Motorbikes

For the Moto Guzzi enthusiast, a trip to Italy is bound to have some fleeting highlights when driving, as the distinctive across-the-frame V-engine of a Guzzi flashes past in the opposite direction, but I have to say they've been disappointingly few so far.  Imagine my delight then, to find this parked outside the Pit Stop cafe:

1951 Astore 500cc single

Nice eh?  But my delight grew to wonderous proportions when  I discovered this ancient gem nearer to the building:

‘Guzzino’

Its a ‘Guzzino’ (more properly a Motoleggera 65, made between 1945 and 1954) and despite using what look like the bicycle wheels and tyres of the day, it's a proper motorbike (not a moped) of 65cc capacity featuring hand gearchange, front and rear suspension, as well as a sprung seat and a sprung luggage rack!

Girder front forks

Rear swing arm

Sprung luggage rack!

But most amazingly, none of these springy elements have any damping AT ALL.  The whole effect must surely have been like riding a motorised pogo stick.  Probably just as well that the little engine with its three cylinder studs and 5.5:1 compression ratio can't have made a whole lot of power.  More like the electric bicycle of its day than the 500cc Astore, which made a massive 20bhp at full chat (4300rpm!).


Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, for the modern rider (with deep enough pockets - about 30 grand new, although you can get one for 11) there's this:

Ducati Panigale

which makes a much more impressive 172bhp at the back wheel, and only weighs 188kg (wet), which gives it a fearsome power-to-weight ration of more than 900 bhp/tonne (as long as the pilot doesn't weigh anything!).  Crucially, it does have dampers at both ends.  And you can adjust them electronically, while you're riding along.  The speed limits in Italy haven't changed much though, so there's nowhere to show off your 200mph top speed.  So much for progress!

An absurdly over-complicated project, Italian style

One reason for not doing more projects is the necessity to visit relatives. Fortunately the lovely Jackie is half Italian, so she has cousins to visit in Italy. One such cousin (Elena) very kindly let us stay in the house her which father Nello (now deceased) built. He was a mining engineer, and the house features a workshop underneath. I particularly liked that the entrance to the workshop from inside the house is down a marble staircase from the hall – classy!

Marble steps to the workshop (Carlo Scarpa style)

Once down there, the workshop area has several rooms, the largest part being about 15m long and 5m wide. I had major workshop envy.

The main workshop vista

Lathe corner.  That's quite some lathe under there!

But the piece de resistance, project-wise, is a concentrated solar water heating system which features a massive mirror array on a steerable mount, focussing the sun’s rays onto a blackened copper water coil, fed through its supporting pipes and conveying the heat back to a water tank in the workshop.

I’m not quite sure how the steering system was supposed to work; I couldn’t see anything to sense which way to turn the array, but the motors and mechanisms were all in place. To be fair, this system wasn’t a home build, but a commercial product, as you can see from the back view.

Nevertheless, it’s a monumental thing to install in the garden, and a grand ambition.
Sad to say, the whole thing was a bit of a flop – the tank turned out to be too small, and couldn’t sink enough heat; the concentrator coil boiled and ruptured, and the whole thing was a victim of its own effectiveness. By this time the old man was quite old, and he never repaired it, so now it stands as a decaying monument to marvellous ambition, thwarted by drab reality. At least it went out with a bang, though.

That loft ladder

Just in case anyone out there in blogland is still eagerly waiting for a conclusion, I can now provide a report on the state of the loft ladder automation project. It’s not all that satisfying though. Basically the need for a top-closing loft hatch has now gone, with the departure of the house of luuurve from our house, and while it existed it was adequately met by the single-string manual hatch closer with bungey-powered bottom flap assistance described earlier. The main stumbling blocks to automating the whole thing were:
- Surprisingly large forces required to start the lifting process (conical capstans maybe?)
- The need to lift from very different places at different angles of descent/ascent (microprocessor control, perhaps?)
- Nowhere to to hide the machinery - motors, capstans etc (hmmm...)
- Far too many other things going on to think about it
- The necessity to have everything working every night
- The lovely Jackie saying there wasn’t any point in automation, as she could always get me to do it manually.
The last was the real killer of course, being so disarmingly true. But I’m still harbouring a tiny glimmer of hope that one day I’ll have nothing better to do than have a proper go at this. Surely mere practicality shouldn’t thwart the creativity of an absurdly overcomplicated project forever?

Strawberries

Wow, time sure does fly when you're having fun.  And it has been fun, actually, having the house of luuurve encamped in our house for several weeks, despite the excess of stuff which comes with three extra people, one of whom is a baby.  Babies come with an unbelievable amount of stuff, much of which is adorned with faces - why is that?  Layla seems to be OK at recognising actual human faces, so why the need for extra tuition on this particular topic?  Does a paddling pool HAVE to be covered with grinning gorillas and been gesticulating giraffes to be fun?  Do soft toys have to be cartooney representions of animals?  What's the hidden message here?  It seems to me that the world is actually mostly full of interesting but inanimate things, and that faces indicate something a little bit special - generally things that one probably shouldn't pick up and stick in your mouth in later life.  But that's not the message we convey with all that baby stuff.  Oh well.

Layla now does "baby-led weaning" which means that she gets given fairly big chunks of stuff to eat, and there are basically no rules.  There is a lot of tactile experimentation (technically known as squidging) and quite a bit of spillage (on the face and body, into the capacious bib, back onto the tray-table, down the side of the high chair, directly onto the floor and many other places which are only discovered later in the clean-up phase).  Some food actually gets consumed, although it's amusing to see the odd mouthful which you thought had gone forever somehow return for recycling into one of the above options.  Highly coloured foods are best - strawberries and beetroot are especially favoured for their ability to produce a vivid image of chainsaw massacre or cannibalism.  This all takes place just before bath time, which is just as well.

For us grown-ups, Leo's habit of proper cooking (you know, from real ingredients) has raised the bar on food preparation somewhat, so we have been having little dinner parties, eating  round a table, every night.  With wine.  Marvellous! 

For the last fortnight Leo and I have been working on the newly-enlarged house of luuurve - painting the extension, laying the (engineered wood) floor, finishing the bathroom, and most recently installing the kitchen.  This is not quite what I thought retirement would consist of!  It's been a lot harder work than my previous employment, that's for sure.  But the house of luuurve is looking really good, and it's nearly done.  More tomorrow when I plumb in the newly-fitted kitchen sink - if I can manage to buy the right size connectors this time, grrrr! 

Exeter Strawberry Massacre

Grand Pierre

Well, today's news is that I have just gone solo in grandparenting.  I was entrusted with over two hours of entirely unassisted baby-minding, and achieved a perfect score on the basic skills of (1) keeping both parties alive, and (2) avoiding any shrieks of such ear-piecing loudness as to cause permanent deafness.  I did all this by merely accommodating little Layla's every whim, so far as I was able to determine them.  Of course, that requires a certain amount of creative empathy because she can basically only squeal and squeak, but it's pretty obvious that the only thing she cares about most of the time is standing up. She hasn't quite mastered it yet and she does need something to grab hold of, to elevate herself out of the default sitting position, but her determination is quite something to behold. She hasn't got very far with balance yet though.  And there are so many distractions.  Especially shiny things.

All this preoccupation with standing means that crawling isn't really a thing yet.  Layla's nearest approach to a crawling stance looks more like AdhoMukha Svasasana (downward facing dog).  The next move is to lift one arm and rotate backwards (somewhat in the manner of Utthita Trikoasana or Ardha Chandrasana) until equilibrium is finally restored by a gentle collapse into a sort of floppy Sukhasana (sitting cross legged).  None of this provides any locomotion, however, which is source of frustration, especially when there are so many interesting things just out of reach.

Meanwhile, it seems that one must adopt a special name to be a grand parent (especially a fake one like me).  I have been awarded the name Grand Pierre, which I quite like, as it reminds me of my great mate Pierre.  We met at university, and he declared that since it was confusing that I was called Pete and so was he, he would call me Pierre.  I declared that for the sake of symmetry, I would call him Pierre.  And so it was, until he died some years ago.

Pierre smoked roll-ups all his life, and then died of a form of lung cancer which, they told him, is not associated with smoking.  He found this very ironic (but he was still very pissed off about it).

I did overhear someone, who was speaking baby-talk to Layla at the time, refer to me as Petey-poos.  So there's another reason to be pleased that it's officially Grand Pierre.

Pierre

Happy families

While all this constructional endeavour has been taking place, it has come to pass that the House Of Luuurve has come to stay, as promised, so the old folks (me and Jackie) are sleeping in the loft.  Sad to say, even after all this time, the loft ladder is still being manually operated (using a single string to open and close it from above).  Well, it works.

Slightly surprisingly, we all seem to be getting along just fine in the overcrowded bungalow, with Leo on parental leave and Ellen going out to work at the moment.  Layla, of course, gets a lot of attention from everybody all the time.  There are altogether too many delights in this arrangement to document, so here are just three snaps:

Paddling pool on the grass:

The lawn in summer (see gardening)

Layla enjoying her first ever restaurant outing:

Pizza and beer

Bruce posing with a delphinium:

The noble Bruce

Work, rest and play

Once again, the astute reader of this blog will has have noticed that nothing seems to have happened for ages.  Of course, it's not true - I've just been to engaged with all the myriad things which retirement unexpectedly throws one's way.  There's been a bit of work (e.g. erecting a 12m x 6m marquee in a field in the pouring rain, and building an enclosure for two compost loos out of ex-military tent canvas, scaffold tubes, ratchet straps and rope) as well as quite a bit of rest (it is still the tennis-watching season, after all) and quite a bit of play, including a few classic tasks.  My favourite at the moment is fixing my Tannoy SFX sub-woofer, which started making an impressively loud 50Hz buzz whenever it was switched on, about a year ago.  It has taken this long to even look inside.  I started with the internet, which turned up one chap showing off his fix for one with no sound at all, due to a PSU fault.  He replaced an open-circuit transistor Q152, which (he says) controls the -12V line.

Here's my PSU PCB:

Ha!  Evidently there has been overheating in the region of Q152 (actually removed before I took this picture)...  Obviously mine has gone short-circuit, and the 12V line has been whanging up and down like a whangy thing.  Methinks Q152 may be a bit under-specified.

Q152 is an A1015GR, which cost about £0.001 each if you buy a few thousand, 2p each if you only want 50, 1p each if you want 10 (all from China) or a spectacular £3.50 for 5 from Germany.  I went for the latter and got them within a few days.  I suspect that I would still be waiting for my delivery of 10 units for 99p (free postage) from Shenzen (but I dare say they would arrive eventually).

Anyway, I stuck one in, and lo - it works perfectly.  All done with no reference to circuit diagrams, and with precious little understanding of anything really.  Hoorah!