Category Archives: Les Guis

Tuesday 1st June 2010 – You may remember …

… that the other day I posted a photo of this tree that was slowly lowering itself down onto the vegetable plots in my garden under the weight of all of the foliage that it was producing.

I’ve had a good look around on the internet to see if I can identify the tree and its fruit, but I’ve not had very much luck at all. I would be grateful if anyone could identify it for me.

I reckon that this might well be your department, Krys.

I’ve was out all morning. Nada, the Croat sculptress who lives in Biollet near the Buddhist temple was at the chantier on Saturday and she said she needed to see me. And so I went today. She’s had some work done on her house but there’s a lot more to be done during the months of July and August and she was looking for advice, help, and the name and address of a decent craftsman. This kind of thing is right up Terry’s alley so I duly gave her his phone number and made her well-aware of his hourly rate.

We also had a lengthy chat about downsizing and composting toilets. I’m amazed at the thing in which people consider me to be an expert these days. But not composting toilets of course. After all, people have been saying that I have been talking crap for years.

Nada cooked lunch for us and then I came back here. But not to work outside or to take photos because it was absolutely p155ing down outside. Instead I started to design my publicity leaflet for my business. I need to get a move on with that and earn some dosh – especially as my gravel is coming tomorrow.

The gravel is coming, but the guy with the tractopelle isn’t, so I understand. There’s been a death in their family and that has kyboshed that!

And in other news, this latest Zionist atrocity has reverberated around the world. Krys quite rightly said that what would Notonyournelli have said if the Zionists had been on the receiving end of this. But more to the point, what would the western world have said if the Iranians or the North Koreans had done a similar thing?

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Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

Lunch today consisted of the usual salad butty only today it featured home-grown lettuce and home-grown radish as well as all of the other ingredients.

I’ve been using home-grown garlic and home-grown herbs for a while but today was the first time that I had pulled something important out of my new vegetable patches for food purposes. I’m well-impressed by how well they seem to have grown and while the taste at the moment is a little insipid it will improve over time.

In fact the lettuce would have definitely done with another fortnight in the ground but things are getting rather tight in the lettuce bed and it needs some thinning out, so pulling up a usable lettuce to eat was probably as good a way as any of making a space for everything else.

But in the greenhouse the tomato plants that have been dormant for ages have now started to go berserk. Rather too late now to expect anything profitable but never mind. It also seems like there might be some pepper plants coming up now that I have bought some, and another pea plant is now emerging from underneath the soil. That makes a grand total of two.

I went round and had another look at the digger today. This is what it looks like, in case you have forgotten, and it’s huge!

I bet it made short work of the rubbish.

I’m eager to see it back in action shovelling the stones into place but there seems to be some kind of difficulty about that and I don’t understand why.

I have to have the stones delivered by a lorry as I need over 30 tonnes of the stuff and 15 trips with the Sankey down to the quarry at Montaigut is a little too much. I have the number of someone with a tipper but they can’t give me a precise date for coming to deliver the stuff. And I need to know a precise date as I need to have the digger driver here to shovel the stuff and spread it out.

I can’t believe that it’s so complicated. Arranging a one-hour spec for a lorry to deliver two loads of stones seems the simplest thing in the world to me. But at least it gave me time to pull up all of the roots and brambles and thistles that were lying around in the way. And I also met the farmer who has taken over the field next door from the late Farmer Parrett. We had a nice friendly chat too.

In other news, the Zionists intercepted this aid convoy and stopped it delivering the supplies to the Palestinians by the simple expedient of murdering the aid workers. It’s high time someone put a stop to this behaviour and if the west is refusing to intervene then you can’t blame Hamas and the rest of the Arab world for having a go.

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Sunday 30th May – Sunday is a day of rest …

… as you know. There are no alarm clocks, no nothing. And I lie in bed until whatever time I like and I don’t care.

So what the heck was going on that I was wide awake and sitting up in bed reading a book at … errr … 06:52 this morning? And by the time 08:00 had come I had eaten my breakfast, drunk my coffee and watched an episode of Up Pompeii.

First thing I did though was to stick my head out of the window and take a photo of the work that was done yesterday. And it’s even more impressive from up here. They did a really good job and I can’t wait for it to be finished.

Once I had taken the pic I made a start on a big mega-tidy-up here in the attic. It looks completely different now up here with everything where it ought to be (more or less) and it’s much more like a living room.

And do you know – that was that. I crashed out for an hour after lunch (no surprise there) and did nothing else of any importance. Apart from talking to Helena that is. She was the girlfriend of a mate of mine at school and we kept in a little bit of touch after that and then we disappeared. I briefly encountered her on a schoolmates website and we have now met up on a social networking site.

In other news, the nuclear talks in New York broke up with the contributors agreeing to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. One group of people has objected and decided to oppose the idea. let me ask you to guess which group?

Hamas? The Iranians?

No – the Zionists! Now of course the Zionists refuse to admit that they have nuclear weapons (although it’s an open secret that they do and that they were built in conjuction with white racist South Africa) but ask yourself this – if they didn’t have any nuclear weapons, why would they be objecting to a nuclear-free zone? And while Iran agrees to suspend any question of nuclear activity there if everyone else does the same, then now tell me who it is that is the REAL obstacle to peace in the Middle East?

Yes, it’s high time that the west stops this absurd and illogical defence of the Zionists at any costs and starts to concentrate its activities on the Muslems, Jews and Christians that the Zionists are massacring. If the west pulled its support of the Zionists there would be peace in the Middle East inside a month as they would be forced to negotiate with their neighbours.

And in other Middle East news, there’s an aid convoy sailing from Cyprus to Gaza bringing in urgent supplies. The UN reckons that the Palestinians (many of whom are women and children and many of whom are Christians) need about 60,000 tonnes of supplies per week to survive and the Zionists permit only 15,000 tonnes – and no building materials so that the Palestinians cannot rebuild the houses that the Zionists demolish with bulldozers. So an aid convoy is setting off with supplies. And the Zionists have vowed to stop it.

This of course raises two important questions.
Firstly – have the Zionists forgotten already about the ships that brought them and their supplies to Palestine in 1947 and 1948 and which led to start of all the trouble in Palestine? Surely not, the hypocrites.
And secondly, how does the treatment that the Zionists are handing out to the Palestinians differ from how the Nazis treated the Jews back in the 1930s and 1940s. We haven’t got as far as ;ass murder yet, but we have the economic blockade and if you have been keeping up with the news just recently we are having the ethnic cleansing and the deportations. The Zionist treatment of the Palestinians has been described as a “pogrom” – and by a Zionist politician too!

When is the west going to put a stop to it?

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Saturday 29th May 2010 – Errrr….

… quite!

Returning home this evening after the chantier I had a tremendous surprise

Those of you with long memories will recall that back in the winter 2008-9 I cleared a plot of land of old trees, weeds, brmables and the like ready to make a parking place for Caliburn and the trailer etc etc. But there were all kinds of rubbish stones and the like to move. And endless searches for diggers was fruitless. Eventually Bernard from the footy club told me of one and we made contact but since the guy’s visit here last week I’ve been waiting for him to get back to me.

Anyway, when I returned home I found that he had been and gone, having dug out absolutely everything and a few more things besides.

It’s not exactly how I wanted it but habitual readers of this blog will have noticed that I have a tendency to vacillate. So, recognising my own failings more than anything else, I’m glad that he came to do it while I wasn’t here because it avoided me getting myself all confused and mixed up and he could get on with the job without me bothering him.

Better still, he’s left the digger here and he’s told me to go ahead and get the stones delivered as soon as possible – and then he’ll come back and do the laying. He’s also brought the football club’s heavy roller for compacting the stones and that has saved a whole pile of work.

So this time next week at the latest I’ll have a proper hardstanding to park some of my vehicles and I’m so impressed. I shudder to think of the cost of it all but it’s one of those things that I need to do, and the sooner the better if you ask me.

This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since I’ve been here.

At the chantier there weren’t so many of us as in the past. It seems that the numbers of participants are falling off. But of course it isn’t quantity that counts, it’s quality and those who were here know each other very well and are quite good friends so that all helps considerably.

Some of the participants were involved in gardening and others such as Nan, Francois and myself, carried on with making this wooden toilet and shower block that we started last year. we had quite a production line going with Francois measuring and cutting and Nan and I fixing and nailing.

We had the work done in no time, including a pause for lunch and chat.

Towards the end of the afternoon we covered up the garden that the others had dug over. A length of breathable bio-membrane covered in woodchips Jean and I fetched the chips with the car and trailer and shovelled them onto the membrane and the others spread them out And just as we finished we had a downpour

It’s nice to work in the company of convivial and pleasant people, and it appears that I might have visitors on Wednesday afternoon

In other news, Dennis Hopper has died. This is desperate news for me and for many of my friends as he and Peter Fonda were our role models as teenagers and they inspired a whole generation of people such as ourselves. I’m going to watch Easy Rider again just now but it won’t ever be the same again.

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Friday 28th May 2010 – It further occurs to me …

… that you haven’t seen inside the greenhouse at all so far this year and so that was worthy of a photo.

It’s a cheap greenhouse from LIDL that I bought last year and it came complete with detachable staging. €49.99 if I remember correctly and that was a good purchase as well.

Most of the seeds have been planted in soya dessert containers. I learnt that from last year and the year before that – planting in seed trays just swamped me out all at once and having 24 lettuce all ready at the same time with none following on was bad news. Doing things like this – a few at a time – ensure a decent succession of crop.

You’ll notice plastic spoons and plastic knives in the pots. I write in pencil on them the name of whatever is in the pot so I don’t forget. Real plastic tags are quite expensive whereas plastic spoons and knives cost me 50 cents for 20 at the local cheapo shop.

In fact this isn’t everything – not by any means. It’s pretty crowded in the greenhouse as you can see and so a pile of stuff has been moved into the new mega-cloche where they can be hardened off ready for planting.

Some stuff, such as the borlotti beans (they are the only ones that have taken) and some more sprouts were even further-advanced than that and so they have already been planted in the appropriate raised bed.

I can see that I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with all of this succession planting. And I’m having to start weeding too. That’s a novelty, isn’t it?

Once I’d done the garden I did some more work in the bedroom and then at 18:00 I nipped into St Eloy les Mines for some shopping seeing as I’m out tomorrow at a chantier communal at Jean and Elizabeth’s. I met Julie and Rob in LIDL which was a surprise as normally I meet them at Brico Depot.

And I still didn’t get to the two new shops either. They both close at 18:30 and I had the privilege of having a door shut in my face on two occasions.

At the chantiers we have to bring along some food to share and so I cooked a huge aubergine and kidney bean chili, some of which I had for tea and the rest I’ll take tomorrow.

But it’ll upset the locals – it’s …errr… rather spicy.

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Thursday 27th May 2010 – One of the things I did today …

… was a job that I had been putting off for a while.

well, not exactly putting off but one that I keep on meaning to do but always forget about – until today, that is.

When I did the lean-to roof back in August I did the guttering but due to the lack of stock in Brico Depot I couldn’t do the downspout so I just had a length of pipe shoved in there. After several months of this I suddenly remembered about the downspout when I was in Brico Depot once not so long ago and as they had the stuff I stocked up.

I prmoptly forgot about it and the occasional flashes I had always seemed to occur when I was too busy to do it. Even the tempest blowing it down coincided with something else of urgence that I had to do.

But not today! I was wandering somewhat aimlessly around the place this morning after my customary 2 hours on the computer and so I searched out all of the stuff and did it.

I’ve not finished off the bottom as I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I have it simply draining onto another piece of guttering and that runs away down the field as a temporary measure.

I’ll now have to think of more permanent arrangement to complete it because I can’t leave it like this. It’s a waste of water for a start.

I’ve also done some more gardening. I’ve put out some of the aubergines and planted some spinach and more radishes. I’ve also sown a few lettuce seeds in a pot to create some kind of succession. The radishes that I planted 6 weeks ago are looking good and I reckon that on Monday it will be lettuce and radishes from my own garden.

To finish off, I’ve started boarding the back wall in the bedroom where the wardrobe is going to be, and as you might expect, I don’t think that I have enough OSB boards left over from when I did the barn floor. That’s a disappointment.

Still, it’s almost the weekend and I can nip off into town and buy some more to finish the job. But it is depressing that I always seem to run aground just when I’m in the right kind of mood to press on regardless.

In other news, we were in the studio on Tuesday recording our programme for June. We didn’t have a guest because the guy I was trying to contact didn’t call me back. So of course, he called me back yesterday. Our programmes that we recorded are for the month of June so today I received an e-mail from a Tourist body telling me about events in the Puy-de-Dome in … errrrr … June.

You can’t make up this kind of nonsense, can you?

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Wednesday 26th May 2010 – It occurs to me …

… that we haven’t had a pic of the vegetable plots for ages. And so I remedied this this afternoon.

And don’t they look absolutely grand?

The bed on the left that is half-covered with a plastic sheet has some chicory seeds underneath it. I planted some of them this afternoon and under the plastic sheet (that keeps the weeds down) it’s damp, warm and humid, ideal conditions for germination.

Next to it are the leeks that I planted on Sunday and the weather has started to bring them along but in the next bed are 5 rows of garlic and about 15 rows of onions and don’t they look impressive? The garlic was actually last year’s and I dug it up to replant once I’d finished the beds whereas the onions were sets that I bought.

But clearly the plot and the weather are suiting them because I’ve never seen such luscious crops growing anywhere near where I might be in charge of a garden.

In the photograph above, you’ll notice the tree branch hanging over the onions. That wasn’t there a few weeks ago – it was up in the air but the weight of the foliage has brought it down.

At the moment it has some small green berries the size of large peas, just like the one in this photo here but they’ll probably develop into something impressive sooner or later.

At least I hope so – and I hope that I’ll be able to make some decent jam out of whatever the tree produces.

That’s not all the excitement either.

I went to have a look underneath one or two of the other plastic sheets covering the raised beds, and in the potato beds I noticed that the plants were sprouting and doing really well.

There was also a huge ants’ nest there too. The ants had somehow managed to bank up the soil a little against the underside of the plastic sheet and honeycombed it with burrows

So my question yesterday was to the effect of wondering what the weather might do. Basically we had 11mm of rain interspersed with a few sunny spells. I moved 200 litres of water as the water butts up at the top were overflowing and the ones down here were empty and it was a shame to waste the water.

Once that was completed I caught up with a load of succession sowing. The beans and the peas aren’t happening at all – neither are the peppers and chili but the cabbage and so on seem to be doing well. I hope everything will catch up.

You might think that that would be enough for one day, but I’ve even managed to find time to work inside the house.

Here in the bedroom on the first floor I found the time to finish lining the wall with polystyrene where I’ll be putting the built-in wardrobe. I’m falling behind with this so I need to get a wiggle on and do my best to finish it.

I must find some focus from somewhere and press on, or I’ll be finished before the bedroom is.

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Tuesday 25th May 2010 – What amazing weather.

Indeed.

This morning was bright and sunny – it was really beautiful and we were heading for another warmest day of the year. The drive down to Gerzat to record our radio programme was hot and sweaty just like an August day and the temperature down there was 31 degrees.

When we left there it had risen to 32 degrees but by the time we hit the motorway to come back there were these huge and onimous grey clouds streaming in from the west at a rapid rate of knots

All of a sudden the temperature plummeted. From 32 degrees it dropped to just 14 degrees in a matter of minutes and as we climbed up into the Combrailles it started to rain intermittently.

After I rescued Caliburn from St Gervais d’Auvergne I drove back here and the skies started to clear.

But suddenly it would cloud over again, we’d have the most tremendous rainstorm and then the clouds would depart leaving us in bright sunshine.

The temperature would rise back into the low 30s almost immediately and the heat would cause all of the roads and the vegetation to steam – just like in this pic near the top of the Font Nanaud on the road between St Gervais d’Auvergne and Pionsat.

Despite what it looks like, it isn’t a hanging cloud.

Back here at home though (just 10 kms from the Font) things had clearly been much more dramatic. 17mm of rainfall had fallen and my water butts were full again.

It cleared up in late afternoon but for the last hour or so it’s been raining heavily, and aren’t my plants grateful for that?

I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

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Monday 24th May 2010 – There were about 15 of us …

… including Clotilde and Heidi from the Conversation Group, who went for this tramp in the woods today. Unfortunately the tramp got away but never mind – we’ll get him next time.

First place we were taken to was deep in the woods at the back of Gouttieres, and here we uncovered some old machinery.

It is in fact some old pithead winding gear – a winding frame of sorts and a steam engine to power it – and dates from the turn of the 20th Century when this mine-shaft was sunk to exploit the coal seam here.

St Eloy les Mines was well-known for its coal mines, as I have said many times in the past and as the quest for fuel intensified at the end of the 19th Century they started to sink shafts at the peripheral edges of the valley.

They struck a good, profitable seam at Youx and Montjoie and so they followed it right through to the edge of the plateau where the valley opens out into the valley of the Sioule.

Early indications were promising and several mines were sunk in the area between Gouttieres and Lapeize, including this site in the forest at the back of Gouttieres. They had high hopes for the area – even going to the lengths of making a huge goods yard at the railway station at Gouttieres for the trans-shipment of the mined coal.

A great deal of investment was made in the area, not just with the mine installations themselves but even dividing up farmland into tiny plots for housing for the workers, but all hopes were dashed as the coal quite literally turned to dust.

Not one of the pits that were sunk lasted more than a handful of years. It was quickly discovered that the reserves were nothing like as prolific as everyone was expecting and there was insufficient coal to make the proposition an economic one.

Even the massive Puits Michelin at Lapeize, the remains of which can be seen in this photograph, lasted no more than 5 years. The huge area that was set aside for a slag heap rose to no more than about 20 feet high.

We visited the site of 3 or 4 mines but the highlight of the visit, from one point of view at least, was finding the final outcrop of surface coal.

Here, we are probably no more than 300 metres from the Puits Michelin and this is where the coal seam ends. It just curves upwards to the surface and that is that. No wonder that it wasn’t possible to make an economic proposition of coal-mining in the area with the coal seam petering out like this.

A small amount of open-cast mining was carried out here but it was done in a very desultory, half-hearted fasion and never amounted to very much at all.

After a stop for iced water we went to look at the quarries at Lapeize.

The area is famous for the “Grès de Lapeize” – a hard silty millstone grit type of rock with a close affinity to sandstone and there are 5 major outcrops in the Lapeize area.

These have been quarried for centuries, if not millennia, and many important buildings in the area, including the Chateau de Pionsat, are made from the stone.

They closed down just prior to World War II but some kind of desultory attempt was made to restart them but it was doomed to failure. But in 1970 one of the quarries was bought (for a pittance) by a man from St Georges de Mons who was going to build a hotel there and he needed the stone.

Now Krys told me to look out for fossils (I suppose she meant something other than my fellow walkers) but never mind that – the guy who bought the quarry took a wartime American GMC truck – 6-cylinder petrol sidevalve – into the quarry. And people say that it was fitted with a mechanical crane to scoop up the rock.

And one day he simply stopped coming and his truck is still there.

So I had a good nosy around it. It’s been robbed of many parts but its major components are still there. And it’s not a mechanical bucket on the back, it’s a mechanical prodder-type of ram-type of drill for breaking the stone off the wall and into manageable chunks.

Still, hottest day of the year so far – 34.5 degrees and the heat exchanger went off the scale – the first time since 6th August last year.

However it got off to a bad start. Being a Bank Holiday I was planning on a lie-in but not one but two phone calls shortly after 09:00 knackered that idea.

And it’s still warm now. It reached over 27 degrees in here even with all of the windows open and as I type – at 01:40 with all of the windows open and a pleasant breeze blowing in, it’s still 24.7 degrees. Summer has well and truly acumen in. Lude sing cucu, hey what?

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Sunday 23rd May 2010 – It was the Garden Fair in St Gervais d’Auvergne today.

This is probably the most important day in the calendar out here in the Combrailles. The weather is, as you know, unpredictable and it can play havoc with your gardening as it has done this year with my plants. I’ve no leeks, no peppers, no chilis and so on.

But this area is the home of many people with a close affinity with the soil and so gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is quite a pastime.

And so at the Garden fair what happens is that everyone brings along their surplus plants and those of us who have been devastated by the late snows and frosts can buy them to replace those that we lost.

And so I duly bought a tray of 50 leeks, some peppers, some chilis, some mint and some decent-sized tomatoes. There was also a stall there manned (“personned” – ed) by a couple of kids full of insipid tomato plants and the like (the stall, not the kids) and they were quite intelligent and interesting (the kids, not the plants). We had quite a chat and some banter and I bought a handful of plants from them for no good reason at all except that I liked the kids. I reckon I get on much better with kids rather than adults. They don’t have any preconceptions and have the same kind of weird sense of humour that I have.

That wasn’t all of the entertainment either. We had some folk-dancing too – a little team of locals giving some kind of demonstration of their art and grabbing hold of passing locals and pulling them onto the stage.

And it’s good to see all of these younger people taking part too. There’s a huge amount of local culture that has been lost due to no-one following on in the footsteps of the older generation and that’s a tragedy.

But that was all in mid-afternoon.

It was Sunday today of course so that meant a lie-in for the morning. And after breakfast I had to write the script for the radio programmes for the month of June.

Yes, we start with the information for the week commencing 4th June and so I am bewildered as to why the person who gives us the stuff to broadcast (which I have to translate into English and work into a script) and who was b*ll*ck*d by me the other week for giving me stuff too late to include in the relevant programmes back then, has sent me all the information (“which we MUST broadcast”) about submitting your income tax returns – final date for submission being … errrr …. 31st May!

All I can say is that it’s no wonder that the French Civil Service is in total chaos.

After St Gervais d’Auvergne I went round to Liz and Terry’s to discuss the programmes and for a chat, and then I came home early to plant my vegetables. After all, tomorrow is yet another Bank Holiday and so it’s a lie-in in the morning and in the afternoon I’m going for a guided walk around some old quarries.

Yes, I really ought to get out more often, don’t I?

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Saturday 22nd May 2010 – I took the plunge this afternoon …

… and went swimming in Neris les Bains. For the first time ever it was warm in there – an air temperature of 26 degrees – so of course they left all of the doors open so a draught of air was blowing around. That won’t half cool down a wet body.

Just the usual suspects of course – no swimming galas or races or anything so it was something of a let-down but at least I’m now clean (in body, anyway).

So this morning I heard all of the alarms go off but badger that – I went back to sleep. I woke up … errr … some time later. So after breakfast and doing some work up here until 13:30 I went off to Commentry. Nothing exciting in LIDL or ALDI or the Intermarche either. Centrakor turned up trumps with a pair of plastic flip-flops for 2 Euros. Just the thing for wandering around swimming baths and muddy football dressing rooms. In Les Bonnes Affaires, the cheap shop, I spent 10 Euros, much of which went on interesting items of food but they did have a plastic stopwatch in there – good value for 2 Euros. I don’t wear a watch but I’ll need something for when I’m refereeing. That’s something useful.

On the weather side the Heat Exchanger recorded 63.9 degrees, the highest total this year and the highest since August 29 last year. In my room the temperature is currently 24.6 degrees – and at 01:30 too! It touched 26.4 degrees during the course of the day and that’s the highest since 9th September. The weather is certainly looking a lot more like it.

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Friday 21st May 2010 – I was at a meeting tonight …

… at Ayat sur Sioule with Marianne as part of our tourist information work for Radio Anglais when this bird decided to join in by flying into the room. It’s a hirondelle, so I’m told – whatever that might be. Keen followers of my outpourings will know that I have more than a passing interest in local birds, but none of … errr … this type of bird.

The meeting itself was a washout. It was to discuss tourist initiatives in the Combrailles and it was very similar to the one a few months ago. The same stories with the same old audience shamelessly networking away.

This morning I had something of a lie-in to catch up my strength and then until midday I was working up here. Later I did some gardening, planting outside another load of stuff and also some emptying out of Caliburn. And many of my “dormant” seeds have suddenly sprung to life. I’d given them up ages ago.

Tomorrow is shopping and I may well go to Commentry, followed by a swim. It’s a while since I took the plunge at the local baths. I wonder if there’s another swimming tournament. .

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Thursday 20th May 2010 – Well, the trailer is now finished…

…as you can see, and we now have the tractor on it. All of the lights now work (with a little manipulation) and we are quite proud of what we have done – and rightly so.

But we’ve hit a major snag with it.

The trailer weighs in at 740kg which is fine. It needs to be less than 750kg for taxation purposes. Its carrying capacity is rated at 888kg and Terry’s tractor weighs in at about 1 tonne (1000kg) but that’s not much of an issue as it’s much stronger how we’ve done it and it’ll take much more weight.

But it’s the broyer that’s causing up the problem. It’s far too heavy – Terry reckons that it’s about 300kg and he could well be right, and I didn’t plan on all of this weight. It’s pretty difficult to take it off and more difficult to put it back on. And it’s much more difficult to put it inside the van too without a major and drastic rethink.

The length of the combined unit of tractor and broyer too is an issue. The weight can’t be distributed correctly on the trailer and even with reversing it on and pushing the broyer as close as we can to the back door of the van there’s still too much weight at the rear end of the trailer.

Then of course all of this is impacting on the trailer tyres. They are caravan tyres and so not up to all that much. One of them doesn’t have a maker’s plate but the other one does – and it’s rated at a maximum 1016lb (475kg) and a max of 36psi. The weight of the tractor is at the limit for the tyre never mind the weight of the broyer and the weight of the trailer itself and as soon as we put the tractor and broyer on the trailer the tyre sank right down under the weight. It has about 55psi in it right now and it still doesn’t look much better.

So we are going to have a major rethink about this trailer and maybe do some more engineering. But the tyres are going to be replaced for definite with some commercial van tyres. They’ll be so much better with the weight loading and that’s always a good start.

-1

Wednesday 19th May 2010 – This trailer is taking shape …

… as you can see if you peer through the flare of the sunlight reflecting off a car window onto something inside the barn (I’ll take another better pic tomorrow).

But the trailer has now grown four chevrons between the metal frame pieces, and it’s also grown some outriggers too. The trailer base is half-done although it needs wood-treating (we ran out of the LIDL wood treatment stuff half-way through).

It’s not going to be the floor that will cause us any problems, that’s for sure.

But it’s slow going though. We’re doing it properly and that includes threading the wire through conduit and then through the chassis leg and out to the back rather than having wires dangling everywhere. We’ve also properly rebated the timber ends so that they fit nicely inside the U-profile channelling, and it’s all bolted down. It won’t half be impressive when it’s finished – which may well be tomorrow with any luck.

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Tuesday 18th May 2010 – You’ll see a few changes ….

… in this photo too.

In the foreground is a huge pile of wood – 6 chevrons and a load of 40mm planking. That’s the floor of the trailer.

The trailer itself is in middle distance. That’s all been cleaned off and de-rusted, and it’s now painted with Brico Depot’s best anti-rust metal paint in a nice shade of mid-brown

And how does Terry pull the trailer? Well a closer inspection of the back of Terry’s van will now show a towbar and some electrics.

And that was today’s work.

The towbar was interesting though. It’s off my old Transit from the late 1990s that is lying down the field here. It was a 1984 model and I drove it for a few years until the tin worm took over. I took the towbar off for Terry and I also removed the mounting plates for him as the mounting holes looked to be in the same position. In 20-odd years the rear end of a Transit hasnt changed. But ooohhh noooo – the mounting plates don’t quite fit. They’ve ever so slightly modified the rear end.

Now I don’t know about you but I reckon that if you are going to redesign something then you redesign it and do a good job. There’s no point whatever in redesigning and then spending all this money tooling up just for moving two holes by 5mm in the horizontal plane and 3mm in the vertical plane. It’s a pointless waste of money. But if Fords can subtly modify the rear end of a Transit then Terry and I can not-so-subtly modify a pair of mounting plates. And now the towbar is on.

Tomorrow is connecting up the wiring to the van, wiring up the trailer and then fitting the floor.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality