Since the main event of today has been an unsuccessful attempt to rehabilitate the DVD drive on Elanor's MacBook, I'll deal briefly with that and then carry on with the shafting.
Elanor has had her MacBook for around three years now, and often uses it to watch commercial DVDs, as she doesn't have a TV or DVD player. Just recently, it has stopped even recognising the disc when she puts it in. It spins it about for a bit, and then ejects it.
A bit of internet research suggested getting a drive cleaning disc, rather than embarking on expensive lab costs. This we did, and I tried using the disc today. It was fine with the drive on my MacMini, which had also started to get picky about which discs it would play, but three applications to Elanor's didn't make a lot of difference. I don't know a lot about slot drives, but I guess they must involve friction linings somewhere, and that hers have just worn out.
Rather than pay a lot to have the laptop taken apart and the drive replaced, we've just bought her an external DVD writer drive; the advent of tablets and netbooks means that there's a good choice of these on Amazon at around £30, which must be cheaper than replacing the internal drive.
So, shafts... There are two basic types, long and short. The long shaft needs to be as long as you can handle, from 10 to 14 foot. A lot of boatbuilders supply a length of basic banister rail for the long shaft, as it has a flat side on it, stopping it from rolling down the roof. The only problem with that is that they are almost always softwood, and no way has yet been found to stop them bending.
We have a 14 foot ash shaft, painted with Cuprinol, which lives on the stand at the front of the boat. However you arrange this stand, do try to make sure that you can reach the items on it from the forward well deck; after all, it's commonly a problem situation when you want to grab the shaft, and having to clamber along the gunwale to get it only adds to the stress.
In addition, we have two cabin shafts, that is eight foot ash poles with boat hook ends. One lies where you'd expect, at the stern, handy for the steerer (the name comes from the fact that on a working boat, the short shaft was kept on the roof of the accommodation at the stern of the boat).
The other we keep with the long shaft, and use it for fishing stuff out of the cut from the bow. We've also acquired a shorter shaft with a double hook on the end, which we found floating, broken, in the cut one day after some youths had been mucking about on the towpath. We keep hoping someone will recognise it and claim it, but not so far.
Also on the roof at the bow is the deck brush, and the boarding plank. Some pictures of all these:
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| The long shaft |
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| Cabin shaft at the stern |
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| Close up of hook end |
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| The complete set at the bow |
1 comment:
I had had my iMac for three years when the DVD drive ceased to function. The Mac repair man told me that the DVD drives are a mechanical part and thus do tend to fail after 3-4 years. The repair cost £140. A few weeks later my external DVD drives also started to malfunction. The cause of that puzzled him and there never was a definitive answer as to what had gone wrong. One issue though was that he thought that the drives were not properly formatted. I thought I had formatted them (with external drives the default is to a PC, Macs have to be formatted) and I then discovered that the instructions which come with an external harddrive for Mac formatting actually leave out a couple of the crucial steps. Not good for computer amateurs like me. I also learnt that Macs can be quite picky about the make of DVD and that there isn't a correlation with price. I am still trying to work out which make of DVD suits my Mac best.
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