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Say you have a 16mm hole but you wanted really to put a 20mm hole in or you drilled a 20mm hole and wanted a 25mm. Yes, I know cone cutters / step drills etc but they go blunt. Starrett have the "OOPS" allowing holesaws of two DIFFERENT arbor sizes to be used but no good for the smaller sizes: But for using two of the smaller sized arbor cutters together........I think I'll call mine the "FOOKIT". First, get yourself a 1/2" UNF 20tpi x 2 1/2" long bolt and cut the head off, file neatly and de-burr: Then screw on a couple of Starretts: Job done. The one in the picture needed a 13mm chuck you could turn it down to 10mm. I did the above one in 2014. I keep one in my tool bag for electrical work. I call it the "FOOKIT". Then today, needs must and all that, the FOOKIT+: Take one 5/8"-18 UNF bolt. Black would have been better but they gave me BZP and plain nuts: Stick 3 nuts on and bung it in the lathe. Roughly turn down the head end to 10mm dia x 25mm long. Drill and pin the nut onto the shaft (you could of course weld it on): Screw on a big "Starrett": Screw on the small Starrett: Pack between the two with M16 washers if you want the smaller one to project more: Best go and use it for the job I need it for now!

Got my light meter out, blinds closed (they are not a perfect fit), 3 LUX, LED on, 12 LUX, old CFL 7 LUX initally, 19 LUX after warm up. My point is that there is a lot of nonsense spoken about lighting, light quality and bightness levels, colour etc. Get yourself to Poundland. Edit, just opened the blinds, got a light reading of 20 LUX Edit 2, 15 minutes later the reading is 8 LUX

I swapped out all my 8W CFL last week for 3W LEDs About the same amount of light (never did a reading but I could for a laugh). The bayonet LED bulbs came from Poundland, for a £. So I now have a 38% energy saving. Cost me £8 If I left 2 lights on 24/7, that would be about £8 for a year. So how much do these systems cost?

POE is Power Over Ethernet. DALI is a standard that a lot of makers adhere to = Digital Address Lighting Interface. Simtronic, Thorn, Clipsal are a couple to conjure with. Where I work uses Simtronics and has a dedicated pc. Benefits are energy savings on a massive scale as you can schedule when lights come on / go off and take care remotely of all the offices where people have gone home but left the lights on. Some places even use the office lighting as a pseudo night time "billboard" treating each area as a giant pixel. You could even switch whole floors in a skyscraper to create a Knightrider effect. At "our" end of things.....dunno.....turn the kids lights off once they're asleep via your smart phone without having to get up! Once you've verified via CCTV they are indeed akip! Put lights on for somebody to come home to if you're out. Its endless really.

Hi. I am a home ventilation specialist and work for BPC ventilation that are leading designers and suppliers of home ventilation and heat recovery systems to builders and self builders throughout The UK, Ireland and most other worldwide locations I will try to answer any questions and explain the facts from the myths Gary

I approach most of our neighbours at speed, if they don't leap out of the way then it's too bad...

Grand Designs Revisted on more4 now is showing the build again

A little light reading? Hybrid MS Sealants.pdf

Panel all 3 vertical walls. If you have an 1100 tray then an 1100 wall panel will have very little meat left for screwing / fixing the chrome wall channel ( for the glass ) to. I don't like the idea of water ever getting to a painted plastered wall. At the very least I'd want an Upstand of similar material for the tray / wall junction.

I looked at one that was 1/4 acre near me for £20k - was right on the river and formed part of the flood plain. The "design" we came up with was a roundhouse that could raise if needed - only needed around 15" lift for the 1/1000 year limit to be exceeded and could be done with four 50 tonne rams and a hydraulic pump which would cost less than £1,000 to do. Nimby neighbours put me off that one ..!

Neither are silicones. These are marketed as combined sealant, adhesive, gap filling goop. Sikalfex is extraordinarily good stuff IMO and is my weapon of choice for setting in and fundamentally sealing shower trays / formers and bonding baths etc into place. The merchants often have a 'sample' box with two pieces of wood bonded together with a ~6mm bead of sikaflex and the challenge is to get the two apart. It can't be done, I've tried twisting and tearing it and it just doesn't die. CT1 is pretty much as good but can be torn / pulled apart. I use the clear one for sealing between trays and tiles as it doesn't degrade, go mouldy or fail like clear silicone does. For 'chemicular dissection', don't ask me .

Cheers. Re the kids rooms, I have a much cheaper system where I shout up the stairs and tell them to turn the lights off. I wouldn't recommend that system tbh as it's quite unreliable and gets mixed results Best alert system for the kids, if the second shout for their food has gone unanswered, is to take their Cat5 cables out of the router . They come down like a fire drill then. Unless going fully automated with an intelligent system, I'd probably only go for this radial, single point wiring downstairs. @readiescards, are you going automated ( able to blackout the house from the front door upon exit etc etc ) ?

You can get a special tool to do it:

For the benefit of the uninitiated ( and me ) can you elaborate a bit please ?

The main potential issue for me is that if there are enough objections, it gets called into committee. While you should, in theory, not be any worse off, I suspect it'll be easier, cheaper and less stressful if you don't get the planning committee involved. If they get it wrong, you have to appeal, which is more money and time, even if you're in the right. So basically I'm all for reducing objections as a general principle. I posted something on this general point in the last few weeks. I'll see if I can dig it out over the weekend, but the essence of it was to be careful about being too open with your neighbours about your plans. The last thing you want to do is try and keep everyone happy by listening to their feedback on your detailed plans, then realise it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy because they all want different things. Then you've by definition seriously annoyed one or more of them by not implementing the feedback you asked them for, so they object. I think it's better to gradually get them used to the idea of development in a social context, then slowly allow the general to become more specific over time. By the time you submit your planning application, everyone around you more or less knows what's coming and there are no surprises. We got a bit lucky, but this was the approach we took and we had no objections to our plans to knock down a small bungalow and build a large, very modern two storey house with three times the floor area!

This book......"Don't Do It" by Seymour Stress

Oh, like the infamous Fanny Flambeaux doll, (which admittedly Big Clive made up as a spoof) :