Monday, July 26, 2010 8:27:17 AM
Here, for no very good reason that I can think of, is a picture of the Maruia Falls. I had to steal this from harlequin.co.nz because the one I took got lost somewhere in the dusty innards of my computer. The Maruia Falls are très pretty but that isn't why we send all our visitors there. It's because in 1928 they weren't. In 1928 they were just a plain common-or-garden scenic river.
Still Glides the Stream and Shall Forever Glide (1), until the 17th June 1929 that is, when, after a few days of the locals hearing what they thought were aberrant deer stalkers in the hills, there was a mighty cataclysm and the Mairua River suddenly broke in half and dropped nine feet ten-and-a-ninth inches. (That would be three metres, Mr Hague, though frankly I feel your espousal of these narsty - ew -
French measurements borders on the philistine.) This is an altogether more satisfying earthquake than the ones where a picture goes slightly askew in a housing estate on the outskirts of Peterborough, even if a clutch of people have to get buried in landslides for it to happen. We haven't had an earthquake for a while and therefore I suppose we ought to expect one. Pleasingly the estate agents have all bought houses for themselves on the Richmond Hills which command a view over Nelson bay, not thinking about the fact that the Richmond Hills only exist because occasionally they shoot upwards three metres at a time.
Below the Richmond Hills are the Saxton Playing Fields crammed of a Saturday morning with all the Nelson schools' sports clubs, and it falling to my duty to endure a van-load of the truly mindless conversation of my daughter's hockey team, I thought I would skip spectating for an hour and drop in unannounced on James or Nigel or Sam, who all live conveniently nearby waiting, no doubt, for a hearty terrestrial shaking to land a selection of startled estate agents in their midst.
To James McLeod's. James's neighbour was washing his car and had mistakenly thought the entire neighbourhood wanted to hear his choice of what purports to be Music but in fact James, unable to bear the din, had gone out. James is of Scottish descent and, I hope, about to take up the bagpipes by way of retribution.
To Sam McEachern's. There stood his blue recumbent on the verandah with its new seat upholstery but there was no sign of Sam nor indeed of any of his neighbours, so perhaps he had spent the morning giving James some preparatory bagpipe lessons.
To Nigel Schroder's. No neighbour, no Music, but no Nigel either. And there stood Nigel's new low racer, gleaming in his shed, so obv. they weren't all off secretly riding up the Richmond Hills together.
Nigel's new machine is a front wheel drive with a swinging bottom bracket. I knew he'd finished it because he sent me film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG5okNSvpTY of him riding it and he seems to be more in control of it that I ever was of the one I made, which after it whacked me in the side of the head got punished with a hacksaw.
However in the evening I had a doleful email:
Well the roll down - at Marsden Valley, the same place we did the last test - didn't quite go as well as planned. The old bike had topped out at 55kph and on the first run the new bike was faster at 58kph but I had to use the brakes a little to regain control as it started to wobble .
On the second run things went a little wrong. I crashed at about 50-55kph.
Fell from the bike and slid down the road a little then into a creek hitting some very large rocks on the way. My helmet was completely destroyed. James drove me home, then we went to the hospital where I spent the next 7 hours being checked. X-rays and a CT scan. Luckily nothing was broken. Feeling very sorry for myself today. As for the bike it's ok but it's the last time I'll ride it as a moving bottom bracket, so I think it'll get a rebuild and I'll go back to having a boom and a twist chain FWD. The moving bottom bracket was just too unpredictable. The speedo had a 55kph max after the crash and I hadn't got to the fastest section of the run.
Nigel
My daughter Susan gaily said 'If he keeps the broken bits he can call it Schroder's Cat, cos it can be a crashed and an uncrashed bike at the same time,' which stunningly obscure joke can only be understood by quantum physicists one of whom I am not.
Anyway as - surprisingly - there was no gravel rash we can't twin him with Bob Knight, and as there were no broken bones we can't twin him with Geoff Bird. But there were bruises everywhere and he's very sore so we can twin him with oh, just about everybody else in the recumbent-building fraternity, I should imagine.
1. Wordsworth who is famous, or Arthur Streeton who ought to be famouser.
Saturday, July 10, 2010 9:33:32 AM
It is Winter. (Have I mentioned this?) It is cold. The moth that fluttered round the kettle this morning seemed out of sorts as if he'd prefer to have stayed in bed for a few more months like a teenager. He resented being captured in cupped hands and when I chucked him out of the kitchen door and he was instantly plucked from the air by a fantail, I saw he had a point. New Zealand possesses these tiny birds just like blue-tits who flutter a yard away wherever you walk, on the lookout for disturbed insects. As soon as they take to flight you just know in your bones that they are called fantails; and so it proves. Fantails are not very clever and whenever they come into the workshop they spend hours attacking themselves in the mirror and perching, slightly baffled, on the badminton racquet below for a rest. The Maoris tell me it's bad luck to have them indoors and that's true, because a month later you find they've been dropping corrosive white chemical onto your supply of silver steel. Chickens are not the only bird that don't just lay eggs.
My workshop is full of anomalies like badminton racquets but the mirror isn't an anomaly. It's used for checking one's riding position while building useless fairings, and it makes the workshop twice as roomy, except now it doesn't because I cover it with a garish pink tablecloth to stop the fantail despoiling all my reamers. Why does anyone go to the trouble of making pink tablecloths? My life is full of mystery, including where the pink tablecloth came from. Another mystery is why my cycling tee-shirt has to have a large plastic tab sewn onto it bearing the legend Eden Project. I thought the Eden Project was about recycling and sustainability and whatnot. Large red plastic tabs cannot be recycled, add weight, serve no purpose, and itch. It is as if clothes designer executives have a group session every Monday morning to decide what brainless irrelevancy they can perpetrate upon an insentient and gormless public that week. What they need to do is take lessons from bicycle manufacturer executives, who, as we all know, have group sessions every Monday morning to decide how to make components that work flawlessly and are compatible with all other components. That is how Shimano Index Systems work so well, and why I fitted one to my new perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle.
Unfortunately it didn't work.
Unfortunately the inner chainring needs a whisker of clearance against the frame so that you can turn the pedals round, and unfortunatelyer Shimano's executives didn't think of this on their Monday morning group session so when I tried to fit a front mech I found that the parallelogram frame is actually too short to lift the chain onto the big chainring. And to rummage for alternatives in the box of spare front mechs I had to move the bandsaw and the table promptly broke off, examination proving the attachment lugs to be made of some flimsy brittle substance approximating to metal but possessed of No Strength Whatever.
Shards of bandsaw
And two minutes later a temporary German damsel (1) came round the corner wheeling a bicycle with a broken chain-link.
Shards of chain
But at least she had the great good sense to keep the chain. The last time I heard of a chain-link breaking was in a phone call from a friend in the village where we lived in England and he had thrown the chain away, being unacquainted with the phrase 'weakest link'. The curious thing was that he was a certain Professor H********, head of department at the largest university engineering faculty in the country. I now start to wonder if his special field of research incorporated bandsaw table lugs, tee-shirt technology and the corrosive metallurgy of bird-lime. I don't think he was a consultant at the Shimano Front Mech Factory.
1. She goes back to Germany in ten day's time, slightly chilled and probably exhausted from skiing
Saturday, June 19, 2010 10:58:08 AM
B*llocks it's cold. When I say it of course I am referring to the ambient temperature, not to It, which might be implied by a wilful misreading of the proximity of 'B*llocks' to 'it's cold.' Mind, if we're going into intimate details, cycling along the West Bank Road does tend to chill certain contiguous organs, and since they then all shrink to the size of something that can be comfortably concealed by the next fullstop, I shall have to stop automatically deleting those helpful emails from Daina Yukiko Devinehlq offering me Our enlargement pills can show you, has the are recently. The West Bank Road gets no sun in winter and you can always find plenty of black ice which yields one of winter's pleasures, viz., boy racing. You indulge in wheelspins and skids and doughnuts all manner of exciting road adventures and yesterday I suddenly noticed in my little mirror that I was being followed by a big 4WD ute. It was driving *very* cautiously. I think he'd spotted what I was doing, and abruptly realised he was in some danger if he drove at normal ute speeds. He didn't overtake for ages, not till we reached a bit of dry road that had been warmed by the sun.
Cold, so time to do a little perfectly good mountain bicycle hacksawing. Sometimes I hacksaw to harvest bottom bracket shells and sometimes I hacksaw to get steering tubes and sometimes I hacksaw out of curiosity to see if the builder inexplicably filled all the frame tubes with molten lead or whether there's some other explanation for outrageous weight.
Mountain bicycles have the two advantages that people are constantly throwing them away and that they don't use obscure British 1940s BB threads and that you get cantilever stubs off them, so that's three advantages, and that they yield long cage rear mechs, so that's four.
Here is a Useful Tip for new cheapskate recumbent builders: always get perfectly good ladies' mountain bicycles in preference to perfectly good gentlemen's mountain bicycles. None of the parts will be worn out. Not even the chain. Ladies have no idea at all how gears work, so though their bike may boast fifteen of them, only one gear will ever have been used in its whole life. Once top gear has been achieved the lady will labour slowly along with her kneecaps popping, and being unaware of the possibilities of going back into a lower gear, will regard the bicycle balefully at the end of the ride and thereafter select the car for all future journeys. After seven years her husband will undrape the dust-laden blanket from it and put the machine, with crumbling brittle tyres and slightly rusty cables but otherwise intact, on the trailer and take it to the local Household Refuse Recycling Centre to be crushed into a skip. And here is another Useful Tip: as bicycles are only ejected from households of a Sunday morning, and as council officials can't abide for the public not to be forced to queue, you wait outside the town dump and ambush the line of cars at 10.40 am and offer every third trailer-load two quid for his bike. He won't accept the two quid if you try to look like a poor student bent on cheap transport. Do not discuss recumbents or hacksaws. Bike-chucker-outers won't give you them if they see the glint in your eye and the hacksaw in your hand.
Distortion of frames after hacksawing
The interesting part of hacksawing a bike is how much the tubes spring apart. They do this every time. About 3.175mm. Internal stresses from the welding. The other interesting part is finding out that the steel is 1.5mm thick. Actually you can ascertain the wall thickness of frame tubes without recourse to a hacksaw: you poke a vernier into a bottle cage hole and then measure the OD across the same point. It amazes me that cheap mountain bikes have tubing of 1.5mm thickness and it amazes me that the OD of one tube will be 38.1mm and the other 50.8mm and it amazes me that bicycles this strong, which cannot physically be destroyed by any means not involving asteroid collisions, always bear the legend 'WARNING THIS BICYCLE IS NOT DESIGNED FOR OFF-ROAD USE OR STUNTING'. Then what is it, pray tell, designed for? - well, actually it's designed for propping up a blanket next to the freezer in the garage for seven years, that's what.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010 12:15:39 AM
Mid-winter, so time for the blue insulated bootees to come out, now reinforced with an additional layer of black foam that I found in a ditch on the Motueka Valley Highway, and I am pleased to say that these now excite admiration rather than scorn among the children's peers.
'What are those?'
'Workshop boots.'
'Cool! You could enter them in the World of Wearable Art competition.'
At least, I think it's admiration.
What happens in winter is this: you install central heating. Central heating is not applied to the house in New Zealand but to the person, by means of hot water bottles installed inside your coat. Then only your fingers fall off.
The picture demonstrates the principle.
The burnt hole in the brand-new sweater is because
a) it was a polyester garment that melted because
b) a certain stupid person was angle-grinding without paying attention to where the sparks were going. (Once I set the workshop on fire, too, when they went into a huge wad of wire wool. Amazingly combustible, wire wool.)
The yellow belt is as you guessed a luggage strap that I found on a ride after Christchurch had gone home from its summer holiday in Kaiteriteri. In January the whole of Christchurch moves to Kaiteriteri and lives in caravans with a bit of plastic grass outside - I kid you not - and erects a gazebo to protect the centre part of its 4WD from the rain that doesn't fall - I still kid you not - and everyone sits on folding nylon chairs reading the Christchurch papers for a fortnight. And because the campground is rather petite for the population of a small city they do this in something of an intense huddle and all the people of Motueka go there to marvel at the sight, a hundred thousand people crammed into the five flat acres that Kaiteriteri boasts, their knees wedged under flimsy aluminium camp tables with ashtrays and beer cans and hair dryers - all the essentials - balanced precariously on top, bare shoulders bright red and freckly in the intense sunlight. (January = July in New Zealand, of course, just in case you forget that the world is upside down here.)
For the belt buckle I retained the black steel luggage hook, and though I do wear it to hold my 25-yr-old Point North coat closed and to secure the hot water bottle, it's also to toughen the children to embarrassment for when their friends call. Nor shall I tell you which of these three predominates.
With the winter rain the children have found a new walk for their exercise; it goes up past the sewage ponds to the coast where all the wildfowlers lurk and where if you turn over old logs and look lively you can catch small lizards which promptly bite your fingers and scurry off into the grass when you drop them. Beachcombing is only less hazardous if the wildfowlers don't see you carting off their mislaid decoys because, imbued with the indiscriminate wisdom of their father, the children return with any and all treasure as is to be found. My policy on bicycle rides is to go as fast as possible but to stop whenever I see an 8mm bolt or a penny washer on the road. My wife believes I am addicted to useless junk but she doesn't know how long it takes to machine an odd-sized penny washer when I come to need one, and actually it only costs twenty seconds of riding time to stop.
Unf. the 8mm bolts are always munted and anyway bolts aren't washed up on beaches, but now I never need to buy flip-flops, nor indeed Holey Soleys provided my feet shrink a bit and I'm content to wear a bright and a dark blue one, which of course I would if they fitted. The pink ones are too small and both left-footed so if anyone chances to see twin children rather distinctively hopping down the road on their right feet, send me an address and I'll post them their missing beach shoes.
And - um - you never know when you might need a plastic VW wheel hub.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 1:26:58 AM
You think your family is gifted. Huh. We are much better than you will ever be. We have just won the world sock-washing championship.
It rained and rained last week and the valleys filled and emptied into their rivulets and streams and eventually the Wangapeka overflowed its banks and the citizens of the Baton, where they say gold is still to be panned, were helicoptered to the Tapawera School and popped into sleeping bags for the deluge, and the Motueka River swelled and rose and by watching the downswept logs steadily overtake me as I cycled alongside I could tell how fast the water was flowing and by joining the sightseers clogging the cyclepath that abuts it I could see how close the water was to the undersurface of the bridge. (Very close.)
And delightfully it's now been raining again, with the start of some morning sunshine to amuse me with the curious observation, wot I have never before noticed, that the lower of a double rainbow has the blue on the inside and the red on the outside, while the faint upper rainbow has the red inside and the blue out. So the reds, with a gap between them, are adjacent. I never knew that before. I was never a student of double rainbows.
Anyway the scullery steadily filled with washing but now with blue skies peeping in the east I have first thing this morning pegged up ninety million socks to dry.
The mystery is this.
There were no laundry baskets.
If you own a teenage daughter then one of the things you do each week is buy a new laundry basket because however frequently you assure her that such are not part of her bedroom furniture, a teenage daughter's bedroom door is a laundry basket valve. They only go one way. In. And this morning looking for something to carry a great mountain of damp socks outside I peeped into a certain bedroom and was mystified and stumped, because though the floor besported piles of clothes tumbling out of open cupboards, there were no laundry baskets. That certain bedroom floor, with some effort, held up the following:
1 camera
1 computer
Approx 200 miles of wires and cables attached to approx 2 million electronic gadgets that I didn't even know she had
Assorted
The last is a sort of dustbin category and includes more stuff than I care or have time to list but it's an essential taxonomic box (just wait - if you don't believe me - until you own a teenage daughter. Then you'll see. Then you'll jolly see) but the salient point is that there were no laundry baskets whatever. None.
It was as if there'd been a sudden laundry basket famine, as if a laundry-basket-vacuum passed over the house in the night and sucked all of them up and they all disappeared into the ether. I was completely mystified and stumped and am even more mystified and stumped now because somehow all those socks got pegged up, yet I have no idea how they managed the semicircular, rainbow-shaped trip round the outside of the house from scullery to clothesline. My brain is defective. It has a gap the shape of a rainbow in it, and somewhere within that gap lurks the fascinating information as to where I found all the laundry baskets.
The Human Power bit of this post being a bit thin, and my notebook (an envelope) revealing only the enigmatic information '3 lbs 2 ¼ oz' with nothing to tell me what possessed that weight and why I needed to know it, I shall justify my web existence by stating that a black tandem tyre lasts just 2,735.4 kilometres and then has to be replaced. The tyre was black and the mudguard was black but on inspection identical adjacent colours was all they had in common with a double rainbow. Unlike my morning rainbows, there was no gap whatever between them. They had, in fact, been rubbing all the while. As I say, my brain is defective. (The mudguard is now zip-tied to the rear rack for a bit of clearance.)
Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:29:00 AM
The building of a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle being of No Interest Whatever to members of the BHPC who are only int'rested in recumbents, I shall generously dispense with further details. What is of vast int'rest is of course what happened to the sacrificial trailer after the wagon got finished, and what happened was this: it got turned into a dung cart. Now do not wince, oh denizen of Surrey. Dung carts have a long and respectable history. And I think they will have a long and respectable future as well, because sooner or later trekking up and down to Dr Brewer's paddock without using 38 mpg to gather fertiliser could have more merit than my wife imagines, she deriding my utterly brilliant and highly informed world economic environmental collapsnik diagnosis with the remark that I am an obsessive nut job.
'You wouldn't have me any other way' is what I plead, complacently.
'Except with a bit more hair.' Cruel she is, and heartless.
Your standard dung cart is pulled by a horse but I do not like horses. The only horse I ever rode regularly had a habit of walking as close as it could to the house knowing it would thereby grind my leg off from the knee down, and it did so deliberately on every occasion I clambered unwillingly into the saddle, and I knew for a fact that it knew for a fact that I knew it was doing it on purpose. Moreover there is something worrying about a vehicle that actually does have a mind of its own. And lest you imagine these concerns are misplaced, the British Medical Journal once published the statistic that horse riding is a staggering 20 times more dangerous, statistically, than motorbike riding. I once didn't meet Prince Charles when he was having his arm set in the university hospital in Nottingham after tumbling off his horse while a-hunting. I twenty times didn't meet him falling off his motorbike. So that proves it. - In any case, if I owned a horse the logical thing would be to bring horse to garden and dispense with both paddock and dung cart. I do not own a horse; Dr Brewer does, or at least his daughter does, and I am invited to partake of its ploppings and given that the stuff sells for two dollars a bag and I am a cheapskate beyond compare, a dung cart had to be adventured.
So, hacksaw and welder out, quick spray with blue paint so that Bob Knight thinks I've turned over a new leaf, and 406 wheels fitted to the old trailer which had been reduced to a stem. Plywood sheet from junk in the shed, scraps of willow from the wagon remnants, screws, glue, and a wooden boxy thing to fit two plastic dustbins. Leg to stop it falling forward, and small jockey wheel for no good reason that I can now think of. And came to regret. Because I kept thinking it would snag on road bumps. And therefore I fixed the hitch as high as I could to maximise ground clearance.
The trailer hitch is a bit of hydraulic tube. It was dreamt up and patented by K-k-k Wossname who built the first Bluebell but I blithely nick patented trailer hitches certain that he will never find out on the other side of the world. (Derek Henden. Bike Hod. I knew it began with K.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4371184.html and it's a dashed fine hitch too, the best I've ever nicked except for a bit we'll come to in a minute.)
So, off to the paddock and when 150kg of substance was gathered, a slightly self-conscious 7 miles an hour home past all the workmen who are needed to wreck a state highway. At one point the cycle path dips down for the convenience of a house driveway, and when I popped up on the slope opposite, I found the back of the bike lurching all over the place and peeping over my shoulder found the workmen chuckling as, with weight on, the trailer hopped from side to side, lifting each wheel in turn. And this is the deficiency of the high hitch. Any slight swaying of the bike gives vertical nudges to the trailer. When I got home I found the draw bar had been rubbing against the back tyre too, so I adjusted it lower and ignoring the possible grounding of the jockey wheel surprised my wife by going out again without unloading; it behaved a good deal better this time.
So we now possess a dung cart, two wagons, a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle and a large heap of horse manure. It escapes me why anyone might wish to know these things and so I shall spare you how many grapefruit fell off the tree last night in the rainstorm. (Twenty-six.)
Tuesday, May 04, 2010 10:19:53 PM
As is well known - because I keep telling everyone - there being no other evidence - I am a Genius. And therefore I am going to grace this Blog with a Fantastic Tip.
The hardest things in bicycle maintenance are always the smallest. There are no exceptions to this rule. And the hardest thing of all is to install foam handlebar grips, which we elderly folk like because we are not interested in impressing eager young athletes but
are interested in not having tingling fingers.
The Instructions on foam handlebar grips are these:
Velo Grips are made to the highest standards and feature a wide assortment of quality, race-proven materials.
(This is bollocks of course, and we both know it.)
Due to the importance of proper installation and setting, and for your safety, Velo recommends having the product installed by a professional bicycle dealer.
Not all that helpful, but passing the buck to a professional bicycle dealer is I suppose a step forward because in the Olden Days we were told to apply soap or meths as a lubricant, and the grip rotated thereafter or fell apart. A professional bicycle dealer - Jim or Lenny - is no doubt expected to have an airline these days, and will blast compressed air under the foam while sliding it in place, but neither you nor I have access to airlines so we have to Make Do. And since I have an Evil History and invented a great many very naughty things to do with compressed air, my natural instinct is to apply Evilness to foam grips. You attach a length of inner tube to the handlebar with a binding of rubber cut from the remainder of the inner tube. You seal the other end of the inner tube with two blocks of wood and a clamp. You attach pump to valve, daughter to pump, and get her to gently pump air into the handlebar while you apply the other foam grip. Air seeping past allows everything to go on smoothly. The plug-bar-end of the grip is removed, and half an inch of handlebar under the foam exposed; inner-tube re-applied to t'other end; and the second grip goes on smoothly too.
There! Now I'm going to write to Blue Peter to see if they'll give me a job as a Presenter, which they might well do unless they happen to google to find out what else I get up to with compressed air.
Friday, April 30, 2010 9:49:11 AM
TransportNZ has decided to maintain State Highway 60, not one lane at a time but the entire section. And to everyone's surprise they have taken it away. The whole highway. For the last month a mile of road between here and Motueka has had no tarmac at all and is a sandy muddy swamp and accordingly Mr Knight, who knows about these things, has instructed me to acquire a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle. Nobody in their right mind builds such a thing but unf. I have a crippled neck and mountain bicycles suitable for perfectly good gentlemen have the handlebars about a mile too low and make my arm all numb and tingly. (Attentive doctors of medicine will immediately diagnose C7.)
Besides I already had the makings of a perfectly good gentleman's mountain bicycle. I had some Marzocchi forks. These cost but little because a previous owner - a moron, if we're being straightforward - had attended to the stem with a hacksaw. (I offer up to the world Middleton's Second Law, which is this: 'Things are seldom improved with a hacksaw.') Fortunately I am a genius and promptly extended the stem with a one-inch tube which inserts tightly and when plug-welded to another stem lies perfectly straight.
A plug-welded stem extensionMoreover 'arry, who ran the bike shop in Loughborough (no-one pronounced the 'H') once gave me the back of a bent GT LTS. - This is a GT LTS which had a bend in it, not a recumbent form of a GT LTS, which clarification I make because there are all too many philistines who following a very doubtful and frankly rebellious parish in our noble British colonies - America - erroneously fancy that 'bent' is an acceptable abbreviation of 'recumbent.' Which it is not. Bent is a word with negative connotations into which I shall not go. Recumbents on the other hand are a glorious invention of magnificent god-like creatures, viz., us lot.
And having a vast Bike Heap I have decided to weld all this together and I can assure you that this will necessitate my using the *uck word quite a lot because it always does. I will also waste most time on the tiniest little bit, and the smaller and less significant it is, the more time and the more *ucks will be spent on it. In fact I just spent two and a quarter hours attaching one of those plastic cable-guiding thingies to the bottom of the BB shell of the donor frame, because a previous owner - a moron and probably the same one - had removed the original and it wasn't a standard size and to make another one fit I had to use a hammer a screwdriver a hacksaw a punch two rivets the small end of a .223 brass rifle cartridge a 7mm spanner a 13mm spanner the hacksaw again an 8mm tap and some meths to wash the reaming tapping and cutting fluid off my best trousers in which I had rather foolishly entered the workshop. As there may well be a vicar reading this I shan't tell you how many times I said *uck but it was fewer than this morning when I found that my bloody wife had constructed one of her amusing Art Installations with all the crockery on the draining rack. We have this rule - call it My Wife's Second Law - that when she cooks I wash up, and when I cook I wash up. And should I demand my yuman rights and go On Strike of an evening she punishes me by playing that bloody Jenga game with the plates and coffee mugs and glasses and carrot-grater and lemon squeezer and anything else possessed of an outlandish and unstackable shape, and behold! at 7.55 am there on the draining board is a reproduction of Mount Everest in bone china.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 5:34:14 AM
With fifty litre bins aboard
A telephone call advising us of the availability of horse apples in a paddock 2.4 miles away. Hah! - an opportunity to test and report on the efficacy of my wagon.
Into the van with wagon and all our plastic dustbins. The van manages 38 mpg and accommodates several common bicycles and the pile of junk essential to hols in Golden Bay; or two recumbents essential to riding round and round Trafalgar Park cycle track; or a wagon and seven dustbins essential to gathering Amber's droppings. (Amber is a chestnut and so, pretty much, are her droppings.)
Gathering horse apples (Squeamish of London does not yet need to know this but soon will, what with Sir David
http://www.off-grid.net/2010/03/22/peak-oil-back-in-the-news/ informing the Internet that peak oil has been rescheduled from 2030 to 2014) is best accomplished with rubber gloves. A shovel is all very well for stables I daresay, but paddocks have lots of holes of exactly the same size and shape as a horse's hoof and they also grow all the rough weedy twigs that Amber won't eat and the sweeping action of a shovel is much impaired by this terrain. And horse apples are discrete - I
said Squeamish of London wouldn't want to know this - and sufficiently robust to be gathered in handfuls. Your farmer's daughter uses a huge nylon bag designed for builders' gravel but we find that plastic dustbins have the advantage of lids, for lids prevent the van interior from reeking of horse produce. Moreover you cannot pick up a gravel bag containing 400kg of fresh compost. You
can pick up a 50 litre plastic dustbin when you have filled it, but you cannot pick up a 50 litre dustbin when your wife has filled it because she shoves as much in as she can and compresses the load.
'But I get more in that way.'
Idiot.
You definitely can't pick up a full 75 litre bin if of middle years and if you want walk upright again.
Three dustbins fit into a four foot wagon though it doesn't need to be 17 inches wide. Ten inch sides are just about high enough to stop dustbins falling out provided the paddock's level, and the wagon definitely needs to have a back. - But it has to be able to drop down. If you've been lazy and lashed a beam across the back with strips of innertube then you're lifting bins over an unnecessary 10 inch hurdle to get them out of the wagon and into the van. - A twenty inch bed height is about right for transfer from wagon to van. Twenty inch wheels manage horse-hoof-holes in paddocks, while 16 inch wheels bounce and jostle quite a bit, though the advantage of full lock is a worthwhile compromise and you're dead glad you fitted the front axle with springs. Small front wheels just mean you have to pull the wagon slowly over a paddock.
Either the rubber gloves have to be large enough to slip off and on easily, or you bind the wagon's handle with a strip of inner tube beforehand. Unless, of course, you're content to accept a subsequent veneer of horse manure. A rubber strip to hold the unsupported handle upright and prevent it falling into what you're about to collect, is a great boon.
So if horse apples are to become more prominent in our garden's life then the new wagon is a vast success. But
Juno Watt? Certain obstinate people prefer to drag the dustbins across the paddock. Use of the wagon would constitute tacit praise. - A prophet is not without honour, 'cept in his own house etc.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 3:07:01 AM
1. It takes approx eleven shakes of the tree (1 per branch) to down approx 180 grapefruit.
2. 180 grapefruits completely fill a wagon approx 3 foot by 1 foot by piled high.
3. I had to use the children's wagon cos the new one doesn't have a back on it. Yet. A wagon without a back is useless for grapefruits. In fact it isn't a wagon at all. It's a dray.
4. 120 grapefruits take approx 50 minutes to squeeze by hand.
5. 120 grapefruits yield 3 litres of juice and forty litres of compost. (The compost bucket formerly contained 10 litres of paint.)
6. Approx 0 members of the BHPC are in a position to challenge these claims.
7. Approx 0 members of the BHPC want to.
8. I have a sore shoulder.
9. And the kitchen floor's all sticky.
10.
And I've still got sixty to do.
11.
And the tree's still got hundreds and hundreds on it.
12. Whinge whinge whinge etc. for quite a long time.