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At this morning's first bootsale of the season I bought two carrier bags full of small hand tools for £30 - result! Amongst them was this oddity - appears to be a gimlet but look how large the screw tip is - it's a full 7mm across at its widest. Anyone got any idea if it's something...

I've got a couple of sets of ceramic doorknobs to fit to mortice latches on internal doors. The knobs are similar to this: My problem is that the screwholes are on a circle whos diameter is significantly smaller than the diameter of the knob so I cannot screw the screws in properly, at right...

We have a Victorian pollstone house with red bricks around the window openings. These bricks have a very smooth, quite shiny, finish (even after more than a century exposed to Welsh weather!). The Boss wants to paint these grey to match the stonework. Does anyone know the best paint for this...

I bought this in a fit of wild enthusiasm about three or four years ago, played with it for five minutes then it's sat on the shelf ever since. So it's time it looked for a more appreciative owner. The full set of eight blades 3mm to 1/2", plus the sawblade for grooving cuts. All in as new...

Blew £3 on a Stanley 13-050 with a single 1/4" cutter in a bootsale yesterday. Anyone able to direct me to a download of the User Guide/Parts List etc? I've Googled to no avail, though I'm sure there must be one about somewhere. Martin.

Hi all - We have hardwood windows painted with Sikkens Teak HLS & Filter7. We now want to paint these same windows black . I want to obtain testers of HLS and Filter 7 in Black just to see how it covers the Teak but the only ones I can find are from Sikkens themselves in Belgium. I'll follow...

I want to buy a bobbin sander with a tilting table. I already have a few pieces of Triton gear with which I am happy so I thought that the Triton TSPS370 might fit the bill. Unfortunately like many things it's out of stock in most places. The alternative is the Axi Craft AC140OSS which about...

Hi folks - My daughter has bought her partner a road bike for Christmas and we want to buy him a good bike lock as a late present. What do the bikers amongst our merry throng recommend as the most thief-proof on the market? A belated Happy Christmas, Martin.

I've just retrieved a couple of large candles that the Estates Manager was taking to the bin. These are labelled "100% Stearin". Is there any use to which stearin can be put in the woodworking world? -Apart from the usual use of wax for lock lubrication, drawer sliders, the working faces of...

Disaster! I glued up a small assembly last night and this morning I found that it had got out of square and needs to be disassembled. I've read the thread back in July 2012 on this subject but I wonder if there's any new ideas on how to separate this glue-up? The glue I've used is Evo-Stik Resin...

I've got an old wobbly four-legged stool which I've dismantled and cleaned up. The holes are pretty worn from years of wobbling so I need a glue which will gap-fill and set as slowly as possible since I'm a beginner and there are twelve glued joints and four wedges to set. I've got Evo-Stik...

I've had a Dremel 400 Digital multitool for a while - maybe ten years - though it's only been very lightly and occasionally used. Yesterday, while cutting short some cupboard handle fixing screws, it released the magic smoke. On dismantling I found that a couple of the rotor windings had...

Here's an entertaining eighteen minutes of chat about Stanley planes from TubalCain (the American one, "Mr Pete"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG5YZLXYLIE Martin.

I was interested to read the recent postings regarding the darkening of oak when wiped over with a Sodium Bicarbonate solution - sorry, I can't find the original thread. So I did a few tests - in each case, a level teaspoonful of chemical dissolved in roughly 100ml of lukewarm water, sample...

Had a quickie look through the buying advice/tool reviews (couldn't find a search for this section - is there one other than the main "advanced" one?) and didn't find anything on impact drivers, so here goes: I'm going to treat myself to one for my upcoming 74th birthday - won't wait for my...

Recently ordered my first bandsaw blade from Tuffsaw. Delivered promptly, I was surprised to see that the blade was a finished product stamped "Starrett". No complaints, it cuts beautifully, but I thought that all Tuffsaw blades were made up by them? Martin.

I recall my father buying a very nice new wooden ladder about sixty years ago. A couple of years ago, after it had lived its life all this time in his garage in South Wales, I unearthed it and wondered - Is this still safe to use? It looked as good as the day he bought it (it was never much...

Not sure if this is in the correct section, but here's an interesting short You Tube video by the boss of Grizzly, describing the history of the company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBQk1WmXpm4 Martin.

Recently unearthed a set of chisels, long neglected. I know I've had these since 1975 at the latest, might be as old as mid sixties. Completely unmarked and I don't recall them ever having been marked in any way. They originally had edge protectors, plain red plastic ones, simple rectangular...

My daughter has found this in the attic of a house which used to belong to my parents..it has been baking in that attic for at least 50 years that I know of. It looks as if it might once have been the central box on a dressing table or somesuch - it was certainly part of something larger. It's...