Solution: I wanted to fix the hose to one of the rocker shaft studs as a more secure solution but couldn’t find a suitable hose clamp with an appropriate drilling. Hence this:

Step one: Source a small brass tee, 4mm O.D, and some nitrile rubber hose to suit (eBay for both, £5 delivered).

Step two: Find something to clamp to the stud that can be bonded to the tee. I found that a solder terminal for an earth strap worked quite well.

Step three: Some two-part epoxy adhesive like Araldite does the trick. Here I used their ‘Rapid Steel’ offering which comes out looking a little like metal and is good for bonding most metals.

Step four: Fill the terminal with enough mixed-up adhesive to not spill out when the tee is pressed into it.

Step five: Press the tee into the terminal, making sure that it’s level and straight.

Step six: Support the items until they set. For Araldite Rapid this needed 45 mins undisturbed. For non-rapid types I believe it’s 24h.

Step seven: Fit to the engine! Happy with this. The tee holds the hose just clear of the rocker cover, and the short hose lengths either side don’t allow it to droop on the manifolds.

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Solution: I had no tools besides a knife and no spare hose, but DID have a small can of WD40 in the boot. 

After cutting the melted ends off both pieces of the existing hose, and cutting a 30mm peice of the WD40 can nozzle, I softened the hose over the exhaust and pressed in the nozzle. A test blow though the spliced hose showed it would allow the vacuum advance to operate and all was well for the remaining 150miles home.

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Solution: I don’t remember where now, but somewhere I saw a rigging screw (sometimes called a Turnbuckle). They are available in a load of sizes, lengths and materials from chandlers (sailing suppliers). So I used one of these to solve the problem. I then went on to sell them for a while on eBay under the name Mere Components.

Type: The type I chose for this job has two ‘jaw’ ends which usually come with a removable pin. Other types of end available are hook, eye (round and oval) and swage, so be specific when ordering.

Size: Rather fortunately there’s a commonly available 8mm size. It has M8 threads, 8mm pin and 8mm clearance drilling in the Jaw, and the Jaw gap is also 8mm which suits the flange on a Lucas A127 alternator which you’re probably using… right?

Material: Given that Turnbuckles are used in sailing, many are available in marine-grade stainless steel. Galvanised steel is available but… nope.

Modifying  an ‘off the shelf’ turnbuckle: The alternator-end can be used as-is, bolted to the alternator with a stainless M8 bolt, nyloc nut and washers. See the following image:

The other end needs to attach to the head via one of the water pump housing bolts. This is a 5/16″ bolt which is near-as-dammit 8mm, so perfect for the 8mm clearance hole in the Jaw. To avoid having to use a longer than standard bolt, and fouling the water temperature sender attachment, one half of the Jaw should be cut / ground off. I found that a new hacksaw blade, and several passes over a bench-grinder made a nice neat Job of it. See pic:

Finally, the two nuts that came with the turnbuckle I bought were very weedy, so I found a ‘normal’ sized stainless M8 nut, and a reverse-threaded one, to replace them with. There are not nylocs, so two 5/16 fibre washers are performing locking duty.

Here’s a pic showing the whole thing installed:

These pics are courtesy of Roy Lacey, showing the one I made for his GT6 as a prototype years back.

Side-note: I see that Quiller Triumph still have these listed as for sale at £32! Goodness… they used to buy them off me a few at a time for about£10 or something back in 2008, crazy. Here’s one of my old photos that they’ve ‘borrowed’ it seems for their website:

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Problem: I’ve updated some Name Server records on a domain and I want to check they’ve propagated using Dig. When I dig mydomain.com ns I keep getting the old results.

Solution: The local DNS cache on the machine needs to be cleared. As far as the OS is concerned, it’s already looked up that domain name and doesn’t need to do a fresh lookup until the domain record’s TTL (time to live) has expired.

On OS X 10.11 El Capitan there are two things needed. Firstly clearing the Directory Service cache and secondly forcing mDNSResponder to restart. This can be done using two commands in Terminal¹:

$ dscacheutil -flushcache
$ sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

A Nice Quick Alias: But really… who’s going to remember that? So I’ve added an alias to make it easier. Aliases are added (amongst other places) to your user’s .bash_profile² file. To edit your bash profile file, open it with the following command in terminal¹:

$ nano ~/.bash_profile

Then once nano (the text editor) is open, add the following line to the file:

alias flushdns='dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder;say -v Zarvox dee enn es flushed'

To save the file, press Control (ctrl) + x and follow the prompts.
Once this is saved, load the changes you’ve made into your current terminal session with the command:

$ source ~/.bash_profile

Now when you type flushdns in terminal, your caches will be cleared! woo!

Tips:
1. The quickest way to open Terminal (or anything actually) is to use Spotlight. Press the Command (cmd) + Space keys, and type ‘Terminal’ in the resulting input, then press Return / Enter.
2. If your bash profile doesn’t exist, it might be empty when you type the nano command above. This is ok, when you Control (ctrl) + x after adding the line, the new file will be created.
3. When opening the bash profile file, I used ~/ before the file name. This is to ensure that it opens the profile file of the user you’re currently logged in as.
4. You might notice the ‘say’ command in the alias. This uses the built-in Mac OS text-to-voice engine to say “DNS flushed” in a robotic voice… just getting y’all used to it for the robot uprising

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Solution: I borrowed a good (Digital Snap-On… oh my…) Torque Wrench from a mechanic mate to test mine against. Here’s the method that worked for me:

Step 1: I set the Draper to 50NM. It’s a bit of a rubbish adjuster so had to make a best guess.

Step 2: The Draper is 1/2″ drive and Snap-On is 3/4″. I have more 3/4″ sockets than 1/2″, so I looked for one that would fit the square end of the Draper as though it’s a bolt or nut. Turned out to be a 15mm 12-point one:

Might be a bit hard to imagine what I mean about using the 3/4″ socket on the 1/2″ drive, so here’s a pic: 

Step 3: Now I set both wrenches to ‘ratchet’ anti-clockwise, i.e. The way it usually is to tighten stuff! I also set the Snap-On to 60NM so it would NOT beep/vibrate when the Draper clicked (hopefully) but would save the max torque measurement. I then placed the wrenches parallel to each other, offset slightly, and squeezed the two handles together until the Draper clicked. ‘Gripping’ the two levers together like this allows for great control. As soon as the Draper clicked I slack off, and the Snap-On’s display stays on the highest torque reading. In my case it read 55NM, so my Draper was over-reading by 5NM!

Step 4: To adjust the Draper a small brass cover screw had to be removed:
… and under this is a hex/Allen head adjuster. Turning clockwise reduces the reading, anti-clockwise increases it. I found a 180° clockwise turn made the Draper read between about 49.5 to 50.5NM. Seemed about as accurate as I could get:
The end… done, I’m happy enough with that now. I tried several other settings and the draper is now reading about 1% over / under.

Notes: This technique does work with a non-digital Torque Wrench as the test device. You just need to hope the ‘clicks’ are quite distinctive

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-bash-4.2$

What I want is for it to show something like:

username@server:/current/path$

Solution: The bash prompt can be customised via a profile script, ideally anything that loads when you log in like ‘.bash_profile’, ‘.bashrc’ or ‘.profile’. If one of these files doesn’t already exist in your home directory (check with ls -la ~ to list the contents) then create one. Here is an example of creating, editing and loading a login script to show a better prompt.

Step 1: Create the file and open it for editing.

$ touch ~/.bash_profile
$ nano ~/.bash_profile

Notes:
– Deciding which file to create probably depends on your OS flavour. Maybe Google it? I searched for “centos 6 user login script” and found that when using an “interactive login shell” these two files are read: ‘.bash_profile’ and ‘.profile’.
– `touch` creates the file with owner and permissions given to the currently logged-in user.
– `nano` is a nice easy to use text editor. If it’s not available, try `vim`, or if you hate yourself use `vi` and spend 30 mins googling the correct commands to save and exit the file again.

Step 2: Add the following to the file, then save it.

export PS1="\u@\h:\w$ "

Notes:
– An explanation of the special characters that can be used with the prompt can be found under ‘PROMPTING’ on the bash man page. But for brevity:
‘u’ = username of current user.
‘h’ = the hostname up to the first ‘.’.
‘w’ = the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde.

Step 3: Make the change take effect.
Just logging-out and logging-in again should show your changes. Maybe a more solution is to load the script again with the following command:

$ source ~/.bash_profile

Notes:
– If this has no effect, it might be that ‘.bashrc’ or ‘.profile’ should have been used for your server.

Result: On my server, when logged in right now I get the following:

ben@myhost:~/httpdocs/wp$

which is much better than:

-bash-4.2$

Any questions?

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Solution: Whilst these diaphragms are available (well, Mini ones are and they look pretty similar) I don’t want to spend £70 on a pair of new ones. Wife had an old summer wetsuit she didn’t want which looked perfect!

Step 1: Cut the wetsuit into several flat pieces (I advise cutting along the inner thigh; leg sections are quite wide when opened-out) then trace roughly around the old diaphragm with a sharpie. Thin neoprene is more stretchy than the original rubber so I cut two pieces to glue together, and also cut about 10mm inside the drawn outline to try and accommodate for the extra tension needed.

Step 2: Using a contact adhesive, spread a thin covering of glue on both pieces and let it become touch-dry. Then press both pieces together and place some weight on the centre of the two glued-together pieces BUT don’t apply weight to the eight ‘lugs’ at the edges where the holes will go. A large log worked here, but you might find a plant pot more suitable. Leave for a few hours, but not too long because…

Step 3: gently peel the two sides of each of the eight lugs apart enough to insert a washer. If the previous glue application has been left too long to set, a scalpel might need to be used to encourage the sides to part. Once both sides are pulled apart and – neoprene being fairly floppy as it is – gaping open, apply glue to both inner sides again, and both sides of a washer. Let them air dry.

Step 4: Place the washer in the sort-of pocket that’s been created by the two sides of the lug, and make sure it’s in deep enough to allow some neoprene to be stuck directly together all the way around it. Then when done for all eight lugs, DO apply weight to the whole surface, maybe with two gurt sheets of wood. Leave to set nicely for 24h.

Step 5: Punch the holes out the middle of the washers. I literally used a 5mm parallel punch into a piece of hardwood.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but at this stage the new diaphragm looks like this:

Step 6: Fit it!

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<?php if(shopp('category','hascategories')): ?>
  <?php while(shopp('category','subcategories')): ?>
    //display stuff
  <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

…displays all subcast AND their subcats.

Fix: I decided to add a new tag, called shopp(‘subcategory’, ‘depth’) that would return the category depth. That way in the loop above this would show only immediate children:

<?php if(shopp('category','hascategories')): ?>
  <?php while(shopp('category','subcategories')):
    $depth = shopp('subcategory', 'depth', 'return=true');
    if($depth!=0):
      continue;
    endif; ?>
   //else display stuff
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Adding the new tag in Shopp 1.1: Open the theme’s functions.php file and add this:

add_filter('shopp_tag_category_depth','return_cat_depth',10, 3);
add_filter('shopp_tag_subcategory_depth','return_cat_depth',10, 3);
function return_cat_depth($result, $options, $Category) {
 return $Category->depth;
}

Adding the new tag in Shopp 1.2 and 1.3+: Open the theme’s functions.php file and add this:

add_filter('shopp_themeapi_collection_depth','lookup_my_depth',10, 3);
function lookup_my_depth ($result, $options, $Category) {
 $ancestors = get_ancestors($Category->id, 'shopp_category' );
 return(count($ancestors));
}

…once that’s added, shopp(‘subcategory’, ‘depth’) can be used anywhere in the Shopp templates.

Solution: The local DNS cache on the machine needs to be cleared. As far as the OS is concerned, it’s already looked up that domain name and doesn’t need to do a fresh lookup until the domain record’s TTL (time to live) has expired.

On OS X Yosemite there are two name resolution caches that need emptying, Multicast DNS and Unicast DNS. They can be cleared / emptied / flushed using two commands in Terminal:

sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache
sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches

A Nice Quick Alias: But really… who’s going to remember that? So I’ve added an alias to make it easier. Aliases are added (amongst other places) to your user’s .bash_profile file. To edit your bash profile file, open it with the following command in terminal:

nano ~/.bash_profile

Then once nano (the text editor) is open, add the following line to the file:

alias flushdns='sudo sh -c "discoveryutil mdnsflushcache; discoveryutil udnsflushcaches"'

To save the file, press Control (ctrl) + x and follow the prompts.
Once this is saved, load the changes you’ve made into your current terminal session with the command:

source ~/.bash_profile

Now when you type flushdns in terminal, your caches will be cleared! woo!

Tips:
1. The quickest way to open Terminal (or anything actually) is to use Spotlight. Press the Command (cmd) + Space keys, and type ‘Terminal’ in the resulting input, then press Return / Enter.
2. If your bash profile doesn’t exist, it might be empty when you type the nano command above. This is ok, when you Control (ctrl) + x after adding the line, the new file will be created.
3. When opening the bash profile file, I used ~/ before the file name. This is to ensure that it opens the profile file of the user you’re currently logged in as.

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Solution: Nipped down to the Pound Shop and bought an assorted selection of hearing-aid button cell batteries for a quid! Taping four AG3’s together with Sellotape or Electrical Tape didn’t make a good enough electrical connection between the cells. Turns out a piece of Heat Shrink tubing, placed over all 4, then gently shrank (shrunk?) with a lighter forces the cells together nicely! After this is done, trim the top and bottom of the tubing to make sure the battery contacts are able to make connection.

Pics: Below you can see the homemade battery from top and bottom. Under there’s a pic of the ‘proper’ one.

Longterm Use: I’ve been using this solution for a year and the batteries have just run out. I was using 4 AG3 type button cells, but any 1.5v types that are small enough to fit in the Key Fob case would be fine. This time around I’m using a ‘proper’ one from eBay – part 4/393 – as I had more time to order it.

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