The Guardian has one of those terribly interesting (well I think so) slightly off-the-rail economic indicator articles for dummies. It mentions quite a few different things, but this bit caught my eye in particular:

Yesterday the price of copper hit an all-time record of $8,000 a tonne, driven by frantic buying and selling by commodity brokers and futures traders. But a little-noticed fact is that every 2p piece made before 1992 is 97% copper - meaning that each coin contains 6.9g of the metal. Collect together 145 of them, and you’ve got a kilo’s worth of copper. Now, just find another 999kg, a total of 145,000 coins, and you’ve got a tonne.

On their face value, those coins are worth just £2,900. But taking them to a scrap merchant and selling them on the open market for their metal content will make you a cool £1,500 profit, especially if you throw in the 25kg of zinc that are also sitting in your goldmine of loose change.

Now this got me thinking about all those 4.5 ltr Bell’s bottles of whisky and how many full ones you’d need to get yourself a tonne of two pence pieces.

The Royal Mint has the following info regarding the coin:

Dia 25.9mm
Weight 7.12grms
Thickness 1.85mm - bronze
2.03mm - copper-plated steel

I’ve scoured the internet for answers as to how many 2ps you can fit in a 4.5 ltr whisky bottle but all to no avail. I’ve also spent the last hour trying to convert crap into other crap - also to no avail. It appears that my maths o-level isn’t really of any use; although, I have converted fishcakes into hectares.

So the question is: How do you work it out?

(Please ;-))

Maybe your elephants haven’t survived the cold spell or perhaps you didn’t complete your whittler’s badge at Scouts. None of that matters anymore as you can now make your own DIY chess set out of old (or new) nuts and bolts.

It really is a doddle. Find out how here.

Are you interested in building yourself a small press brake for use around the home?

I’m quite sure some of you are.

Anyway, here are some plans from 1958 in the form of a pdf which shows you how to go about it.

And here are the specs of the thing as specified on the Vintage Projects website:

This press brake is small-shop size, makes those clean, sharp bends in sheet metal that will delight the eye of a craftsman who has had to improvise methods of bending.

A retractable stop at the 90-deg. position permits the operator to make repetitive right-angle bends. The throat opens to 5/16 in. to admit flanged parts. All main parts except the table, or base, are made from cold-rolled stock.

From the British Stainless Steel Association comes this downloadable pdf relating to the care and maintenance of stainless steel for a wide variety of appilications.

A cleaning frequency or schedule for external or various architectural application site types is shown and covers grades 1.4016 (430) 1.4301 (304) and 1.4401 (316). The sites include rural urban and coastal (marine). Cleaning suggestions for a range of situations are made. These include routine cleaning, removal of fingerprints, oil, grease marks, water marking, light rust staining, burnt on food, tea and coffee residues, mortar (cement) splashes, heavy discolouration, paint and graffiti. The dangers of using bleach (sodium hypochlorite) and hydrochloric acid based cleaning agents (brick mortar remover) are noted.

Now this covers everything from fingerprints on your sink, to caked on grease on your cooker, to removing rust marks. It’s a bit technical, but it has a table of removal methods and another about the cleaning frequency of different grades of stainless in different atmospheric conditions.

It mentions nothing about cleaning stainless steel with baby oil to its eternal discredit.

Download Care and Maintenance of Stainless Steel pdf.

Well I think it’s only right and proper to end the week as we started it - with a new-lad Craig tale.

The poor little bugger has hardly said a word to me all week so it’s maybe time I bought him a pint or maybe a woo-woo. Perhaps an Erasure CD - who knows?

Enough of all that.

A couple of weeks ago, John took Craig out to fit a job in Burnley which involved him popping into the local industrial suppliers to get, amongst other things, some chemical fittings/anchors. (These were the chemical fittings with the vials.)

When John returned to the van, he carefully passed Craig the box containing the fittings which Craig plopped on the dashboard. John immediately berated the boy for being a bit cack-handed and told him to hold on to them.

Obviously Craig asked him why and John went into some serious spiel about them being nitrous fittings - nitrous being somehow related to TNT and that the slightest jolt could have the vials exploding due to their extreme volatility.

The next thing you know Craig was holding the box of fittings at arm’s length trying to compensate for the van seriously leaning to the left due to its suspension issues (nothing to do with Jasper having sat there for years you understand).

Not only that, but John decided to deliberately tear-arse round every mini-roundabout and take every corner as poorly as possible to see how Craig’s balance was.

According to John, Craig’s balance was fairly tip-top; it was the poor lad’s nerves that were beginning to fray, especially when John ‘accidentally’ clipped one of the larger roundabouts in Burnley centre flinging poor Craig across the cab and into the door.

Of course, John told Craig to be more careful.

By the time they reached wherever they were going, sweat was pouring from the hapless Craig and quite a bit of colour had drained from his cheeks. He simply couldn’t wait to get out of the cab and hand the explosive fittings over to John and have a fag.

However, John, being the top-notch japester that he is, took the box, and, just as Craig was lighting up his cigarette, staged a butterfingers and dropped the nitrous fittings to the floor.

This led Craig to recoil in a similar manner your average silly mid-off would staring down the barrel of a full-blooded cover drive.

[A picture paints a thousand words and all that.]

You can imagine how non-plussed young Craig was when nothing was blown to kingdom come and his cigarette had rolled off into a puddle.