MOT time

Like many men of a certain age, I try to keep up the appearance of youthful vigour and a zest for life by pretending to be a motorcyclist.  In years gone by, I actually was one, riding a bike as a serious means of transport, but nowadays I drive sedately around in an automatic Honda Jazz, and my motorbike is basically just a toy.  As a consequence, it doesn't cover many miles in an year, which makes MOT tests (which are not very taxing for bikes anyway) pretty much what our cousins from the US call a "shoo-in".  I don't usually like American additions to the English language, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for "shoo-in".  Apparently it originally came from corrupt jockeys holding their horses back and "shooing" the pre-selected horse into the lead, so that it could win and everybody could cheat successfully.  Nowadays it just means what we might in English call a "foregone conclusion".  Actually Americans seem to have lots of offerings along the same lines, but while "sure thing", "dead cert", "cinch" and "slam dunk" surely have their place in popular culture,  none of these have the slinky softness of a shoo-in.

Anyway, I digress.  I booked the VFR800 in for its MOT, and didn't think any more about it until an hour or so before the appointed time, when I went out to make sure it had enough battery left to start.  Which it did - hoorah!  While it was running I thought I'd check the lights (because even motorbikes have to have them) and - well, you can imagine my surprise when I found that neither headlight could muster up a dipped beam.  There's only one fuse for the headlights and the main beams were OK so it seemed fairly certain that the bulbs had failed - these are quaint old-fashioned filament bulbs after all.

It turns out that in order to change the headlight bulbs, you have to remove the upper fairing, which means that you have to remove both side fairings and therefore the central lower fairing as well, which looked like at least a couple of hours.  I rearranged the MOT for a few days later and set to it.

At this point I made the strange discovery that something had biffed into the left hand crash bung from behind and mashed it into the fairing. (A crash bung is a sort of rubbery lump on the side of the bike that takes the hit if you drop the bike on the road.  It's supposed to protect the delicate, expensive plastic fairings from damage.  Maybe.)    This is really weird, because I can't remember parking it anywhere where anyone could have hit it from behind on the left hand side.  It hadn't fallen off the stand, because the bung was bent forwards, not backwards. I don't believe anybody's borrowed it, and I definitely didn't do it myself.  I was so distressed I didn't even take a picture of the damage before I ripped it all apart, but here's the fairing after I got it off:

rather un-fairing if you ask me

That big hole is supposed to be a small hole, inset, but the whole hole's been broken off.  Meanwhile the bracket which holds the whole kaboodle onto the bike had become seriously squished...

seriously squished

Anyway, the bracket is made of mild steel, so you can fix it by just mangling it back into shape with a vise and a hammer.  The fairing needed a bit of Dremelling and some attention with the lacrosse ball (it's a gym thing) to pop the bits back into the right places, and then I stuck it back together with some ABS solvent glue and my favourite bodging tool, the hot-melt glue gun.  It's just like 3D printing by hand!  Here it is (seen from the inside) afterwards:

Add caption

It doesn't look perfect on the outside but it's really not too bad.  It'll do for an MOT, anyway.  And here's the newly-straightened bracket, refitted:

If I had a hammer...

You won't be able to see the hammer marks when it's all back together, honest.

When you finally get to the headlight bulbs, your once lovely bike looks like like this:

not the bike it once was

At this stage it's the work of a moment to actually change the bulbs, and Lo! there is light, and all is good; but the fairing parts are all held together by bolts which go into neat little vibration-tolerant rubber-mounted threaded things called well nuts, which protect the plastic from cracking.  Unfortunately the rubber fails in various ways, so a few of them need to be replaced to put it all back together properly.  Fortunately the internet can provide well nuts at a price which won't actually write off the bike (unlike Honda), but I have to wait for them to arrive, so with the rearranged MOT test looming, I put it all back together with Spire nuts and self-tapping screws where the new well nuts aren't (yet).  (Interesting point for linguists there - is that "put" a present tense or a past tense?  I can't decide, and I wrote it!).  And so I'll have to take it all apart again when the well nuts do eventually turn up.

And so to the MOT, where I had a nice chat about riding in the rain and strategies for not being an idiot on a motorbike with a chap who turned out to be the pilot of the air ambulance.  He gets to see what happens if you are an idiot on a motorbike more often than most people.  He said that almost all injured motorcyclists believe that the accident was entirely the car driver's fault, because he hadn't seen the bike, completely disregarding the fact that the bike was somewhere completely unexpected at the time.  Completely expectedly. my bike passed its MOT with flying colours.  (There should be a "smug" emoji for that, shouldn't there?)   All that didn't help me with my crash bung incident though.  I never even saw the accident, let alone the car (or whatever it was). And the bike had never left the locked garage, Monsieur Poirot!  I feel like the ever-mystified Captain Hastings. 

All that, with a bit of interference from the rugby World Cup and some light drinking, seems to have taken a whole week.  Somewhere along the way I did manage to squeeze in constructing another wall light though, so at least we can eat dinner in proper stereo now. 

The other thing that happened recently is a major milestone on the way toward the fabled front flip - I managed a complete front flip on the trampoline, landing properly on my feet and getting back to standing on the next bounce.  It's a bit of a concern how difficult this is though - you have to get everything just right, and the rotation speed required to get round and land on your feet is really fast.  And this is with a free two-foot jump into the air!  The unassisted grass flip now looks somewhat further away than it did previously.  I am still determined to get there eventually though.  And I promise I won't blame the car driver when I'm in the air ambulance.

En Vacances en France

As the title suggests, we have been on hols, in France; but before we left I did manage to get a prototype wall light completed and installed.  So here it is.

wall light - on wall, lit

As you can see, it lights up, and is mounted on the wall, thereby meeting the main design imperatives head on.

It's made of perspex, finished on the front faces with left-over table laminate.  The laminate is stuck on with nice, almost odourless spray-on contact adhesive (as used on the extension leaves of the dining  table), but the perspex is stuck together with a hideous-smelling solvent, sold expressly for the purpose, because most other things don't work as well, and I don't want it falling apart under its own considerable weight.  There are three more layers of perspex behind, and a big hole through the middle with some LED strip inside to do the actual lighting.  The whole thing hooks firmly around a slightly-modified wall plate with a 2.5mm power connector mounted in the middle for the 12V feed.  There are no screws anywhere to interfere with the purity of the concept - what Philippe Starck once called "la violence du design" (ahem!)

The pre-prototype experimental model was deemed insufficiently bright by the lovely Jackie (in her role as fussy client), so I changed it a bit to cram some more LEDs in.  The prototype you see here was then deemed to be excessively bright when seen from the side, so I added some paper tape inside to dampen down the light from the outermost layer.  And in this way we have finally got through type approval, and all that remains is to make some more, when I can be bothered.

wall light, in context

In case you were wondering just how big the thing is, here it is in the context of a dining room:

Of course, all this industry couldn't possibly have been achieved without the creation of a special tool.

poised

In this case it was a router clamp for cutting laminate, seen here clamping (left) with the router poised for action, and opened up for positioning of the laminate (below).  It's made from a bit of MDF and an IKEA cabinet base (and some hinges, and random baulks of timber).

The router runs along the bottom edge of the black bit and cuts to the sides of the slot, as I'm sure you can readily see.

lacking poise

Somewhere along the way we also gave the lovely Jackie's "Dune" table its fourth revamp, by replacing the lacquered wallpaper finish with the same laminate.  I say we, because Jackie did most of the laborious stripping (border adhesive - ugh!).  Here she is, using here favourite tool, the flame-thrower.

The lovely Jackie, stripping

We had enough laminate to do both levels, and we started with the top one.  I cut it roughly to size (with a pretty big margin) and coated both surfaces with contact adhesive, and we offered it up as best we could - which turned out to be wrong by a good inch at the narrow end.  Desperate lifting of the laminate and scraping of the glue ensued, until very near the end, when the lifting force exceeded the strength of the ever-narrowing still-stuck down laminate, and the bloody thing broke!  Very fortunately, the lower level is smaller, and the broken piece was just big enough... Anyway it all turned out well, as you can see in this picture:

Dune table, gloriously reborn (again)

And so, to France!  We went in the camper van, of course, and as luck would have it (some would say planning, but I wouldn't know anything about that) we went to Vannes in the van (ha!), where we rode hired bikes, and drank wine, and ate lots of cheese, and didn't do any watersports at all because it was really rather windy near the water, even in the sheltered Golfe du Morbihan.  After a while we wandered off along the Loire, where we managed to find quite a few lovely gardens, including one in Angers, rather inventively called the "Jardin des Plantes", which featured sculpture amongst the trees.  Here's an example:

untitled sculpture

From the photo, it's a little difficult to see what's going on here, but it's essentially a lion-headed, winged lizard (rampant) with a naked lady sprawled, somewhat provocatively in my opinion, on its back.  I suppose this arrangement might relate to some obscure episode in classic mythology, but the perpetrator didn't seem to have afforded the whole thing a title, so we can't really be sure.  I couldn't help noticing that even the lizard has breasts, though.  Odd.

I was still wondering about the relationship between art (generally created by men) in public spaces and the female form, when we came upon another example of the genre.  As we approached I was thinking an appropriate title might be something like "Save time by doing your hair whilst urinating", but it turned out that this one already had a title: "La Matinée"

Well!  If that's the matinée, I can't help wondering what the evening performance looks like?