Kates Journal

So, someone, I’m fairly certain, said that you could swap cylinder heads on a DAF 44 with the engine in situ. There’s not a great deal of space in there, but it appeared like, certainly on the R hand cylinder head it was feasible.

I spent the entire day stripping apart the car - documented here, for posterity, on flickr - only stopping when I realised it wasn’t actually possible to do it at all. That would be when the rockers were off and I slid the head up the studs and realised that ‘no; no amount of wiggling is going to make this come off’. Part way through reassembly the builder arrived. He says he rang, but he didn’t, not any number I’ve got. I scrabbled the exhaust back on and we pushed Jejy out onto the road. I then completed reassembly of the DAF on the road, and contemplated that the skip needs loading with rubble.

This evening I need to move the motorbikes and mark out the curve for the driveway.

Tomorrow they make the driveway wider and hopefully we can stop being quite so antisocial.

So, today I’m hoping to whip the head off Jejy and replace it with a new one (sent by the ever lovely Rich) - unfortunately he needed to send it urgently and discovered, somewhat sadly, that the exhaust was stuck. Apparently he’s lopped it off so it’ll fit in the box.

So I need to get that off.

Before I do that I need to work out why the minor’s not running - I suspect the hot weather’s evaporated all the petrol - and means that I need to prime the petrol pump. A new and novel fault. But she needs to go out on the road, anyway, so the DAF can go up on the drive…again.

I also need to find my battery charger, because both Rebecca and the Motorbike’s batteries are suffering from sitting. I looked in the attic - I was fairly convinced it was up there - but I can’t see it anywhere. I now have a selection of places where it’s not (where I thought it was) - and am wondering where’s left to look.

So, all in all a fairly busy day; which is why it’s a bugger that it decided to rain last night because while the rain almost certainly did the garden good (albeit somewhat late, since we watered it last night) it didn’t help with my sleeping - when the huge flash of lightning whipped across the sky I was suddenly awoken - and it wasn’t raining at that point - so I couldn’t lie there and listen to the rain. I just led there listening to rumbles of thunder and the whiiiiiirrrr-squeek of the desk-fan upstairs and contemplated that I’d just woken from a rather horrid dream where I’d been about to be shot; again*.

Trying to get back to sleep was accompanied by a return to that dream, which left me not really wanting to sleep for a while :(

At any rate, it’s now morning and I’m waiting for it to be late enough for me to go and be noisy. 0830’s a little early to be antisocial. 0900, then I’ll go and persuade Rebecca to start :)

I’m still hopeful that I might be able to cancel the hire-car this afternoon.

* I think that was about the third replay of that bit. The interesting thing was I wasn’t scared about being shot, I was worried about what’d happen to Kathryn after I was shot but the assailant. Fun fun fun.

So I decided this morning, given that I had a couple of hours to kill before my appointment at the bank (debt reduction continued) - that I’d ‘pop’ to B&Q, get a tap for the garden, and fit it.

Yeah.

So I went to b&q and I got the tap. Without a car the proper plumbing place is too far away. I contemplated hoses, but thought, nah; just get the tap and a new T piece to replace the 90 degree bend the builders put under the sink.

I got back. I pulled the plumbing stuff out of the shed; there in the bag were yorkshire connectors, a thingie of flux (or two), and some wire wool, and in the process I also pulled out my blowtorch. Score.

Then I went back to the shed and got the pipe cutter.

Then I went back to the shed and got the PTFE tape.

I poked in my toolbox and remembered that I don’t have a 16mm drill bit long enough to go through the wall. Rats, I thought. Collected my stuff and went back to B&Q.

Geeeeeze they’re expensive. If it weren’t for the punative charges most plumbers charge just to turn up and debate the merits of your plumbing it wouldn’t have been worth buying. Frankly, it wasn’t really worth buying, but it cost less than getting a plumber in.

Then I drilled a hole in the wall and realised it was time for me to go to the bank.

Walk to the bank and back in the hot, hot sun.

Pay off loan.

Get back, ring I&A and find out the car won’t be ready. Make whimpering noises. Realise I’m going to have to book a rental car again. *sigh*.

Eat lunch.

Cut some pipe and realise, somewhat belatedly, that there are, in fact, no 90 degree bends in my collection of yorkshire joints. Expanders to go to 22(?)mm, yup. T pieces, two bags of. Straight joints, millions of the buggers. Right angle joints? Not a one.

Curse. Walk back to the store. Buy 90 degree bends.

Come back, get half way through fitting things, realise I’m very low on PTFE tape. There’s definately enough to do the inside bits though. Note that the builder’s compression joints are done up much tighter than mine ever are. Put it all together, find it leaks like a sieve. Because… the builder’s crushed the pipes where the olives* fit for the compression joints. Curse.

Go and buy more PTFE tape and some more olives.

Stare longingly at air conditioners**, debate evaporative coolers, go to Agroes and get some very cheap crappy hose-pipe set, because frankly, I want to water the garden and wash the car, and that’s about your lot.

Cut out all the builder’s pipe work. Replace with new, nice shiny Kate pluming. Mutter to myself that I really should have gone to find the level before attaching the pipe to the tap, because it’s miles off level.

Check it’s all working.

Load up the bread maker with stuff to make bread.

Collapse on the sofa drinking ‘Breakfast Redbush’ - which I’m not convinced is deeply different to normal red-bush, but is nice. Take shower. Sit in front of fan feeling hot.

Contemplate whether I’ll have time to ring the Student Loan company to find out how to pay off my loan…

* These are a soft ring of metal that gets squashed such that you get a seal.
** Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice environmentally responsible way to have Aircon?

The scrappage scheme in the UK has removed another polluting car from the roads…

*sighs*

That minor is f*cking beautiful. Perhaps the underside looks like crap, but I suspect not. I think that after more than 40 years on the road producing around 38mpg - the same as a modern car - with little to no usage of resources it’s been scrapped to prop up a corrupt and depressing parliamentary system. Anything where the heads of an industry too stupid and blind to change their production to move away from producing cars which are just as dirty as they were 40 years ago, when the technology is there to do so, get to influence government policy so markedly does not deserve to survive.

Dear labour: Fuck. You. All.

I want real green policies which will actually change the world for the better. I want transformations to the way the country is run so that it isn’t run for big business and with disgraceful invasions of people’s privacy.

It’s shameful that the policy they instigated to prop up the motor manufacturers for a few more months / years is destroying bits of our heritage. They should be ashamed.

As a side point, it made me tempted, for once, to break the law. Obtain a chassis plate from a wreck, and switch them, so that the unrestorable wreck gets crushed and the wreck can be on the road. It’s called ‘ringing’, and is notorious and illegal, but the scrapping of that car is just plain wrong.

*sighs*.

Get me out of this country, please.

So, the summer’s quite definately here. It is somewhat ‘hot’. We’ve lost the duvet (just an empty duvet cover on the bed now), a fan runs at night trying to keep us cool, and in the lounge we have the potential for a 1930s diorama.

The fan in the lounge is finicky (to put it midly), needs it’s motor rebuilding because it’s sintered metal bearing, the fan’s cord is probably 1950s, because it’s proper rubber, not PVC, but it’s all good, because it works nicely (once you’ve got the motor’s axle positioned appropriately in the bearing) and I love the fact that it works really rather well.

Of course, it’s joined in the potential diorama by the gramophone records and player, and really, if we extend a little further, the UK’s first model of ‘modern’ steam iron, and a hoover junior…