MarkW

I know, but it's my only shot at glory on here - I haven't even got a bike FFS!

This thread is going to be my big push for MOTY or TOTY. I've never won anything before, but if I pull out all the stops the Gammons might nominate me for TOTY, and the members who know what adverbs, nouns and prepositions are might nominate me for MOTY.

Somewhere in the old 'EU: In or out?' thread I said that leaving the EU would be a disaster for my industry. One of the more intellectually challenged Gammons (I know that doesn't narrow it down very much) immediately demonstrated his profound grasp of the issues by posting a characteristically misspelt and illiterate response along the lines of "My arse it will". And what I said would happen has happened. Getting products onto the market in Europe involves every Member State in a complex and protracted evaluation process, and the UK had a huge amount of influence at the table. Now we're not even in the room. We still have to follow the same EU procedures if we want to sell into the EU, but we no longer have any voice - we just have to do as we are told. Presumably this is what the Gammons think constitutes 'Taking back control' - voluntarily inserting the ball gag and bending over to be f*cked up the arse by Germany whilst the rest of the EU looks on. Yup - that's showing them who's boss...

There's no point explaining it to them now! Some of these f*cking braindead Gammons haven't even mastered the rudiments of English after a lifetime of daily exposure to it, so they've got no hope of grasping the implications of leaving the EU!

To be fair, it's not really anything like the Y2K panic, which ended abruptly at one minute past midnight when no planes fell out of the sky or global IT systems imploded, and which affected nobody in any meaningful sense. UK businesses now have two weeks before new rules come into force between us and our biggest trading partner, and despite the expensive and characteristically vacuous advertising campaign from the government encouraging us to 'get ready' when you make contact with them they still haven't got a f*cking clue what we need to do. I can't help thinking that this is all going to turn out to be a very high price to pay for pandering to a section of society who never understood how the EU works in the first place.

Enjoy it whilst you can, because opening your pressies before Baby Jesus Day means you're going to Hell. God has no sense of humour about shit like that.

My notoriously tight-fisted father-in-law got scammed when he responded to one of those unsolicited text messages saying that he was due compensation after his recent car accident. The fact that he hadn't actually had a car accident in the last twenty years didn't set any alarm bells ringing - the mere prospect of money coming his way was enough to get him to bite.

@Bender I can't help you with your drive I'm afraid, but if you need any floorboards nailing down just give me a shout.

I started off by taking an air rifle to the ones that were in the warehouse, but it's only effective for as long as you're prepared to sit there blapping them, and it quickly gets boring. It can be a messy affair, too. With the electronic zapper you just bait it with something suitable (I conducted extensive confectionary testing based on what I could pinch from the staff canteen, and found that those tiny Mars Bars out of a box of Cadbury Celebrations seem to work best), place it in a likely looking spot and leave it. We check ours each morning - there's even a flashing green light on the top to tell you when it needs emptying, so I don't even have to bend down to look inside! Perfect for a lazy arse like me!

We've got half a dozen of these dotted around our warehouse. Bloody brilliant - batteries last for ages, and a fried ratty is much easier to dispose of than one that's had its brains blown out with an air rifle.

Funny you should mention Neil Peart - this dropped through my letterbox yesterday: Anyway, on the subject of books I can recommend Robert Persig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' if you want something to keep you occupied for a while. I've been reading it on-and-off for nearly 20 years and I still haven't made it to the end.

Thanks XTreme! How compatible is Fusion with an early 1970s model IT shagwit?

I see that this fancy new software we all forked out for has done nothing to improve the general standard of literacy around here...

Morning peeps! Just a quick question on the off-chance that anyone here is into animation/motion graphics stuff. My woolly grasp of the terminology should tip you off to the fact that I'm a complete noob at this! We are going to make some short videos in the lab of various procedures that need explaining to government regulatory bodies. This video footage will be the perfect way to show what we do and how we do it, and I'm comfortable with using Adobe Premiere Pro for editing the footage. However, we need to add some graphic elements to show how we interpret the results, such as animations of microbial colonies on a Petri dish, and how dilution determines the limit of detection. If there was any great urgency to this I'd just sub it out to a designer, but as we have plenty of time we'd rather keep it in-house and try to learn how to do it ourselves. Can anyone recommend software that is suitable for a beginner whilst still giving professional-looking results?

Too right! It was such an awkward and tight spot to work in that at one point I thought I should have called a gynaecologist rather than a plumber...

Just donated £20 towards the updated software with (hopefully) more sophisticated gammon filtering technology.

All done, and no leaks! I bought some push-fit brass couplers this morning, but the pipework was so tight that the only angle I could get to assemble the repair fouled one of the joints (the one up by the skirting board, naturally) and it jammed half way in. B*llocks! They're not demountable, so the only option was to chop it all out and take a different approach. With time ticking on until the carpet fitters arrived I gave in and called an emergency plumber. Their idea of 'rapid response' was later this week, so I called the guys who do our lab plumbing. Two of them were round in under 20 minutes, and after a couple of hours of swearing we got it done between the three of us. They had some fancy 90 degree spanners for tightening compression fittings under the skirting, so that's what we went for. It required a bit of re-sculpting of the joist to get it to fit, so I expect the floor will collapse next... They left at 11.15h, just as the bloody carpet fitters were arriving! That caught us on the hop a bit, so I was refitting the floorboards as Vic was emptying the last few bits out of the room. Now I'm on the sofa with a mug of tea and a thumping headache. Still, it'll all be worth it once it's done, and hopefully our eldest will love his new room. Thanks so much for all your help folks - you guys are the best!

No room for mole grips, unfortunately - I think I'm going to have to cut a section of skirting board out to make some room to work, and then try to get it back together before the carpet guys arrive.

Yeah, those are the things I tried. They looked brilliant in the video, but I couldn't get them not to leak from the top.

Cheers Bender! I'll try one of the push-fit jobbies first thing in the morning when Toolstation opens: the reason I was dicking about replacing floorboards is that the carpet fitter is coming at lunchtime! I'm not sure how much play there will be in the radiator end of the pipe once I cut it, but maybe I can rig something to keep it from moving as I push the fitting on. How much space is there between the pipe ends in one of those fittings? Am I going to be able to just cut 1 cm or so out where the nail went in, or will I need two fittings and a length of pipe? It's only two inches to the elbow, so I could have quite a lot left over!

Yeah, I know what you mean... If I could find a way to cut the pipe in the joist channel I could try one of these: https://www.screwfix.com/p/tectite-sprint-copper-push-fit-equal-coupler-22mm/2442g#product_additional_details_container Trouble is I have an irrational fear of 'push-fit' - I've used the plastic ones everywhere in the lab and they're brilliant - but I can't help thinking what would happen if it decoupled itself in the ceiling... Come on professional,plumbers - put my mind at rest! And any suggestions for cutting the pipe off much appreciated as well!

Of all the pipes I could have holed, I picked the worst one: right up by the skirting board in a short piece the goes under the wall to the bathroom. There's no way to solder in a complete new pipe without either pulling the tiles off the bathroom wall or knocking a hole in the plaster on the other side. When I tried soldering the saddles on I could barely slide the soldering mat between the pipe and the one under it, so there's no chance of using those plastic speed fittings. I guess the best option would be to cut the pipe off as close to the hole as possible, desolder the other end from the elbow, and solder a new piece in with a sleeve joint. Trouble is, because I was nailing the floorboard back right up by the wall the holed section is in the channel in the joist. Christ knows how I'd cut that out, or solder a sleeve in place without setting the inside of the wall on fire...

The nail hole is in a place where there's no chance of replacing the pipe (it's in the short right-angle piece that goes under the wall to the radiator on the other side) so I made a temporary repair yesterday with a strip of rubber and a jubilee clip, which was fine. Thinking that a more permanent solution was needed I bought some of those pre-soldered repair saddles this morning. Three of the f*cking things I used - the entire combined stock of my local Screwfix and Toolstation - and every one of them leaked. In the end I de-soldered one, slathered the underside with silicone and clamped it in place with two jubilee clips. It's good for high temperature applications, apparently, and as the system only runs at 1-2 bar hopefully the pair of clips will be enough to hold it...