It's Not Pretty But It Does The Job

I was working outside when I dropped the cap for my silicon grease down a drain. I happened to have a bag of Polymorph granules (a brand-name of Polycaprolactone, a type of polyester with a low melting point) which I'd been meaning to experiment with, and this seemed like a good opportunity to try the stuff. Polycaprolactone melts at 60°C which makes it easy to work with at home, even to work by hand as it doesn't conduct heat very well.


I took a small handful of granules and melted them in an improvised bain-marie (a steel bowl suspended over a pan full of boiling water). Once it was all melted (no pic, I'm afraid, but it'll go translucent eventually) I scraped it all out with a spoon and rolled it into a ball using my hands. If you try this, don't worry about any bits left in the bowl, they can easily be scraped out with a metal spoon once they've cooled and hardened. I then push the ball of soft plastic onto the tube nozzle and moulded into what I thought would be a good shape for a cap.

Caps moulded in a factory have ridges to help with grip. I didn't think I'd be able to achieve this effect easily so I just squeezed the ball flat to make a kind of rudimentary wing nut. The plastic shrank slightly as it cooled and had to be squeezed a bit tighter to maintain good contact with the screw thread on the nozzle. I eventually left it overnight and when I came down in the morning, here's what I found:



And it's pretty good. The plastic has taken on the shape of the screw thread and seems to make a good tight fit. And there's plenty of polycaprolactone left for more moulding fun.

Every time I have to leave something in our meter cupboard for a Freecycler, or when the postman leaves a package in there, it annoys me that there's no flat surface to rest stuff on. Using some scrap 5mm plywood and a random length of wood I found in the shed, I now have a nice little shelf.


OK, the batons are a bit wonky but look at those nice round corners! I even glued a strip of waste ply to the front edge so there's a lip to stop stuff slipping off.

This is a parabolic reflector designed to enhance the directionality of a wi-fi router or access point antenna, and to increase the signal strength in that particular direction. It's cheap and easy to make, and involves cutting and glueing, which is always fun.

My router is in the corner of my house, and there's no point illuminating my street with my wi-fi signal since I'm not using it out there. This reflector will bounce all of that signal back into my house and increase the reception. The link (below) where I got the template says it will increase gain by about 9dBi, which is pretty decent. I never got round to doing a before/after measurement, but there was a noticeable improvement. In rooms on the far side of the house where signal had been patchy before, it is now much more reliable.


The antenna on the right with the reflector is set to cover the ground floor. The antenna on the left is aimed at the area where my wife uses her laptop in the bedroom upstairs. There isn't enough space for a reflector there, but the signal is good enough without.

Here is the link where you can download the template and make your own.

When we moved into our house, the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen didn't have a shelf inside. We decided to keep our cleaning equipment and supplies in there and, after a while, we accumulated so much stuff that it started to overflow into other cupboards. Around this time, the supermarket near where I worked was being refurbished and they were throwing out a load of stuff, including most of a kitchen. I grabbed a few pieces of useful-looking wood and brought them home. One of them was a cupboard shelf that was exactly the right size for our cupboard.

Being under the sink, there are pipes and things in the way. My friend Rich kindly lent me his jigsaw so I could do some fancy cutting. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures before or during the process, so you'll have to make do with the "after" shots:





The trickiest part was taking the cupboard apart so that I could put the shelf in. I had to remove the strut in the middle, which had screws at the bottom:


and at the top:


I then had to remove the board in front of the sink, and the drawer (though luckily not the drawer runners). It fit first time (a rarity for me) and the extra space was quickly filled up:

There was a lot of useful space above the clothes rail in our wardrobe and we had stuff piling up on the floor. I bought a big piece of melamine-coated conti board and used some scrap wood from the shed (left by previous owners) for the battens.