Simple solutions are always the best

So I went down to my parents this weekend (incidentally, I won a copy of Rez! All be happy for me now); this was for two reasons: firstly to collect some items I need to ship off, and secondly to fix their dishwasher and their coffee makes. Oh, and thirdly (yes, I know I said two reasons but you’ll just have to cope, okay?) to take the lamp I bought for them at Ikea up to them (where it’d be more useful than in a box here).

Anyway, having partially disassembled their dishwasher (which, incidentally, much to Zanussi’s disappointment I’m sure, dates from 1978 (like me)) I discovered the problem was simply that a piece of metal had got slightly bent. Well, two pieces actually.

Problem was it was a piece that was both difficult to reach and under a lot of stress – thus it seemed that simply bending it back would lead to the same problem occuring in the not too distant future. So I decreed; “I shall make a sort of ring thing to sit around it, thus making up the difference caused by it bending”.

Off I went to the garage and fabricated, in total, 3 different designs of metal hat/ring/bent bit, all of which worked in a vague sense of the word but were disloged by the incredible pressure and unfortunate direction in which the force was directed.

After getting a small splinter of metal in my finger I decided I’d had enough of this game, and suddenly had a eureka moment. I’d been trying to cure the disease, much easier to mask the symptom. The symptom, in this case, is that the door was opening marginally too far and was catching a piece of metal. 20 seconds with a pair of pliers and lo, it wasn’t catching the piece of metal anymore, and was no longer going “eeeeeeeee-KRUNK!!” when opened. Simple solutions :-)

I think my finger may also have managed to dispose of the piece of metal. It’s not hurting at the moment anyway, so that’s good :-)

Also in the ‘good news’ front, I’ve got the stuff about spray painting, which is encouraging me to finish off the dashboard for the car, which I started an awfully long time ago.

On the less handy news front I’ve been completely unable to locate any carpet shampoo. Last time I looked it was available all over the place; perhaps this is just not carpet-shampooing-season. Any suggestions would be welcome (you can send them on the back of a postcard to the usual address). Anyway, I think it’s Bed-time for Kates. So, yeah, g’night.

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.

5 thoughts on “Simple solutions are always the best

  1. It’s carpet shampoo, for a house with an irritatingly not-beige-anymore carpet. We tried: Sainsburys, Big W (where I got my wet ‘n’ dry vac from), and B and Q. None of them had suitable carpet shampoo (B&Q managed stuff that needs a VAX to put on / get off (not suitable for manual application stuff)). Terribly frustrating.

  2. Waitrose in Henleaze have VAX carpet shampoo, too. And another brand whose name I’ve forgotten. Can’t help you with a VAX, but I do know of a PDP-11 that’s looking for a new home…

  3. Not that kind of VAX John (mutters darkly).

    Managed to find yon crappo-carpet-wetting device; this has allowed us to smear foam uselessly all over our carpet without the danger of disturbing the dirt. Guess what might be going back to Argos with the statment “it doesn’t work”.

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