good quality modern chainsaw with all the correct safety guards in place is still without doubt one the most dangerous tools you can pick up. I spend around 4 hours a week with one in hand and you learn to respect the tool, and also to appreciate just how unpredictable wood is. It's bad...

I have the Triton lunchbox thicknesser TPT125. I have used it to thickness mostly white oak boards and it has performed beyond expectations for a cheap machine. I take very thin passes - less than 1mm per time and have got a good consistent thickness from it which just needs a light final finish...

In a 6M x 7M workshop I would go down the Track Saw / MFT table route rather than getting a table saw, unless you need to do a lot of repeatable cuts. The table saw will pretty much use up your entire space if you have it in the middle, and if you don't you're only going to be able to do shorter...

At 47 I'm semi-retired, working between 2 and 3 days a week, with about 8 weeks completely off a year. The hardest part of this is actually turning down a lot of work I am offered. I intend to remain like this until I am either dead or unable to work at all, but moving gradually towards more...

All my ladders including a 10 metre rope operated extending ladder are Hymer. Not cheap, but very strong and well engineered, it never jams when extending or retracting, even when covered in lime, sawdust etc

I have the Arno framing chisels. They are fantastic, take a good edge and hold it really well. They are steel all the way through, I removed most of the rubber grip so I can get them deeper into sockets. They can take serious hard work, I’ve been pounding them into old reclaimed oak with a big...

Useful thread, thanks @Cabinetman for starting it, I for one will be a bit safer using my table saw - it came with one pushstick so I use this to push the work along, but have used my hand to push the wood into the fence, or an offcut of wood if the work piece was too narrow. Having read this...

OK - I'll keep practicing with the #10 - I've only really used it for cleaning up big tenons for timber framing work which it is a dream at - but it gives me the chance to try in both directions for difficult wood. These rebates were quite big to accommodate the casement and draught excluder so...

OK - I expect the problem is with the operator :oops: More practice needed with the #10 then! Thanks for the advice

I don't have a wooden rebate plane, but I do have a #10 and a #90 so I can go both ways - but I'm not sure how this would help? It'll either tear one way or the other as the grain reverses around the knot. I was able to get fairly minimal tear in this case, but unacceptable as it was for the...