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Routing out the rebates needs some pretty serious kit. Clearly a router and wide/flat bit, most importantly, you'll need a form of support - otherwise as you get to the middle of the brood box, you'll have no support. Have a look at any woodwork forums for the tricks people use to level...

Some facts. 1) There is no fund. Teachers pensions are paid out of general taxation. So it is entirely the case that future generations will be picking up the tab for services delivered today. 2) Whether the pension is self funding on an annual basis is irrelevant. What is important is...

You buy lath? Are you made of money? :) A piece of scrap pine run through the table saw at 6mm will make loads of the stuff. Ekes. Why does anyone buy an eke? Any piece of scrap (assuming you can get 4 sides off the scrap) can be turned into an eke - you don't even need to be able to...

Some of our hives that were very heavy in mid October are becoming perceptibly lighter - there is not a lot of forage about, and during the last week the clouds of bees outside the hives have looked more like July than November. So they've been tearing through winter stores as they are...

This chart: http://mdmetric.com/tech/tict.htm And a set of thread gauges (£6) and a cheap vernier caliper (£10) will identify pretty much any thread you find. I've got that chart printed and laminated in the "measurement" drawer of the roll cab in the garage.

We are re-establishing an old orchard that came with the house. 40 trees, all planted a bit close together and no pruning for the last 20 years. This year we had the first whopper crop. We've pressed about 150 litres of juice using a Vigo 36 litre press, and one of the neighbours (who is in...

And depending on how awkward your bees are, they may create structures at the bottom that mean frames are impossible to remove. If you have any drawn comb available, I'd start mixing it into the 5 central frames as fast as possible. Nat frames in amongst 14x12s are fine on their own. 5...

Nor would I. I would only settle for a 16bit microcontroller for accurate temperature resolution, with software (complex software) to handle the hysteresis of the containment with respect to temperature overshoot. I'd be logging the temperatures to a database (clustered, active/active for...

Same story. Though how much does the cluster warm the sides of the hives? I'd guess the sides are at about 5C, which means very little heat loss.

You don't need to go nuts on the roof thickness. If the centre of the cluster is about 30 degrees, and the edge of the cluster is about 15 degrees, then on a cold night the difference between the edge of the cluster and the outside is maybe 25 kelvin. A beehive roof is about 0.2 sq metres...

Why? All a firewall does is block a port based on some rules. If you have nothing running on that port anyway, the firewall adds nothing. Firewalls do not handle encryption, they do not stop malicious payloads. If you move around between wireless APs, then the thing you need to worry...

AVG Free works fine. You don't need "personal firewalls" unless you have been deliberately been setting up services. If you have no idea what "setting up services" means, you don't need a firewall. Any modern broadband router that does "network address translation" does more than the...

Which is exactly my point about cruelty being an entirely human construct. Say a vet operates on a cat to remove a cancer and has to remove its tail. We would not consider that cruel, but all the cat knows is that its tail has gone. If a vet removed a cats tail for a laugh, we would...

It wouldn't learn very quickly. Imagine a room with a red mark on the floor. If the subject treads on the red mark, a bell goes off and one of its legs is removed forcibly. Say I have invented a forcefield to do the leg removal, rather than using something the objects are already scared of...

Mice are hardwired to be scared of cats. It not a learnt behaviour - if it were learnt, then all mice would die as they said "hello" to the nearest cat. I would imagine that their instinct would be to fear anything with binocular vision (= a predator) and things that are bigger than them. A...

The real question is are living things sentient, can they process pain or injury at anything more than a chemical level? As soon as you start talking about souls, you are in Flying Spaghetti Monster/Big Man in the Sky territory which involves a whole new level of claptrap. If you rip a...

8" is effing huge! Building regs currently state that 6" is required for all stoves between 20 and 30kW - which is a damn big stove. Under 20kW (most of them) 125mm is the regulation, but most stove manufacturers state 6" as the minimum. Our 16 kW Clear view is on 7", and the 11 kW Rayburn is...

I will take a picture of my saw buck. Meanwhile, here is a picture of my logpile:

Indeed, they are completely different tools! The Oregon grinder (about £60 as I recall) is not too bad. The only flaw is that it is a bit flexible, so if you want really accurate sharpening (say, for milling) it doesn't do a good enough job. For general firewood use, it is perfect. The...

General rule on chain sharpening is to give it a quick once over with a file after every 2 - 3 tanks. The saw should "self feed", if you have to lean on it to get it to cut...it is blunt! Also it took me about 10 years to learn that files go blunt - get a pack of decent ones (about £6) and...