Tag Archives: tyre issues

Wednesday 9th October 2019 – WE’VE HAD …

… another tremendously busy day down at the tyre depot.

This morning, with nothing much to do although everyone else was rushing around, I filed away all of the bills, invoices and charging sheets. And that wasn’t the work of five minutes either. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’ve been very busy just recently and done a lot of work.

This afternoon involved even more of an effort on my part. I had to go off down to Bristol and the auto spares shop for parts for not one but two jobs that were ongoing in the garage.

And then we had an extremely complicated enquiry about tyres.

Someone has a pick-up with tyres on it that have long-been obsolete and reliable heavy-duty ones can no longer be obtained – except at some kind of silly astronomical price for “specials”. We managed to source a set of wheels of a different diameter and then we had to hunt down a set of tyres for those wheels that would have exactly the same circumference as the original tyres on the original wheels.

It was a good thing that I made the old laptop work yesterday because I could sit down and hunt for a tyre conversion program on the internet – and in the end I found one – and having downloaded and installed it, I could get it to work it gave me a choice of half a dozen different tyre sizes.

And this will please the guy intensely because one of the sizes of tyre is a much-more mainstream size of truck tyre, and even with the cost of new wheels for his truck, he’s going to come out ell on the right side.

I ought to be on a commission.

But that wasn’t all the excitement. yesterday as we were closing a guy came in for a new wheel that he had ordered and to have a tyre fitted on it. All in all, there wasn’t much change out of $1000. When it had been done, he just threw it into the back of his truck.

“Aren’t you going to strap it down?” asked Darren
“no” replied the guy. “It’ll be fine in there. Its own weight will hold it in”.
So Darren shook his head and came back in.

This afternoon the guy came back for some other things.
“You know that wheel and tyre that you sold me yesterday afternoon?”
“I do” replied Darren.
“Well, it’s in the river”.

Luckily he managed to rescue it otherwise that would have been very expensive.

Last night, with having not felt so good, I was in bed something-like and even though I heard the alarms go off, it was still 07:15 when I finally surfaced.

The girls had a ride in to school and so I had another leisurely breakfast followed by a nice stinking hot shower which made me feel so much better.

Plenty of time to make my lunch and then head off to the tyre depot. And I’d noticed that we were low on bread so I stopped to buy some another couple of loaves. Only to find up at the office that Rachel had also noticed that we were low on bread this morning and had already bought two on her way in to work.

Later this afternoon I fetched Amber from her cheerleading practice after school and brought her home. Rachel had gone to Fredericton so there were just us at home. Our little visitor had told us a while ago that she had a really good recipe for a vegan chili so we set her to work in the kitchen this evening.

And I’ll tell you all something for nothing – and that is that it really was excellent too. So much so that Darren, who isn’t usually a fan of exotic vegan cooking, helped himself to a second full helping.

I made a second visit to the pan too and decided that she can cook again for us!

So it’s bedtime now, and I’m looking forward to another decent sleep. I certainly need it. So goodnight to everyone, including my readers in Celbridge, Ottawa and Montreal. One day you really will have to introduce yourselves and say “hello”.

Meanwhile, I’m saying “goodbye”. Until the morning.

‘.

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Saturday 8th June 2019 – I’VE BEEN SHOPPING …

.. today.

But the shopping expedition started before I went out, actually.

Liz turned up as planned, but she had stopped off at the chemist on the way here and bought some arnika tablets and some calendula oil.

The arnika is for easing the pain and bruising, and the calendula oil is a natural anti-inflammatory preparation for rubbing on the knee. and seeing as nothing else seems to be working right now, it’s worth a chance.

Last night was, for a change, an excellent sleep. I remember nothing whatever until the alarm went off, and even though it’s not a Sunday, I lay in bed until about 08:25.

After a coffee Liz and I went to the shops, fighting our way through the grockles.

Nowhere came up with anything special, although we had a nice lunch in LeClerc. I also helped Liz check her tyres – there was a lack of pressure in the rear left-hand tyre.

Back here, I crashed out not once but twice, and then hung out the washing that I had done while we were at the shops and changed all of the bedding.

For a change I didn’t feel much like tea but there were a few baked beans left so I had them with a couple of small potatoes.

An early night now, I reckon. And Sunday is a lie-in. So I’ll bathe my leg in calendula oil and hope that it produces some good results.

Liz is impressed by how much easier I am moving compared to last week, and for that I thank the salt baths. Let’s hope that the calendula can add to that.

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Monday 5th December 2016 -DRAT AND DOUBLE-DRAT!

The other week, we discussed the problem of burst tyres on the motorway.

And so it should come as no surprise to learn that it was the turn of Yours Truly today.

Not quite on the motorway – in fact about 400 metres after I’d pulled off at Montlucon. But a flat tyre just the same. There’s a nail in it somehow.

Luckily, if there is such a thing that can be called lucky, regular readers will recall from 2012 when I had a blow-out on the M6 near Stoke on Trent, I’d pushed the boat out and bought three really good Hankook tyres. The fourth was a second-hand cheap tyre that I had bought because of the wheel that was attached to it. There was plenty of tread on it but I didn’t expect it to last very long. Anyway, it’s this one that has the puncture.

There’s a spare on Caliburn and that was a second-hand one that I bought for the wheel (it was the time when I was collecting a second set of wheels for the winter tyres). But when I had a look at it … well … I’ve thrown away better tyres than this. A fair amount of tread to be sure, but standing around for as long as it has has done it no favours. But at least I was mobile with not much effort.

selfish parking montlucon allier franceMy new enhanced mobility took me to the LeClerc supermarket where I stocked up with another big supply of food for Belgium. And while I was there, I had another big laugh at the selfishness of other drivers.

The driver of this car parked it up at the supermarket – and pretty badly parked at that – and walked away – and then turned round to come back and parked his car even worse, straddling the white lines.

The selfishness of people is astonishing, isn’t it?

Having done the shopping, I went off in search of some tyres. I’ve ordered two brand-new Hankooks and they will be delivered on Friday. They will be going on the front, the other Hankook that is still on the front will be the spare, and the nasty spare tyre will be going in the bin.

But I’m not thinking very clearly here. What I should have done was to forget about the new tyres, come back home and fitted Caliburn with his winter tyres on the front. And the money situation is going to be important because on the way down from Leuven, I could feel the other wheel bearing start to tighten up and that’s going to have to be looked at. It’s yet more expense that I can do without.

I had a decent sleep last night and the breakfast at the Premiere Class was quite good. And then I hung around there doing stuff until about 11:00. When they threw me out of the hotel I hit the road and drove steadily down to Montlucon

tacot railway station narrow gauge bourbon l'archambault allier franceI cut the corner off down at the end of the road and came back through Bourbon l’Archambault, and this building caught my eye.

You should all know what it is because I’ve taken you to see a few of these. It’s the old railway station of Bourbon l’Archambault and the railway concerned is the tacot, the metre-gauge railway network that covered the Allier during the first half of the 20th Century.

Built far too late to have a decisive influence on the country’s transport policy and built too cheaply, serving the layout of the terrain rather that the needs of the passengers (one commentator described the railway stations as decorating the abandoned landscape), the only surprise was that they lasted aslong as they did before road transport swept them away

There’s a new chain of budget hotels opening in France – called Ace Hotels. One has been built on the edge of Montlucon and so I went for a look around.

ace hotel montlucon allier franceAt just €49:00 per night, it’s excellent. Certainly the best budget hotel in which I’ve ever stayed. The only complaint is that there aren’t enough of them yet.

My view from the window was excellent, right across the motorway and into the Combrailles at the back. That’s where I’ll be heading tomorrow.

So in the meantime, I ordered a pizza and wasn’t that a disappointment? Overpriced, undercooked and crushed up on one side of the box – someone had carried it vertically.

I shan’t be going to that pizza place again.

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Sunday 30th October 2016 – IT GOES FROM BAD …

… to worse.

Luckily, it’s something that hasn’t happened to me (except only indirectly) but I’m involved in this as much as anyone else.

Terry needed to move the mini-digger and asked me ages ago if he could borrow my Indespension plant trailer to do the job, to which I agreed. Then a day or two ago he told me that he would be round at my place this morning, but the penny didn’t drop.

Later this afternoon, I had a phone call. There’s a puncture on the trailer. Well, I had no idea that he was planning to move it today. And where is the puncture? Why, it’s about 200 miles away from home. I had no idea that he was going to go that far.

Of course, there’s no spare wheel. That was one of the things that I had intended to resolve over the winter, as well as fitting all of the rear lights that I had bought for it so that I could bin the trailer-board on the back, but as you know, I was otherwise occupied with my serious health issues and I’ve never been home since.

If you have insurance on your trailer you can call for assistance, but that’s another thing that never entered my mind seeing as how I am in no position to move it anywhere right now.

And of course, it’s Sunday, so now Terry is stranded. But luckily there’s a hotel near to where he is.

Tomorrow he needs to take the wheel off the trailer and take it to be repaired or replaced, but to do that, he needs to take the digger off the trailer. But there’s no diesel in the digger so he’ll have to go off and organise that first thing tomorrow. Except that he doesn’t have a fuel can.

As you can see, it’s another thing that has come to try us just now. When is all of this going to end?

I was asleep really early last night but my neighbours awoke me when they came in and they had the television on – not loud, I hasten to add, but I could hear it vaguely in the background. And once I did drop off, I had to go off twice down the corridor.

I’d been on my travels too, but I don’t have a clue about where I went or what I did. It all evaporated the moment that I awoke.

And wasn’t I organised today? Breakfasted, down to the boulangerie for my baguette and back here, all befor 07:45. that’s something of a new world record. But I spent most of the day drifting in and out of sleep. I had a good chat with Liz and Rosemary today and I’ve also been attacking the website. You remember that I travelled along the Trans-Labrador Highway when it was completed in 2010 and my account of that journey has been on line for a few years.

But as you recall, if you are a regular reader of this rubbish, that I’ve done the journey twice since, once in 2014 and again in 2015 – both time is the opposite direction from east to west. There have been so many changes to the route that I’m going to write another book about it. And so I’ve started to merge all of the reports and photos into one.

That’s going to take me a good while, I reckon. Not the work of five minutes, that’s for sure, so don’t expect to see daily updates on line. .

It’s Sunday and so for tea tonight I had a pizza. Spinach and mushrooms and it was delicious. Best that I’ve had.

But now, I’m going to try for an early night. My body clock will be up the spout because of the change of hour, so I hope that I’m not disturbed.

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Wednesday 4th January 2012 – TODAY DIDN’T WORK …

… out as I had wanted it to do.

Forgetting to switch off one of the alarm clocks didn’t help much, for a start.

But nevertheless it was about 10:00 when I finally surfaced.

As part one of the plan, I watched one of the the films that Marianne had bought for me for Christmas. I’m a big fan of Louis de Funes and have a great many of his films, which I can watch time and time again.

But I’ve had loads of difficulty trying to track down one of his films that, to my mind, is by far and away the best film that he has ever made –  La Folie Des Grandeurs.

It concerns de Funes as a Spanish nobleman who runs foul of the Queen of Spain. Apart from the legendary “towel in the bath” scene, it also contains the immortal lines –
de Funes – “tell me some little flatteries”
Valet – “senor is the greatest Spaniard who ever lived”
de Funes – “that’s not flattery – that’s the truth. Try again!”
Valet – “errr … senor is very very handsome”
de Funes “that’s better!”

Anyway, Marianne tracked down a copy for which I am extremely grateful, and I sat and watched it. and I’ll be watching it again … "and again and again" – ed.

But at lunchtime, Terry rang up. He and Rob were working somewhere and they had run out of concrete. So that involved digging out the Sankey trailer and setting off for the quarry. He just had the sand/stone mix and so we had to go to St Eloy les Mines as well, and that took most of the afternoon.

So much for my plans to tidy up and do some paperwork.

But the tyres on the Sankey are thoroughly perished and they need to be changed before it goes anywhere else. You can’t haul a tonne or two of sand and gravel on tyres like those.

So this evening was quiet – I read a book. And that’s really it.

But going back to Marianne’s I do remember one evening sitting down to watch La Grande Vadrouille, another de Funes film in which he stars with Terry-Thomas. It’s another one of my favourites and Marianne had bought that for me as well.

And as I was getting the film ready to watch, Marianne was idly surfing through the channels and what should be on the TV but La Grande Vadrouille?

Coincidence or what?

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Saturday 12th June 2010 – Long Distance Runaround

Well … errr … Yes. No wonder I’m feeling Fragile “That’s quite enough of that” – ed. 

american mikado 2-8-2 steam locomotive 141 R 420 montlucon allier franceAnd I bet you never ever imagined that there would be a steam locomotive involved in today’s rubbish either. Especially not a North American “Mikado” 2-8-2, but nevertheless, here you are.

And in case you are wondering all about it, I’ll tell you more of this anon.

Just for a change for a Saturday I woke up early “lucky Early” – ed and after breakfast I went to fetch the two spare wheels for the caravans.

And I know that they are here in my barn. I remember very well having a blow-out on each of the two caravans when I brought them down here and changing the wheels at the side of the road. And I know exactly where I put the wheels with flat tyres when I arrived here too.

But the way things are around here, if they aren’t in their proper place then I’m well and truly snookered.

In the end I turned over the four piles of tyres but they weren’t in any of them and that has really got me puzzled now. But no matter – off to Liz and Terry’s to get the two off the trailer. And I really didn’t want to do that as I need those two to stay inflated so that I can move the other caravan chassis around but it really can’t be helped.

viaduc des fades gorges de la sioule puy de dome franceThe trailer wasn’t there of course, it was out on a chantier with the scaffolding and so I had to go around there to liberate the wheels.

This chantier is taking place at the old railway house at the Viaduc des Fades, about which I have written a great deal in the past and there’s an excellent view of the Viaduc from there. As you might expect, his calls for a photo.

So having liberated the wheels, it was off to Commentry to the tyre place. And it was indeed the guy who I had met at the autocross back in 2008 and who reckons he can source all kinds of unusual tyres. So having posed the question, he replied “well, I’ve switched the computer off now. Come back Monday afternoon and I’ll order them. We might have them by Tuesday night”.

But Tuesday morning the tractor needs to be on site so that’s no good. Off to St Eloy les Mines to the new tyre place. And the only 13-inch tyres that he had were “reinforced” – not even “commercial van”. And there he was, insisting that they would be good enough. I don’t like the guy at that place and I never did and I’m not putting any old tyres on that trailer just for the sake of it.

So off to Pionsat to referee this challenge match. And the pitch all overgrown and full of weeds and two players practising their golf on it.
“When’s this match taking place then?”
“September” Matthieu replied.

Ahhh well.

But in for a penny, in for a pound. I had an unexpected couple of hours of freedom and an urgent task to undertake so I went chaud-pied to Montlucon to the tyre place at the back of Carrefour – he who had done me proud with tyres for Caliburn in December.
“What’s it for?” he asked
“A caravan chassis that I’ve converted into a trailer for carrying heavy loads. The existing tyres just collapsed under the load”
“What kind of load will it be carrying? A tonne?”
“At the very least” I replied

So a rummage down at the back of his storeroom produced three 10-ply steel radial commercial van tyres. “These will do you fine” he replied.

Downside is that I can’t have them fitted until Monday as he is full to the brim. But that gives us Monday afternoon to play about with them.

He is also having a sale on tyres for Caliburn – buy two and get the second half-price. And I need two to go on the front as I don’t want to wear out my snow tyres. These will set me back €216 which is a far cry from the €272 that I was quoted back in December. All of this is working out expensive.

So then I realised that I hadn’t done all my shopping (I’d bumped into Bill in Carrefour and while we were waiting for the tyre place in St Eloy les Mines to open, we went for a coffee) so off I popped to the Intermarche at the back of LIDL.

rotary snowplough allier franceThe parking borders on to the railway line and there was a crowd of people gathered around the fence peering through it. It seems that it’s some kind of Open Day at the railway roundhouse and there were several old and interesting objects on view.

One of the things that caught my eye was this delightful rotary snowplough. It’s not a patch on the rotary snowplough that I saw at Chama in the Rocky Mountains in 2002 of course, but it’s quite impressive for around here.

french sncf diesel railcar montlucon allier franceFrance’s railway – the SNCF, or Société Nationale des Chemins-de-Fer Français – underwent a huge modernisation programme in the 1950s and 1960s just the same as most Western countries. Steam locomotives were retired from service and diesels took over.

Everyone who travelled around France in the 1960s and 1970s will remember the typical red-and-cream diesel multiple-units and railcars that replaced the steam shuttles and it was nice to see a couple of them on display here.

american mikado 2-8-2 steam locomotive 141 R 420 montlucon allier francePride of place, however, has to go to the Mikado. It’s a 2-8-2 in Anglophone notification, although the French, who count the axles not the wheels, would call it a 1-4-1.

It’s one of the R class – number 420 in fact, and was built by Baldwins in the USA just after the war as part of the “Marshall Plan” to re-equip the European rail network after the ravages of World War II. France ordered 1340 of these (to give you an idea of how much of the French railway network was destroyed during the war) but only received 1323.

american mikado 2-8-2 steam locomotive 141 R 420 montlucon allier franceThe other 17 are lying at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Newfoundland, due to the ship that was transporting them – the Belpamela from Norway, sinking in a heavy storm on April 11, 1947.

The type remained in service with the SNCF until as late as October 19th 1975 when R.1187 performed its last duty.

R.420 had been stored by the SNCF but was put up for sale in June 1976. Luckily it fell into the hands of a preservation group in Clermont Ferrand.

american mikado 2-8-2 steam locomotive 141 R 420 montlucon allier franceIt is one of the 12 survivors of the class, although the fate of three of these is hanging in the balance since the company that was restoring them went bankrupt.

It underwent a full restoration and was passed fit for rail service in March 1982. Today, it’s the equivalent of the British “Flying Scotsman”, performing steam excursions.

As an interesting aside, in July 1987 the locomotive was officially classed as a French Historic Monument.

Tonight was the cheerleaders or majorettes competition in St Eloy les Mines and I was planning on attending. Piles of girls in skimpy costumes chucking sticks about and sometimes even catching them – but after today’s exertions I don’t think that I could stand the strain.

I hope Terry is grateful for all the sacrifices that I’m making on his behalf  so that we can get his show on the road! Missing out on a display of girls in skimpy clothing is not something I would do lightly.

And in other more depressing news, here, in the comfort and safety of my own attic, I have been flaming well stung on the leg by a perishing blasted wasp!

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

caravan chassis trailer sauret besserve puy de dome france…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.

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