How to Use a Gear Puller

To Remove a Knackered Gear or Bearing Before fitting new bearings or gears onto a shaft, you must first remove the old ones and this is often difficult because many gears or bearings use what engineers call an interference fit. It’s called ‘interference’ because the two parts ‘interfere’ with each others space, i.e. one part is fractionally bigger than the space allowed for it and when the parts are pushed together under great force the resulting friction creates an incredibly tight fit. The best way to remove worn out gears …

The Power of Opposing Force

Use your own strength to break things apart You are stronger than you think! However most of your power often goes against you because your leverage simply tries to move the whole object instead. When you need to separate two pieces of timber for example, if you were to use a single wrecking or crow bar, all you’d achieve is the workpiece rolling around because you can’t adequately hold it still whilst you try to lever them apart. However, if you try the same thing with two wrecking bars, hey …

How to remove a newly laid tile…

Using a mini hooked seal pick Sometimes you need to remove a ceramic tile you’ve just laid, and boy is there a lot of suction to overcome! There are lots of reasons you might want to remove a tile you just laid; you might’ve noticed a defect in the tile, or you forgot it should be a feature tile, or you simply need to add more adhesive behind it. Wet tile adhesive is designed to be super grippy to give it ‘non-slip’ properties and this can make removing them difficult without disturbing the …

How to remove big nails easily

This tip is probably one of the first things a new carpenter or builder will learn on site when pulling out big nails during a demolition job. As you might have already found out, big nails can be pretty tough to pull out and this is all to do with the friction added by pulling the nail at the wrong angle. This can pretty much lock the nail in place and you’ll need a lot of force to wrench it free. Fortunately here is a simple solution. Using a claw …

Taking notice of stuff around you

Or not, as I found out this week….. I get asked to do all sorts of different things during the course of a working week, some familiar and a significant amount of stuff I’ve never done before. But this week I got stuck because I didn’t practice what I preach. A vertical blind was my undoing. I’ve seen them a hundred times, but obviously never really looked at them, never figured out how they work or how they go together. And what did I get asked to modify and fit …

How to mark a level line around the room accurately

Even if your spirit level is not very good. Something I was taught very early on in my building career was that spirit levels “tell lies”…. Now that was probably just my old boss talking, after I’d pointed out something he built wasn’t level, but in a way he was right. Spirit levels DO tell lies, about 0.15mm per M usually. Now that only adds up to 1.5mm in a 10m run which is not too much of a worry, but that’s when the level is brand new. After a …

Upside down fire using the top down lighting method

Turns out I’ve been lighting fires completely the wrong way my whole life! We all know the method, you place some small stuff at the bottom, then some slightly bigger stuff followed by even bigger stuff in a pile, boy scout style right? Well, no. When you do it that way the small flames from the starting kindling ends up licking around all the bigger timber higher up, smothering the flames and creating lots of smoke. Sure it gets going after making a lot of smoke, but there is a …