daniel bates

I recently received my Makita 10.8V drill/driver kit for $200AUD delivered.    Impact Driver, Drill Driver, 2 genuine Makita batteries, charger, flashlight, and a loada bits in a drawer in a case. Handy.   I bought a cheap Chinese battery pre-empting the need for one to be on charge all the time as backup. Genuine rated at 1.3Ah cheapo at 1.5Ah.. Surely that's just bollocksy ebay marketing? Genuine's got to be better. Both Batteries were fully charged, run in over light use, and fully charged again. Test 1 - Running drill continuously at full speed for 3 minutes using stopwatch. Genuine - at 50 seconds slight dip in speed, 1:20 another small dip. Still powerful at end. Ripoff - Notably Higher RPM at start. Held RPM continuously until end. Test 2 - Drilling through 2" of hardwood with 6mm HSS drill bit. Until impractical power output and automated drill cutoff (these drills have low-voltage disconnects to protect batteries). Genuine - Outl...

Here's just to say to the interneting public of the world that I have a MendelMax 1.5 reprap 3D printer! I sourced many of the parts myself, some parts in kit form, such as the frame and electronics, and used the invaluable open source community to complete the design and calibrate the machine. Credit to Joseph Prusa and Maxbots. All terrain MendelMax. Born and bred in the foothills of Snowdonia.

It's hard to photograph just how useful and awesome these lights are but here's an attempt. Reels of LED SMD. £1/meter fixed first with a self-adhesive backing, then stapled permanently into place using small fencing staples. Simple, cheap, and much more useful than strip lights! Costed out the same as buying two 6ft strip lights. LED lights like these are much more useful for the money because the shelving's directly illuminated, no shadows! As well as being more efficient, so they'd run off a single 12V car battery and a sub-100W solar setup, as this one is. Easy! The lighting I chose as 'Day White' and it's remarkable how accurate that description is. With the lights on there's little colour contrast between inside and out. A curious sensation as usually I'd expect artificial lighting to be, well, much more artificial in feeling.  

Following a commission from Tim Newman http://vibrafuzzfamily.wordpress.com/ and his request of high gloss panels for the top and bottom of the racks, I have recently completed these four racks. Don't they look good?!