Squirrel Hoarder

Whilst building my BMW R100R I wondered why nuts kept appearing on shed floor, I also found starting difficult and when eventually running it was very choked, on removing airbox cover I realised the nutty problem of a squirrel having stashed his stolen bird food from a shed in Capel Curig. Talk about alternative fuels, eat your heart out Ethanol additives etc....
I bet the squirrel was really pissed off and is still hunting me down on a mission scouring Welsh mountain tops and forests like a Squirrel Rambo.
Capt Simon

Nuts

Lee John Phillips is nuts.
I am currently cataloguing the entire contents of my late grandfather's tool shed. I estimate the project to take around 5 years and will involve me illustrating in excess of 100,000 items.

A man after my own OCD heart, producing fantastically obsessive drawings. Never before has a U-bend looked so magical. BP

Standing on History

History lessons at school were mostly a bore. I did enjoy learning about how the Romans made straight roads and Hypocausts in hilly chilly Britain. But now the internet is my friend I do enjoy historical detective work to find the origins of things around me. Admittedly it's more the world according to the Antiques Roadshow than Darwin.

Me & Mrs P are in the process of laying an old wooden parquet floor in our new kitchen. Once the cacky bitumen used to hold the blocks in place in olden times was scraped off the bottom, the words 'DIP. Đurđenovac - Made in Yugoslavia' were just visible embossed into the wood.

It turns out that he red-brick parquet factory founded in 1909 is still standing.

The whole town (now eastern Croatia) was dedicated to the processing oak from local forests (but I think ours may be Beech). Our blocks were made some time in the '50s.

I made a custom scraper with male and female teeth to clean the edges of tongue-and-groove blocks.

Once we have glued them down herring bone style, they will be professionally sanded flat. We have excess blocks to experiment with stains and wax finishes. BP

Australian Sheds by Jasper White

Thanks to my old friend Alex for sending a link through on the work of Jasper White. This is what the English photographer says about his project...

I’ve recently completed a project shot in various locations throughout Australia that takes you into the private world of working men’s sheds. These sheds are the personal retreat of their creators, filled with the various ephemera of their lives and interests. Viewed as a whole, each shed becomes an extreme focal point of human individuality in what could be described as the barren wasteland of rural Australia. The shed frames an individual portrait of its creator, and this visual impact of the unusual and the unpretentious is what I find so interesting.

BluTack Gymnastics

Take the swearing out of the balancing a tiny screw on top of a screwdriver trick with a bogey sized ball of BluTack. You too can work up-side-down in perilously awkward and dark crannies. BP

Pegboard Boots

Always on the look-out for another handy gadget for my shed, but these on fleabay aren't exactly what I had in mind. BP

Template

In Shedland CNC does not stand for Computer Numerical Control, but rather Cardboard Near-enough Calibrated. Corrugated cardboard is not recommended for templates, do yourself a favor and step up to Corn Flakes box grade. BP

Zip Tips

A biscuit tin makes for a good cable-tie hutch. If you punch a hole in the corner you can easily stuff them back in without having to take off the lid. That is if your ties are like mine and behave like worms wringing their way off on their own into the most unlikely of corners in my shed, home and car.

That expanding polyurethane glue is the devil's bodge, I only use trad PVA glue for woodworking. But it is slovenly once the bottle is more than half empty, so if you store it up-side-down - cable-tied loosely to a vertical, to act as a holster, it is always primed and ready for action!

(Here's one my 'make-do and mend' Mum would be proud of) if you snip off in-situ ties behind the head, you can pull out the end of the tail and re-use the remainder (albeit now smaller, but as most jobs on motorbikes only require short lengths, they're always handy). And no tool box should be without proper snips. I got these from my local Maplin electronics shop. BP

Peaks Ride-Out Snaps

This was the only accident of the whole day. It was just topple during the coffee break when the sidestand pressed through the flapjack tarmac. The only damage was some earth deposit on the sidestand which didn't exactly warrant calling out the AA.

Dave on his newly acquired CB175

Max winner of 'Best Jacket' wearing Dave Aldana's old leathers from when he was a teenager.

Proper coffee in the middle of nowhere, served from the back of Motore's Piaggio Ape - How fantastic!

And the next day on the way home, I stopped by Derbyshire Aggregates out in Youlgrave for a few sacks of black Bassalt chips (not peculiar to the North of England) for my wannabe-Japanese garden. (I nearly gave myself a double hernia when I acquired the stone doorstep from a field next to the A53 when I was last in the Peak District). BP

Do It Proper

My shed is a cheapo flat-pack kit and as the supplier felt guilty having tried to fob me off with delivering the wrong model, they offered to erect it for free as a sorry. What they chucked up in a day would have taken me a week so I was happy. However, they got two monkeys to do it. The fury tails should have been a give-away. It was as weather-proof as an egg carton. I didn't have the justice-seeking stamina, time or money to sort it and wrapped the whole thing in a plastic tarpaulin from the B&Q.

That was two years ago, and even with the addition of a second tarp it still wasn't sea worthy. The planks were warping out of shape and making even bigger gaps. Mould and rust moved in; then the final straw, the cassette stack-HiFi stopped working. So finally, making use of the tropical summer we are having, I spent the last two weeks taking it back to the bone.

Top DIY Tip: when your battery-powered drill dies and you discover the price of a single new battery is not much less than a whole new kit which includes two batteries, don't be tempted to upgrade to a newer model, get the same. Then you have two drills, each with a new battery and you can leave one with a screw-bit in and the other a drill bit. Perfect for jobs like this. (This Christmas I'm going to ask Santa for a holster, then I'll be a force to be reckoned with.)

An old bird's nest on the neighbour's wall had been taken over by a swarm of bees, but thankfully the three layers of creosote I treated the roof with seemed to sedate them so I didn't get any bees in my ear.

70mm of Celotex insulation. Cool in summer, warm in winter. It's dear so I tried to find it secondhand on Gumtree locally but you only end up with odd scraps so I splashed out on new - then over-guesstimated how much I needed by two sheets (which isn't a problem as it will be good for the shady back wall). Neat edges finished with aluminium tape.

I wonder how much a sheet-zinc roof would have cost?

Top layer bituminous corrugated Coroline. It's a French invention from the '50s but I've only just discovered it. It's weird - but good stuff. 100% waterproof, you don't need to paint it, bendy, easy to cut, cheap. I made an anal pattern to calculate exactly how many sheets I needed with minimal wastage. The edges are finished off with a bituminous self-adhesive (but needs a primer) flashing tape.

Bring on the monsoon! My shed is so water tight, with the edition of a periscope and torpedo hatches it could serve as a submarine. BP

Rafters

What do you mean you are running out of space? BP

Sam Christmas

Londonites and globe trotters don't forget tomorrow night. BP

The Gift

Audio cassettes shaped my youth. Now they've been outmoded and relegated to my garden shed and only get aired on a 90s stack hi-fi I found in the rubbish. Every third tape gets a munching followed by spewing out half a plate-full of tagliatelle magnetic ribbon. Carefully re-spooled with a biro - remember doing mix-tapes when you'd turn back 1/4 turns to take up the slack between hitting PLAY-RECORD?
The shed is my escape away from worldly worries. Those old tapes are an amazing time tunnel. Today I unearthed this one of John Cale and The Velvet Underground, sent to me from the States by John Held Jnr. a famous mail artist of the day.
Me and my art college friends used to post all kinds of crap to each other. Art and omelettes. Literally. When I heard J.H.Jnr. was coming to England and visiting collage artists A1 Waste Paper (who I'd never met, but sent a ton of arty cards to), I decided it would be appropriatly whacky to mail myself.
My Tai-Chi bendyness (of the day) enabled me to be packed into quite a small wooden crate, and with the help of an assistant, it was nailed shut...BP

(turn the balance into the left speaker for just the narration and the right to trip out on the psychedelic ramble.)