No more Mr. Bouncy?

I had hoped to be posting a stirring story of complete recovery from the front flip incident, but sadly, I can't yet.

It's three weeks since the tragic day, and progress towards my customary state of vitality seems to have stalled at a point where there's still a bit under my shoulder blade which hurts, sometimes quite a lot.  It's altogether somewhat unsatisfactory.  I may have to seek professional advice.  After all, people have been telling me that I should seek professional advice for years.

Fortunately I have recovered enough strength and mobility to use the MIG welder, so I have been able to do some useful things.

Our 5 year old house has a trendy rainwater collection system which collects all the rainwater from the house and the garage and puts it in a big tank under the terrace.  Along with anything that washes off the drive, because they (wrongly) connected up the land drain too - Grrr!  Recently, following liberal use of the newly-commissioned automated garden watering system, the tank ran dry, which resulted in unhappy noises from the pump in the garage.  That's not supposed to happen; it's supposed to detect an empty tank and switch over to mains water automatically.  Obviously this situation necessitated a look at the whatever is supposed to detect a low water level in the tank.  Which is located under the newly paved terrace.

Fortunately, we thought of that when we had the terrace built, and bought a very large (and very expensive) aluminium tray to hold the paving section over the tank so that you can lift the whole section out, for just such an eventuality.  Except that even Dales, who can deadlift at least 130kg, can't lift even one end of it with the the little T-handles provided.  So it needs a special tool...

After much pondering I made two of these out of some of the the rusty old Dexion which used to be the custom slope-levelling car ramps at our old house:

some rusty old Dexion

The long bit bolts down onto the aluminium frame with the paving in it, and you can lift the whole kaboodle by levering the wheels underneath by rotating the short bits until they are alongside the long bit, thus:

wheel, wheel...

Then you can wheel the whole thing away.  This can all be done single-handed by a half crippled ex-trampolinist with a sore back, or even, I suppose, an able bodied person, if that's all you've got.

Here's a close up of a corner.  I had to weld the little tab near the two nuts, because there's no room for a bolt underneath when it's bolted down and the tray is in its holder (first picture).   Apart from that it's all just big Meccano.

cornered

The next challenge was getting the top off the tank - it unscrews.  And it's tight.  So, some more rusty scrap iron, some more welding, and another tool appeared:

handle with care

I couldn't operate this by hand, despite the generous length of the handle, but fortunately it's short enough to get a leg over, which did the trick.  Phwaaaah!

Inside, the 150mm inlet pipe and the gauze filter were literally half full of solid sediment - which explains why the tank was empty.  Most of the incoming water just went serenely on by, straight into the overflow pipe.  I made a half pipe to temporarily replace the gauze section so that I could pressure-wash the poop out without it all going into the tank - which necessitated another special tool to put the half pipe in place (about 1.5m down the hole).

Here it is (on the right), along with yet another tool for scraping crap out of the bottom of the manhole.

some more rubbish

Hang glider aluminium tubing, Dexion offcuts, exhaust clamp parts, leg piece from the old ramps, cable ties, plastic drain pipe.

Eventually I got down to the float switch, which is supposed to be suspended 120mm above the bottom of the tank so that it hangs down when the tank is empty, and floats up when it isn't.  As far as I could tell, it had never actually been installed - just thrown in there with its 5m of cable.  So it was just sitting at a jaunty, and completely misleading angle in the mud on the bottom.  I screwed a hook into the tank side, hung the switch according to the installation manual (it's written in Dutch, but that's not a problem for Google translate), coiled the excess cable up neatly, put the gauze filter back in, and the job's a good 'un.

Why are builders so useless?  They installed 18 of these systems in this road alone; you would have thought that it was worthwhile for someone to spend a couple of minutes at least looking at the pictures in the installation manual.  Incidentally they also fitted the wrong type of pressure vessels for rainwater, and they all rotted away and flooded peoples' garages within a few years.  Rainwater is not like mains water these days, it seems.  Who knew?  Not the builders, evidently.

Still, it's good to get the old welder out after such a long time.  I'm glad I'm not trying to build a car chassis though, because I'm really rubbish at welding these days.  I basically can't see what's going on at all.  I think it may be time to treat myself to a modern self-dimming helmet.  Obviously there's a lot of choice, from the rather gorgeous, at a mere £594.48 (+ £11.95 delivery):

gorgeous

...through a whole raft of skulls...

what is it with the skulls?

...and eventually, to the seemingly somewhat ridiculous...

er... what?

Yes folks, it's an auto-dimming leather hat, presumably specially created for fans of

Or maybe just for those on a very limited budget, because this little number retails at a rather unbelievable £11.59 (postage free).

I think I'm going to go for something like this, for £27.50:

It costs £3 more than the same thing in plain black, but I like the zappy lightning idea, and blue is still my favourite colour.  And after all, you only live once, don't you?