The Shed team is taking a few weeks’ holiday from the work computer and heading to the beach shed for some kickback time.
So. Merry Christmas and have a wonderful summer holiday to all our readers, followers, and fans. Enjoy this special extra time in your workshops and we will be back posting projects again mid to late January.
Have fun, be good and be careful out there.
It splits wood and rock, it severs roots, it levers…it slams. The Slammer may be a literally ground-breaking tool to work with, but the manually operated device is a rare creature in the thriving high-tech landscape of new DIY tools.
Developed by TJ Irvin, a globe-trotting American who settled by Lake Hawea more than a decade ago and handcrafted by one of the oldest engineering firms in the country, Templeton & Sons, the Slammer is an unusual piece of kit any manual worker needing a bit of extra grunt should consider trying.
The 9 kg, two-piece Slammer developed by Irvin uses the impact of a solid, high-tensile steel rod rammed down a length of pipe by the operator. This provides the momentum to ram the attached blade into—and through—the sort of material most people hire a jackhammer to deal with. Other attachments turn it into a fence-hole rammer and a compacter for foundation work. As TJ describes it, the slammer/rammer multipurpose tool is a combination of a crowbar, axe, spade, mattock and sledgehammer all in one. Made in New Zealand.
The family gathering around the wireless to listen to the Friday evening programme may be a thing of the distant past but the beauty of those old valve-driven radios lives on in the dedicated work of Retro Radios.
Based in Dannevirke, Alister Ramsay works from an assortment of sheds, a garage and a container lovingly restoring old valve radios and radiograms. In a workshop redolent of the glory days of the 1940s to the 1960s, with nostalgic posters for Life magazine and a smattering of old cameras – another hobby is collecting old cameras – Alister works to a background of smooth jazz issuing from a variety of beautifully restored valve radios producing warm-toned music to set the mood.
In my first two articles about the rebuild of a bitser 1952-ish AJS 500 motorcycle, I outlined how I welded a broken cast-iron cooling fin on the motor, checked the magneto ignition and got the head repaired.
I also described what I had learnt about nickel plating (using surplus nickel welding rods and then nickel tape) so that I could make a relatively cheap substitution for chromium, eg on pushrod cover tubes and bolt heads.
Nickel plating was also used to build up a worn kick-starter shaft as a part approach to stopping the kick-start from jamming; I also ground back a couple of teeth on the starter quadrant gear.
My bitser’s gearbox
The gearbox is a Burman CP type, used on many English bikes, with a code G45 L47 stamped on it.
The L in the code refers to the month of assembly, so November.
47 is the year: 1947. So this would have gone into a bike probably in 1948. (My claim to be rebuilding a 1952 AJS looks shakier.)
The Shed magazine is eclectic, informed, and always fascinating. Aimed at those with a few tools and perhaps a few clues: this is the magazine for real sheddies.
Packed with ideas, projects, advice, and peeks into other people’s sheds providing inspiration, ideas, and techniques, or just for the sheer enjoyment of the sheddie’s endless inventiveness, The Shed is the project enthusiast’s bible.
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