Requirements

• Easy to put on and take off
• will spread lubricant evenly on the chain
• cost effective

The basic idea I came up with was to place a rag on the chain with oil flowing onto it at a slow rate, the oil would spread over the rag and onto the chain. This is how I built it.

I had intended to attach it either by using the rear stand thread but I didn’t have any bolts that size, but I found a piece of wood would very happily wedge into the swing-arm very tightly. I took an off cut, drilled a hole through it at 9mm then applied a piece of 10mm threaded rod to it (installed the thread into the wood very happily, the threaded rod was tightly stuck in there.

An ‘arm’ was needed to reach down to the chain, so another off cut was attached with a couple washers and bolts. This also meant I could adjust the angle to suit when on the bike.

Then I built the oiling base itself, I made two because the first one wasn’t large enough to be drilled again for the second rod. Basically its a small off cut with a 5m hole drilled in it for the hose.

Inserting the oil flow tube.

The “oiling system” is a folded up rag. I kept the rag and the block the width of the chain to keep the oil where it should be.

I used electrical tape to keep it on. Electrical tape works here because of its ability to stretch. whilst it doesn’t stick to the wood etc. It’s basically working like a rubber-band in this instance.

Its looking good here, but because I cant really attach it to anything I remade it slightly larger, The threaded rod is the second arm between the first and the base, I used threaded rod again so I could adjust the distance.

This is the full mount set. The small block on the right is the wedge for the swing arm, then there is the arm that goes down to the chain. Then the rod that goes inwards to the right distance to place the oiling block where it should be. Bolts for Africa to keep everything in place.

Installed on the bike:

I was a little surprised at how sturdy it is. you would expect with wood, tape, bolts, threaded rod, and something that’s just wedged into the swing-arm to be quite fragile, but its pretty solid.

At the other end of the tube is an adapter I had made earlier for a standard soft drink bottle. I drilled a hole that was 1m too small and  used a small off cut of another tube to make the base. some hot glue to seal and then inserted the smaller tube. I didn’t have any hose clamps handy so used some 20 gauge wire to make my own clamp sort of thing. works well

So now I have my oil input ready. for testing its just sitting in the pillion foot peg.

Ideally I will have a small, thin, seal-able tube that has a screw thread on both ends that I can use to put the right amount of oil in, and maybe it has a gauge so I can see how fast its draining etc. but for now; the top of a sprite bottle will do.

So I put some oil in the “reservoir” and let it flow through. the tube thickness and oil viscosity control the rate at which oil gets onto the chain. and it was flowing through the tube at about 1cm per second, which was perfect. The oil goes through the rag and onto the chain as expected. I am a bit slow here, I was too busy taking pictures and musing to start rotating the wheel which is why that small drop is on the bottom. the idea is you pour the oil in and go for a ride around the street to drain it. Today I just tilted the bike on the stand and manually rolled the wheel, this worked just as well.

Full system off the bike (excluding reservoir)

Overall, this was a resounding success. It does everything I wanted for very little cost (I had everything already) Its not too fragile, its not too bulky, and it actually works!

Possible improvements

• I would like a better ‘wedge’ system perhaps some sort of clamp that fits on the underside of the swingarm
• I should remake it with a better material than wood
• I need to build a better tube style reservoir

I present to you, the Grass Cutter Mk II

So a list of upgrades/changes

A new handle, taped up to keep it safter and secure. inside this is a lightswitch embedded in the wood for off/on and the control board.

A new adjustable angle handle, I can loosen the bolt and change the angle so if its not really comfortable where it is, I can change it.

The engine is now parrallel to the ground, much more ‘mower-like’ less ‘weed strimmer-like’.  Also I removed the rubber as it wasnt providing any vibration releif and was just making it smelly. The strimmer line (orange twine) is also attached in a more reliable way: I threaded it through a drilled hole in the shaft head, then tied a double knot on each side so it cant pass through either direction.

And a new height setting/adjustment pole. there will be a wheel on here soon, I tried a couch floor knob but it doesnt slide very well. The point of this is to make it easier to push around rather than having to manually hold it at a certain height. although doesnt mean you cant flip it upside down and go manual if you want to do edges etc.

I planted a lawn out the back of the property where the gardener couldnt get to without a key so I needed something to cut the grass. My lawn mower is a bit pre-occupied and my weed-wacker was wacked. So in the usual recycling manner I made my self the

Graminoids De-lengthener Mk I

Wow look at that, badly thrown together lense flare, a fluro background. This thing HAS to be awesome.

To be honest, the only reason I am calling it MK I  it because its rather hastily assembled and has some design uglies, I’ll probably never rebuild it because it works, and thats all I care about.

So I started with an old hand mixer/blender motor I had lying about, and thought about strapping it to a peice of wood, without anything else more suitable I made a sort of wooden vice with two threaded steel rods and 4 bolts. This worked really well!

I basically just nailed the control board onto the length of wood for now, holds fine, but I had to wire up a switch. In the interim I have some twine nailed to the board, going over the switch with another small peice of rubber, then round a nail and back to the top of the board for a lever.

I also attached some twine to the end of the engine so I could cut some grass. simple; effective.

bill of components

* engine: from a hand blender like: * a bunch of wood I recycled out of an old couch.

* about a 1/4 of some threaded steel I bought a while back
* a 6cm bolt for the lever
* 5 bolts
* cut mains cable I had left from another project.
* some weed wacker twine for the controller and the cutting part.

(goto part 2 -> )

1. Make your own online quiz with PHP easily

Make your own online quiz with PHP easily

Disclaimer: All care No Responsibility. you follow the instructions provided at your own risk. I take no responsibility any damage you may cause. Please read the article in full before starting

I thought it would be fun to make a little quiz the other day and it was pretty simple, so I thought I would share it.
Basically, using post, if / else and some radio buttons you can make a simple quiz that looks good and is pretty easy to create and update.
the quiz runs in a single page, so first thing I do is to see if the quiz has already been taken by checking a post variable specifically for this purpose.

?php
if($_POST['done'] != 1 )
{?;
so now I know its not a completed quiz, so I start asking questions. for the purpose of this I am going to only use 2 questions.
I am going to open up a form, posting to the same page and then use radio buttons to set individual variables which I have called opvar2 and opvar1

form action="quiz.php" method="post" /;
Do you use a terminal?
input type="radio" name="opvar1" value="1"; Yes
input type="radio" name="opvar1" value="0"; No


how many domains do you manage?
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="0"; I don't
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="1"; 1
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="2"; 2
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="3"; 3
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="4"; 4
input type="radio" name="opvar2" value="5"; 5 or more

OK so we have two variables opvar2 and opvar1 with corresponding values eg, ’2′ and ’4′ we need to close this form off and give it a submit button but we add in one more variable so we can identify whether or not this page has been submitted or not.

input type="hidden" name="done" value="1"/;
input type="submit" value="Submit...."/;
/form;
All the questions are primed and ready to go, pressing the submit button will refresh the page posting the results to itself. So now we need to look at that and do something with it!

?php
} else {
$lopvar2=$_POST['opvar2'];
$lopvar1=$_POST['opvar1'];

$total = $lopvar2 + $lopvar1;
print $total;
}
?;

So if the page is returning stuff in post, we go straight down to this last ELSE statement, pickup the variables and add them, for now it just posts them plainly but later I will demonstrate how to use a ‘if / else’ statement to get some nicer results!

Here is the full quiz I made

And its source code

I have worked on the Life of Riley comic code for a while and realised its a good base for anyone else to use for their own webcomic. its really simple and should be easy enough to modify to suit your webcomic with some simple HTML stuff.

Here it is on sourceforge

Here it is to download now

I have added on this version to include a basic mysql table to pull the titles out since they were not printed on the images, I recommend you print the comic titles (if you are naming them) on the images but if thats not feasible then here is the additional code to pull from a mysql database. it should be quite straightforward. I feed the request the $titleid which comes from the URL eg /comic.php?strip=1
mysql_connect('localhost or mysql.yourdomain.com','yourusername','yourpassword');
@mysql_select_db('databasename') or die( "err1");

$query="SELECT * FROM titles";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$title=mysql_result($result,$titleid,"title");

mysql_close();

Here is an SQL file of the table to get you started

The only major flaw is currently you need to update the end # of the comics if your comics list is dynamic, mine is static so it doesnt need to change.  a simple way of doing this could be instead of

comic.php

$lastcomic = "100";

create a new file called end.php which you update as you go

comic.php

//$lastcomic = "100"; commented out not useing this anymore
@include end.php;

end.php

$lastcomic = "616";

And now you can edit that end.php as you update. It would be much smarter to use Mysql for this as it would be a really simple call to find out the end but I wanted this comic to be flat and not to require SQL