Pooing punctuation
I haven't put any shelves up lately, but on Saturday I pooed an apostrophe.

Or should it be poo'd...
( Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 13:18, 8 replies)

Telephone Engineering - Gone wrong.
This question reminds me of back in the days of dial up and when we had extension cables running from the phone socket, up the stairs to the PC.
Somehow our extension cable had snapped. No doubt a hoover incident.

So I decided to repair it by re soldering the wires together, and a bit of eleccy tape. Sorted. But stupidly I left it plugged in. My ex comes in and is like, "Is that ok to do that when its plugged in?"

All smugged up I said, "Yes its fine as a high voltage and current go through the line only when someone rings. No ones going to ring at this time!" It was 11pm.
A minute or so later and im just using the human wire strippers (teeth) and suddenly i feel an absolutle whack in the mouth. OWCH!!!! ARGHHH!!! I screamed and jumped back.

The girlfriend is looking a little shocked... and somewhat guilty.. and somewhat laughing all at the same time.

She decided to test my theory and ring the phone from her mobile.

Cheers luv!
(Miggyman, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 12:54, Reply)

Non-alcoholic DIY cocktail disaster
A pint of lemonade with a disolved M&M
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 12:32, Reply)

Some mothers do 'ave 'em moments
Not much of a disaster, but:
I was decorating one of the spare rooms in a colour that the missus still swears blind isn't pink, but it fecking is. I had finished paining one of the walls, so climbed down off my ladder, put the paint tray down behind me and took a step back to admire my handywork. And put my foot in the paint tray. Swearing a bit, I took my trainer off to see how much paint it had on it. And put my foot down in the paint tray. Swearing a bit more, I took my sock off. And put my foot down in the paint tray. I just laughed at that point.

I also once spent a good 5 minutes getting fairly severe electric shocks, while trying to put insulating electrical tape over some accidentally exposed wires in the power cable to the fridge. It was only after a particularly violent swearing seesion that the missus came in to see what the deal was. And suggested that I unplug the fridge before grabbing the wires. It seems obvious now...
(ScousersPet, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 12:06, 5 replies)

We made vodka with sweeties in
Here
Some of them were good,
Some of them were bad,
some of them were Very Nasty Indeed.

Yes.
( DukeEuphoria Comes highly reccomended, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 11:18, 9 replies)

Student house
We rented a terrible student house in York back in the 90s. I've told one or two stories about it before (see here). The landlord who rented this house liked his money rather a lot, and certainly didn't like wasting it buying furniture for us. So we had four of the cheapest, nastiest, fifth-hand War-on-Want beds you can imagine. They were so poor that three of the four ended the year with a leg having fallen off.

Not wanting to risk losing our deposits, when we were packing up to move out we set about glueing the legs back on. But they wouldn't stick as everything was too irregular.

Time for some lateral thinking! If the legs couldn't be glued to the beds, what could we do...? Cue the bed legs being super-glued vertically to the carpets and the beds balanced on top. It worked a treat and he never noticed. Well, not until the next cohort of students moved in and sat on their new beds...
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 11:08, 1 reply)

Disaster-free zone
Haven't posted before this week because mainly because I've been too busy, but also, I'm fookin' ace at DIY. No disasters chez che - if you know what I mean.

One little observation for you though: If you ever decide to sand a floor; the main bit is fine, a bit like using an industrial strength lawn-mower on your floorboards with similar results if you're not careful, but for the edges, you need an edging sander. Using one of those buggers looks and feels exactly as if you were throttling a Tasmanian devil - no other way of describing it. By the end of the day it'll feel as if Taz won on points after 15 rounds. You'll also be coughing up sawdust for about four days and dusting it off things two weeks later. Excellent if you don't like your neighbours though.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 11:04, Reply)

Ewww
EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to the post below. I hit the wrong button.

Macs are horrible. At least, if you're a gamer. Which I am. That said, Windows and Linux are horrible too. But if I wanna play my games I gotta use Windows (when I'm not playing my 360)

Anyway, I have a couple of suggestions. Use the recovery disk that should have been supplied with your computer. THis will probably require a HDD format but I'm not 100% sure. I did it the other day with a work lap top and everything was stored on the network anyway.

Suggestion 2: Create a new user account and see if you can delete the old one (if it works you should be asked for the administrator password in order to proceed) IF this happens, cancel the delete and try to log in again.

Suggesstion 3: If your computer is on a network, check to domain settings on the log in screen.

Suggestion 4: This one should probably come first, but meh, make sure you're spelling your user name and password correctly and that the capslock key is not on.

Suggestion 5: Abandon all hope, for someone has changed your password and stolen your recovery disc.
(Teran Thinks Pogonophobia is funny, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 10:56, 5 replies)

Computer DIY anyone?
I've got next to no computer skills, so when I turned on my PC last night at home, I was rather upset when it didn't let me logon...

I'm running Windows Vista Business.

It turns on as normal, gets to the user account selection.

If you then click on "Kaol", it says to enter password, as normal, but when you do and press "logon", you get a message saying:

"the User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded."

You can go on the guest account as normal, which is the really odd part.

Hoepfully one of you beautiful B3tards will have the answer...

Sorry for the QOTW abuse, but it is a Thursday...
( Cawl, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 10:38, 39 replies)

The flip side
A new house (to you) is a bewildering landscape. Generally speaking it will have stuff 'built in'. This square meter-age is uncharted territory: camouflaged angst. You don't know where the wires or pipes run, or how things are fixed to walls.

Monbison's answer has reminded me of this subclass of shite DIYer, the elusive, lesser spotted work-maker, leaver of poisoned chalices , who bequeaths a legacy of skinned knuckles, sweary bollocks, broken claw hammers and bent hacksaw blades.

Whilst most diy disasters are from inappropriately weak fixings/tools - and this tends to be manifest all too quickly - for some inexplicable reason, some utterly inept people have a tendency to over egg the diy pudding to a bewildering extent.

This would be great if it could be applied to quality fixtures, fittings AND furnishings, but it seems, almost without exception to apply to impromptu brackets for nasty shelves.

It's as if, through childhood inculcation, the phrase 'you could hang yourself off that fucker' was the only one that resonated with them, no style, no taste, just a desire to fix things to walls that no man can tear asunder.
(Countryslicker, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 10:17, Reply)

Me vs. Trees = uneasy truce
I'm a pretty good mechanic, plumber, carpenter, etc. I don't fool with electronics (yet) and I don't mess with anything structural beyond my ability (that is to say, everything). But for some reason I have been surrounded my entire life by individuals who are convinced that me being a great hand at gardening and carpentry = apprentice lumberjack.

I have a few disasters to relate, and they involve trees.

My father got me and a couple of his friends out to his back yard to down a rather majestic pine tree say about 10-12m high. My father and his friends were firemen, so they reasoned, if it's easy enough to use tools of destruction to save lives, it should be even easier to cut a tree down where they wanted it to go. Is my father a lumberjack? No. Are any of his friends lumberjacks? No. Am I a lumberjack? No. In my defense I can say that free beer was involved, very involved by the end of it.
My Dad and his friends reason that they can tie off and pull tension on a rope, wrapped and knotted well around the tree, and, using another tree as a pulley, they should be able to hold the rope while one of them cuts the tree. I asked at this time, "Dad that tree weighs a ton easy - we don't weigh enough to hold it or move it." He advised me at this time to shut up and help hold the rope. The rope in question was a length of life-saving rope, which has a core of spun rubber interlaced with nylon fibers...this is fantastic stuff for hauling people up out of burning buildings and stuff. It has a relatively high melting/burning point, has tremendous tensile strength...but also has a small amount of give.

So take 1)three drunken idiots hauling on a length of dangerous rope 2) another drunken idiot with a chain saw 3)a tree easily twenty years younger than the one being cut down "acting as a pulley or a guide" and put them in a back yard with a chicken coop, water tank, bonfire hearth, and a stout heavy picnic table.
This is in fact a recipe for disaster. Away goes the tree...my father shouts "Timber!" for effect, as he has cut the tree at a singular angle that he feels will guide the tree away from the house.

Well. Yon tree has ideas of its own, and tilts exactly towards the house. It had slipped from the very steep cut he had made and was now arcing so very slowly and silently at the back of the house. I dropped the rope as soon as I felt it begin to pull and bounce in my hands, as did one of my Dad's friends. The other did not let go quite so quickly and was jerked very nearly out of his boots towards the "pulley" tree. I was standing next to the picnic table and looked up to see the tree aiming at me, and with an amount of deftness that I was not consciously aware of, literally flung myself out of the way. The picnic table? Matchsticks. I again asked my Dad about the "simple matter of weight ratios" and he said, "Nah, we just used the wrong rope - it was springy"

From that time to last Sunday, I have avoided the always regrettable but sometimes necessary task of tree-cutting or pruning.

But I have a friend, and he has a house. And that house has a tree, and on that tree grew - nothing. It had eight primary limbs, six of which were dead, and were standing wood. This spring, the limbs remained dead, but new branches and leaves are sprouting like some kind of new infection all over the trunk. New saplings are rising from the exposed roots. I cannot identify for the life of me what tree it is or what it is useful for - the folks at the nursery insist it is a mulberry - except that I know what a mulberry looks like and it's not even in the same family as a mulberry.

Anyway, it's largely dead, and we have no power tools. My friend actually was a lumberjack in his youth, no fooling, so he had a pretty good idea on how to take the dead wood down with a couple of hand saws. The last one is the hardest, and we had to fell it in such a way as to keep it from taking out our neighbor's goldfish pond and our mailboxes. How do we do this? By bringing it gently down with our hands.

Another thing about this kind of tree is that it sticks little twigs and branches in every available space. They can be very pleasant to look at, but dump sticks on his front yard every fall and winter.

So: A very twiggy and heavy branch, cut off and held at the base by us two yahoos, swiveling this way and that while we manuver it away from the house and into the street. It ends up on my shoulders while he rolls it up and over me. Fine so far, except that as it rolls, a hanging branch swivels up and snags the inside of my thigh - my unprotected, shorts-wearing, sunburned thigh. It travels the length down my thigh and ends right below the knee. At first, I do not register anything but the fact that, hey, the tree hit me. The pain was so great that I was afraid to look, and it was throbbing in such a way that I had to have him look at it to make sure it hadn't gashed my femoral artery. Blood was puddling where I stood in agony.

I now have a 16 inch long gash in my right leg, suitable for framing. It is accompanied by a huge bruise that also runs the length of the cut. I have made a decision that I will harm no further trees, and will allow gravity, the elements and time to fell dead wood.




Length? Three inches higher and there wouldn't be any to speak of.
(aeon chicken Like the Millenium Falcon, only slower and noisier, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 1:22, 3 replies)

me and friend said we would knock this house down.
We tied a piece of rope to the van, then tied it to the main beam in the roof (it was old and Oak). About two hours later we where in the pub sending the money we'd made from the Oak beam. We never went back.
Fuck knows who cleared up our mess?
( johnvile dsfadsfgafgf, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 0:36, Reply)

@BGB
Absolutely...gaz me up and we can talk about the shipping forecast!
(Eds Meds Mathskillz=1,Socialskillz=0, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 23:20, 45 replies)

Halloween last year
Made a schoolgirl outfit; skirt, shirt, tie from Claire's Accessories - all teamed up with some lovely boots.

Anyway - I made the skirt. Got loads of halloween fabric and made a proper wrap-around one. Only, I didn't have a sewing machine. Or much cotton. So I made it, hemmed it with that micro-fibre hem shit and sewed a zip into it.

Needless to say, by the end of the night, I ended up with a skirt that was being held up by safety pins, not before flashing everybody from the DJ box.
( Methylene Blue - electrohead, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 21:50, 2 replies)

Loads of stories, too lazy to post,
but 3 of my favourite diy adventures are

Audrey Hepburn (young)
Debbie Harry (young)
Miki Berenyi
( disasterprone "Pyjamas caused the Holocaust", Wed 9 Apr 2008, 21:02, 4 replies)

Okay, so it didn't specify *what* type of DIY...
...

As those of you who know me, i am a geek, so when the time comes to replace the aging phone system at work, i jump up and say "We don't need to buy one... i'll make one!".

And so i did.

We're now running 6 offices world wide, free calls between them thanks to asterisk.org.

I DIY'd myself a phonesystem!

Hammering a nail? ... Don't go there
( Axai is in Montréal, Canada O.o, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 21:02, Reply)

umm
i can't think of a funny story, except for the time i fell through a metal chair whilst putting up wallpaper, taking a chunk out of my leg as i did so.
apart from that, i'm great at d.i.y.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 20:49, Reply)

I know its not technically DIY but....
I went out last nite, got back late and went straight to bed.

This morning I wake up and theres a bath in my garden.

No really, a bath.

WTF?
(big king bob Lord of the Ska, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 20:44, 2 replies)

Measure twice, cut once, right?
When my Dad does DIY it's normally measure 27 times, cut once, find it still doesn't fucking fit through no fault of his own because the wall isn't straight.
( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Wed 9 Apr 2008, 19:52, Reply)

drilling holes
I needed to put up a bathroom cabinet.

Out comes my weedy 9.99-from-woolworths drill and I start drilling. And drilling. And drilling. I'm penetrating at the rate of about 5mm an hour.

My drill is crap.

I work in engineering, and at the time we were making bits for jet engines out of super-difficult to machine nickel alloy horribleuminium. So, I nicked an endmill from work.

An endmill is like a drill, but it's not pointy. Instead it's squared off with four chisel shaped cutting edges on the end. Very tough, very sharp, very strong cutting edges. They cost about 100quid a pop.

If it gets through bastard-tough inconel alloy, it'll get through my bathroom wall, thinks I.

It did. It whizzed through with barely any resistance at all. And this is where the other useful attribute of an endmill comes in - unlike a drill, you can cut sideways with it. You can cut slots.

Which means, if you stick one in a hand held drill you have to be very careful to go straight into the wall. Cos if you don't, as I found out, you can cut a spectacular slot halfway across your bathroom wall before you have time to say 'shit'.

Shit.
(inflateable, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 19:05, 1 reply)

No More Frikkin Nails
I am currently living in a house that can only be described as a show home for the latest BBC reality show on crap DIY. The trouble is that the work that has been done was by the last two owners and not me (Despite what the wife tells visitors).

For starters every room had a shade of pink somewhere be it the walls or the skirting board, and I'm not talking an easy to get rid of colour pink either this was full blown can-see-it-with-the-lights-off sort of colour. With this colour scheme I was sure it used to belong to Rod Hull for his live shows back in the 80's. Thanks to numerous hours of painting coat after coat of paint (One coat only white paint- Shite) the paint scheme looks considerably normal now but that isn't the end of the DIY woes of the house.

The previous owner also had a love for no more nails. I don’t mean that he attempted to glue everything together with No More Nails when it broke, as that would be a problem that would be easy to overcome. This is more bizarre than that. I found out about the old owners fixation a few weeks after moving into the home, he had just popped round to collect some mail from my house and found me sat on the floor unpacking my drill as I was having problems trying to remove a screw from the wall. While I was looking for the right sized drill head he decided to let me in on is little secret:

"I would watch what you're doing mate they're going to be stuck firm, I used No More Nails on the screws"

A quick WTF from me and he explained that he used to dip every screw and nail before he used it in the sodding stuff, so every time it came to me installing a new curtain rail/ change the light fitting/ some other bit of work a whole lump of the wall/ ceiling/ floor/ etc used to come our with it too (yes he coated the wall plugs with it too). Cheers for that. The first time I pulled out half the wall when removing a random screw I blamed my own crappy DIY skills.

The only true piece of genius DIY I have seen from the old owner (or Mr No More Nails as he's called nowadays in casa Bison) is in the garden shed. Inside this shed is a small cupboard with a door hidden behind the shelves. At first I thought that it was another crappy bodged attempt at DIY using an old door as a makeshift wall for a shed but a bit of further investigation and an update from my current neighbour (and all round nosey bastard) I found out that it is a working door and was also used as a secret exit for Mr NMN.

Turns out that Mr MNM was a bit of a henpecked husband, and not in the wife constantly nags until you get something done kind of way either. Every time Mr NMN did something to piss off his wife (i.e. attempt to fix the TV with bostik) she would yell at him and send him to sit in the shed to think about what he had done.

Once he was in the shed, he would simply remove the shelves, open the door (Which turns out is part of the back fence leads through to the overgrown garden belonging to the Chav family with bugger all idea about cutting grass behind casa Bison) and pop down the local for an hour. The door had a normal key hole in it but was padlocked on the inside for extra security-so the aforementioned chavscum family couldn’t get in (the padlock was actually the reason why I spotted the door in the first place)

Pretty clever but I still hate him, I had to remove the old toilet seat with a hacksaw thanks to him and his love for gluing things.

There’s loads more of botched DIY I could write about like the water tank that was held together with a combination of carpet, duct tape and some gluey substance that shall remain unnamed, the shelf system that was built with parts of old sofa (you could see parts of the patterned fabric still stapled to the top of the shelves but I need to lie down due to another bout of No More Nails induced rage.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 19:02, 2 replies)

There have been many mentions of bad wood, but none of good wood.
Pine.
Best stuff on earth. It is light-weight, strong, durable, and versitile. You can build some amazing pieces of furniature with it. And you can fake the look of a number of other woods with the right combination of stains or paints. Sand it smooth for a faux marble finish or distress it to look like worm-wood.

Pine is a beauty to behold.

14 years of using Pine and loving it.
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Wed 9 Apr 2008, 18:41, 6 replies)

I Like This...
www.sniffpetrol.com/wp-content/uploads/spadikea.jpg

...as I have no amusing DIY stories to tell!
(Bob Frapples is de-lurking on, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 16:59, Reply)

Prince, self cock sucking.
I hear Prince does do it him self, that’s why the little midget pervert had the lower two ribs removed, so he can get his grubby wee dogs arsehole mouth round his own “raspberry beret”.
I say it’s alright for the super rich who can afford such surgery. The rest of us have to settle for sitting in the middle of five stacked used tires, naked. And it’s no fun trying to get out again I can tell you. I can never show my face down Quick Fit again.
(Jeeves, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 16:57, Reply)

Disaster
Shannon Mathews mum and step dad are great believers DIY. Even when it came to the "disappearance" of the daughter, they did it themselves.
(Jeeves, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 16:42, Reply)

A guy I once knew...
...was not too good at DIY, or gardening for that matter.

He attempted to remove some stubborn weeds from his front garden through the use of a blowtorch - and set his entire hedge on fire.

Thick black smoke billowed across one of the major roads into Edinburgh, which was closed off while the Fire Brigade put out the flames.

He then gave up on gardening altogether from that day onwards - leaving a completely charred hedge proudly on display ever since.
(Reverend Fister "a disciplined fuckwit", Wed 9 Apr 2008, 16:40, 1 reply)

a bit shit
My wife is great at DIY. Every time I ask her to get me a beer, she says “do it your self”!!
So I punch her in the face and lock her under the stairs. I just reply “you did it yourself”.
(Jeeves, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 16:30, Reply)

All in one day
Well as usual for a teenager I though I knew it all and nobody could tell me otherwise. So after a 6-month stint as an electrician during my work experience I took it upon myself to do some improvements around the house. Surprise my ma when she got back from shopping

First – Bring a light from the house to the shed. Simple enough I thought. Have a plug for it in the house bring the cable out the window into the tree beside and run it above the drive into the shed drill a few holes for cable in the wooden beams, sorted. Nice neat job. All was going swimmingly till the beam bit. The drill either slipped or I got caught with a chunk of flying shrapnel (well wood chip) and skinned my nose from tip to where it meets forehead. Didn’t notice at first till I seen my t-shirt was going from a grey to a distinctly darker colour. Didn’t think it was to serious so got a bandage pad and stuck it on thinking that would do. What next

Second – Where’s that mirror Ma wanted in the lower room. Get it and out comes drill again. Change bit line the mirror up over the sink and drill. Everything seems to be going ok till I notice there appears to be water coming out of the hole I’m drilling. Confused danniemcq stops and pulls the bit out and water starts coming out quite rapidly. Shit. Turns out I hit the hot water pipe going into the room. Shit shit shit. Run upstairs into the room above and open the press under the window looking to turn this torrent off. Couldn’t see anything in there really so grabbed a torch and plunged headlong in. Still see nothing except for some grey football looking thing in the corner that might have some use for me (why I dunno I was a teenager) so I done what anyone would do and poked it with a coat hanger. Yeah turns out it was a wasp hive. Fuck fuck fuck I scrambled back out and shut the door with only a few stings and ran back downstairs. By now the wal in the other room is looking pretty dark where the water is gushing. Only one thing left to do, ring my uncle. I told him the story and through bouts of laughter he told me where the “cog” was (see I’m real technical eh!) and turn off the hot water. Sigh

So Ma comes home 10 minutes later to find me sitting in the kitchen having a cuppa (like all good DIYers) face covered in a bloody bandage, my t-shirt ruined, several wasp stings on my forehead and arms, small drops of blood on the kitchen floor, a press full of pissed off wasps, a bust pipe, a soaked wall and no hot water in the house. I had to even pay for the plumber and that room in question the wall is fine but it will never have hot water again.

Length? Well I lasted an hour last night
(Samantha Bricks Better half done a poo on, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 15:35, 1 reply)

Dont Know if it's been posted
But have you heard the one about the deaf dog and the drill??

It was relayed to me by a Cro-Magnon who was installing my cable connection a few years back.

The story goes that a 'friend of a friend' was installing cable in some old dears house and the 'deaf dog' was asleep the other side of the wall where the hole was being drilled.

Result one dog with an 18mm hole in his head and blood everywhere.

I dont quite buy it myself tho...

Length? None
(never-right -getting it wrong since '78, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 13:47, 22 replies)

literally all Australian women are terrible at carpentry.
I haven't managed to get into a single one of their drawers.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 13:13, Reply)