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The good:
The MZ is done and MOT’d (yay! a year of road-worthy-ness, ish)
The DAF is booked for transport to the welder.
I plastered the curve and the wall under the window (or alternatively, as I originally wrote, the window under the wall) yesterday.
I have done much laundry and our laundry basket is no longer full.

The bad:
The ‘zed is still not doing any more than 6k rpm. She needs a full engine rebuild to work out *why* she’s not revving right.
The DAF is, at the moment 4 miles from the restoration place. It will cost 10 pounds a mile to get her there.
The flat bit of the wall under the window needs a lot of work to make it smooth. Conversely the curve looks ace.
It’s intermittently trying to rain on the clothes.

It’ll do…
Well, the ‘zed, really. It’s not worth the hundreds of pounds it’d cost to fix it, but the new brake MC and a mirror, (a mirror on the right hand side!) they make it much safer to ride. Well, the mirror does. The old MC was fine, but I was rather worried about the crack which had made the metalwork for the lever not really, well, attached very well in once place. It was all hodged back together with washers and the hand protector, but I wasn’t really very happy with it. Now I can brake with confidence. Poor old Cherry Red Zed, she’ll probably end up being a spares bike for Charlie. I may even pinch the new MC and such for Charlie… And keep the original MZ one as a back-up. I do need to get Charlie back here though, so I can reassemble her and get her MOT’d.

The DAF’ll have to do. I am peeved that it’s 10 quid a mile, or there abouts, for the journey to the welder. I have had these terrible thoughts of ‘well, technically it’s legal to drive to and from a place of repair’. Once the brakes are serviced ‘n all, the only person I’d be putting at risk, theoretically, is me. But if the police were to, say, stop me as a car with no MOT or Tax and ask questions it’d be hard to defend and difficult for them not to notice the huge-gaping-lack-of-sill on one side. I shall, instead, content myself with attempting to find time to do the brake-service in between now and then so that I can drive her directly from there to the MOT; thus saving at least the 40 quid for the return journey.

The wall? Well, the curve I’m really proud of. It’s not perfect and has a couple of small ridges on it that’ll need a little sanding to make right; but really? It’s pretty darn good for someone who’s plastering qualifications are ‘I’ve patched up a few walls now and then’. Me and the float though, we couldn’t get on when covering the scratch coat on the flat wall. To be fair to me I think the problem was I was trying to do a proper skim; not a full on coat of plaster. On the curve it’d more-or-less all come away so the curve was a proper thick layer of plaster that I could skim until it was right. On the wall, it was a skim on top of a very thin scratch coat on top of multiple patches and such – which I was just attempting to smooth out. And without making it so high as to make the skirting entirely disappear that’s pretty hard to do. It’ll look alright after a light (moderate in some places) sand, but it’s slighly disappointing – I really felt like I’d started to get the hang of plastering with the stuff in the kitchen. I’ve still got the big section by the light-switch / door to do. That still needs more stripping back though :-/

Anyhow, I’m off to nodnol in a bit, go and collect the ‘zed. ‘m just letting the phone charge and having a cup of tea first :)

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.