Tag Archives: twingo

Friday 31st August 2012 – WHAT A WAY …

… to start the day!

Yes, a phone call at 08:00 from Terry “I’m off to the quarry – do you want any sand?”

Well, as you know, I am rather low on the stocks and so at 08:30 I was at the end of the lane and we went off together. 2.5 tonnes of that went into Terry’s huge trailer and then we shovelled 12 sacks – about half a tonne – into the back of Caliburn.

I was back home by 09:30, soaking wet because we were having a storm at the time. But at least i now have plenty of sand for Stage Two of my wall and that will keep me out of mischief for a while

few more hours on the web site – I’m currently walking around the walls of Québec right now (and did you know that Québec is the only walled city in the whole of America north of Mexico City?) – and then outside to play.

Pascal came round with the Twingo and a couple of dents that he had acquired. I had a play around to try to take them out out but that wasn’t any use – his car is well bashed up and so that was that.

After lunch I started on the guttering on the lean-to.

guttering glass window collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd not just started on the guttering either because there it is in all its glory, all finished.

No downpipe yet of course because I need to know the height of the water butts and all that kind of thing. That will be a later addition.

But what there is on the guttering which you might just be able to see is that there is some of that fine netting to keep out leaves and so on.

I had a few rolls of that lying around and so I’ve fitted it over the guttering. That is where the cold water supply for the house will be coming from and so I need to keep it as clean as possible.

What you might also notice if you look very carefully is the reflection of the sky in the upper right-hand window. That’s where I fitted the glass yesterday.

I was going to fit some perspex in the other one but then I thought that as I’ll be going into St Eloy-les-Mines tomorrow I may as well buy the real thing – waiting until Monday isn’t going to hurt any.

What’s also significant about this photo is that it’s taken with the Nikon D5000.

You remember that it packed up when I was on that icebreaker going out with the relief supplies to that island in the Gulf of St Lawrence in May and I had to send it away to be repaired.

Anyway, it came back this morning, much to my delight.

It seems that there was a crack in the housing, and some water from the driving rainstorm that we were having when I was on that boat found its way inside.

Strangely enough, I do recall when I was out on the Sageunay Fjord that the photos suddenly started to become woefully over-exposed. Maybe it was round about then that the crack occurred and the over-exposure would be due to the extra light finding its way in through the crack, bypassing the light meter.

I knocked off early today – 18:50 because I ran out of things to do that I could do in 10 minutes and anyway it’s POETS day today as you all know.

I’m going to take it easy this weekend and then start the re-pointing of the long wall on Monday.

I’ll finish this lean-to if it kills me.

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Thursday 30th August 2012 – I DIDN’T DO …

… anything like as much as I was going to do today.

I was up early and spent a few hours on the computer as usual, but it was after that that it all started to go wrong

Finding a fully-charged battery for the Hitachi SDS drill was the first issue that I had, and once I’d managed that, then drilling the brick pillars has caused some of the bricks to split. That’s annoying to say the least.

But anyway the window frames are fitted and that’s something. Next plan was to fit the fascia boards to the end of the chevrons on the lean-to,

However, in an astounding achievement the type of which surely only I can be capable, it seems that having cut the wood to the right length, I somehow have managed to discard the piece that I want and I’ve painted the off-cut instead.

As Kenneth Williams once famously said, “I’m often taken aback by my own brilliance”

I didn’t get much done after lunch as the phone rang. The handbrake on Marianne’s son’s car has ceased to function and so could I look at it.

He brought it round and I dismantled the rear end (brake drums held on by the wheel bearings, how I hate that!) to find that the auto adjusters aren’t working. So no surprise as the handbrake needs 12 clicks to work.

I reset the adjusters but that didn’t do much so crawling underneath the car, it turns out that the cable adjuster (there’s one of them too) has slipped out of position. I reset that and now the brakes will stop that little Twingo on a sixpence.

But that cable is totally weird. Most cars have one single cable and there’s a slider at the centre of tha cable that’s attached to the handbrake arm so that the brakes pull evenly, and when you work the manual adjuster, the adjuster works on both brakes.

But not the Twingo.

There’s no slider at all but just a single fitting on the end of the handbrake arm, and two cables, one for each rear brake on each side.

Consequently although moving the manual adjuster will tighten up the cable, it doesn’t equalise the brakes. If one side is lack, then tightening up the cable adjuster will over-tighten the good side.

It took us ages therefore to adjust the brakes correctly, setting up the automatic adjusters individually by trial and error until they were equal, and then tightening up the cable adjuster.

And then of course we had the issue of refitting the hubs and bearings, and torquing up the nuts. That’s something I really hate doing.

Back on the lean-to afterwards (just as well I finished the car as we had a torrential storm straight afterwards), I’ve fitted one window pane (one of them survived having a ladder thrown on it) and the second one is ready to cut.

But by this time, it was 19:00 and I was well fed up, so I called it a day.

And tea tonight? Courgette and lentil curry. You can see that things are going berserk in the garden right now.

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