Babushka

More toys to fix, this time a broken pivot hinge on a doll's house. The two year old got her paws on the door and off it came. The trouble was a snapped hinge, which had been made out of uber-thin wood dowels (0.05"). The top hinge had parted leaving a stub in the door and an empty socket in the door casing ( the bottom hinge is shown below).

The quick fix was to drill out the remaining dowel in the door and replace it with brass rod. The sockets were 0.08" so 1/16"rod would do, or 1.5mm. A foot of 1/16" was duly purchased and a 7mm length cut. The socket in the casing was deep enough for the rod to be pushed up into it and then held with a strip of card while the door was replaced. The card was removed and the rod dropped down into the socket in the top of the hinge stile forming the hinge and locking the door back into place.

JOB DONE

Batteries Galore!

One of the first things out of the pile and onto the bench, I mean desk, was yet another battery powered toy. It seems that every other toy needs to flash and beep, the consequence of which is that the house eats AA batteries by the handful. We had brought a recharger from Pkgreen that should have been able to deal with standard alkaline cells, but it didn't. However it does work with rechargeables even if the screen is partly broken now.

With this in mind I decided to cease feeding the house's habit and buy in a chunk of rechargeables in one go to provide a maintenance dose of AA power. A search on t'internet led me to the eBay website  of RechargeableBatteries.co.uk who had 40 2000mAh Sanyo Eneloop batteries on offer for £65. These are low self-discharge batteries which should be good for the low-use low-drain toys that are scattered around the house. As I'm always a bit wary buying off the web and the eBay shop has only been running since 17/12/10 a quick Whois gave the domain registrant as Supreme Imports who, according to their website, is the largest battery distributor in the world) so that's OK then.

Batteries arrived within 4 days of ordering. JOB DONE.

Did someone say Project?

We are supposed to be having a major clear out of the junkyard that is the kid’s playroom. As is to be expected this should generate small fix-it jobs on a large scale . It would if it was being done with any speed, that is, but the Major is far too busy to progress her first project of the New Year. Hence it can be carried out at my more reasoned and logical pace, which also happens to be quite a bit more leisurely…

Anyhoo the first quarter of the room (also the one which the least in it) yielded enough floor space to fit another small desk into the room. I managed to swing it past the Major on the grounds that the current ‘70s office surplus desk could be used as messy/craft area for the kids  (ie code for a small scale indoor workbench for me,  mwhah-ha-ha-hah!).

At the moment the world and his wife are ditching their computer desks when they get a laptop and they are frequently available on Freecycle. As I am of a functional/utilitarian bent I don’t care what it looks like just as long as it fits into the space  and does the job so that suits me. A day later we had a perfectly reasonable pine corner desk. Result.