New paint job on the dome Ylab’s home at the DDO has been undergoing an extensive restoration since the spring. As scaffolding is starting to come down,  it’s looking amazing. The work has been extensive. Removing all the old lead paint without getting it in the environment. Carefully restoring all the windows to their original...

We just happened to pick this one Our recent fix-it night posts here and here seem to have a common thread: crappy Crappy Tire tools that need repairing. This week… well, we didn’t intend to pick on them. It was just the luck of the draw.   Small 12V tire compressors – the type that plugs into the cigarette lighter 12V...

Case closed. Desktop too. We posted earlier about our project to make a lockable enclosure for the reception desk of our home, the David Dunlap Observatory. We left that post with a pretty crappy picture. Protective plastic was still covering it.  Test usage showed an area for improvement. Sliding everything into place would work better...

Nose to the grindstone Last week we posted about our evening repairing crappy Crappy Tire tools. One tool  could not be fixed. Here once again is our picture of a pair of side-cutters that broke simply doing what side-cutters are supposed to do. Reminds us of the old mechanic’s joke about there being two types of tools – Snap-On...

We have a bunch tools at ylab, and some of them from Crappy Tire. We can call them that – after all, Canadian Tire fought for the use of that name. You would normally think we would be using their tools to fix other things. Nope. We had to fix the tools. This  Mastercraft drill is about 4 years old, the first 3 1/2 years being unused...

Your high-school periodic table was never this cool. UNESCO has declared 2019 to the International Year of the Periodic Table to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Mendeleev periodic table. You know, that thing you studied in high-school chemistry. Ylab member and high-school chemistry teacher Karen could not let that go unnoticed. Working...

Don’t be a hero. Many pages on the Internet tell you how to make a spot welder from a discarded microwave oven. We always thought it was a crazy idea. And then a couple of the more experienced ylab members told us it made sense and would not result in electrocution or being nuked into a medium-rare meat sack. That explains some of the...