Here is clever old me making lighting grooves in the roof of my building ready for the wires to appear and go down the back to the power supply.
I 'll natter about the wiring aspect of this when I start on the electrics, for now I am in the 'woodworking' stage of the build and part of this is making a mess with my little Drill Master. I have finally decided to give it its proper name instead of pretendy Dremel which is how it has been known so far. It has earned its nomenclature as I now know what it actually does.
I wrote an earlier blog about finding an unspecified bit in my kit and thinking that it was the right tool for this job but it turned out not to be so. I knew it wasn't a router but I thought it was a cutter and might do; now I have no idea what it is or does, even after trying it.
When that failed me I tipped out all these carving/engraving diamond burr bits!! I know that's what they are because the Dremel spot-the-tool poster tells me so. There are twenty of them and are often very subtly different.
I marked a line where I wanted the groove to go with a steel rule and box cutter and selected one of the very finely pointed bits. It worked OK, but one about three sizes up worked even better. It pretty much stuck to the line with only a very occasional wobble when it hit a hard bit of the MDF.
I finished off the groove with this weird and wonderful looking one which worked brilliantly.
I have no real idea of how these are supposed to be used or how long they will last hacking their way through MDF but for now I am doing cartwheels.... of the rotary variety.
For a few weeks now I have been talking to (emailing) the extremely patient and helpful Martin Butler of Small World Products Ltd discussing his great lighting system. He had read my article about my frustration with removing and replacing pins on the plugs which come with the round wiring system and suggested I might like his system better. I do before I even use it.
The solution to my frustration is his Power Centre (SW01&SW01S). This is the basic component of the system. It connects the wires from the lights and fires etc to the transformer/power supply via ten pairs of screw terminals. So instead of removing a plug, threading the wire through a hole in the house and reconnecting the plug to shove it in the wibbly wobbly power strip all you do is cut off the plugs, thread through your hole, strip the wires a little and and connect to a simple terminal. No more dancing round the room with plug pins in your teeth.
There is also a power centre with individual switches (as shown in this (bad!) photo) so you can turn things on and off individually at will if you want to.
This is a picture of the rest of the various bits of kit that I have as a starting point for Chocolat.
I'm not talking about it in detail here as I will do that when I come to actually use it, but I wanted to give you a heads up about it in case you are about to buy your wiring system for your house. Trust me - this is the way to go.
He has anything you could wish for any size project. You decide what you want to do and there will be a way to do it - simply.
This set was intended for my American house - hence the American plug in the picture, but as that has been kicked into touch, it will now move on to Chocolat.
I never thought I would say this...... I am actually looking forward to doing the wiring! Watch this space.
PS: for anyone who is a bit girly about this stuff - and that includes me - don't be put off by it looking a bit electrical/technical - it isn't it is just that most of us don't mess with stuff that looks like this. In a nutshell - you are replacing those nasty plugs and sockets with a simple bar of screws - open up a gap, insert the wire and screw it back down - just like you already do on the transformer connection - what could be easier?
