Fight Club

Those who have known the lovely Jackie for a long time may be aware that long ago, she lived in Dubai; and (being youthful at the time) there she took part in all sorts of youthful exuberances like water skiing and karate training - meaning what is now known as "full contact karate", or more loosely, kickboxing.  I think she got pretty snappy at it. She never went as far as actually fighting any bouts though (I'm pleased to say).

Anyway, when she started going to the gym in more recent days, the idea of toughening up those now-ageing bones with some high-impact fight-style action seemed much more credible to her than it could ever seem to me.  And so she signed up for some one-to-one training in Muay Thai, which is another variant of Mixed Martial Arts fighting.  There are loads of variants actually, including Dutch kickboxing, American kickboxing,  K1, Sanshou, Yaw-Yan,  Gwon-gyokdo  - you get the idea.  Muay Thai is kind of the original, and allows pretty much anything; elbows, knees, kicks, fists (gloves are worn) and continuing the attack in a clinch, unlike more recent styles.

Muay Thai training involves learning different types of kick and punch and then doing them as quickly as possible against one's trainer's various pads.  The most obvious result of this regime is that it generates a facial colouring indistinguishable from a cooked beetroot, which effect can last for half an hour or more (easily long enough to get back home from the gym).  It's shocking initially, but one gets used to it.  Various other bits get a recolouring too, especially the shins, which mostly go various shades of blue, and stay that way until the next session.

All in all it seems quite damaging to the delicate tissues, but apparently it's worth it for the endorphins, bone-strengthening, muscle tone, overall fitness and improved self-confidence.  Whether the acquired skills are effective in a street fight remains, I am very pleased to say, untested.

Jackie's Muay Thai trainer is a muscled hunk called Jacob (pronounced Yacob) who is frighteningly strong. Yesterday he entered his first "kind-of-big-league" fight as part of the support for the title fights for two classes in the European Championship.  All this took place in Exeter University's Lemon Grove - a venue generally more accustomed to hosting tribute bands than gladiatorial combat.  And guess who had tickets?

And so it was that, to my considerable surprise, I went to a live boxing event. 

First stop was the bar of course, where I was served behind an older gentleman wearing a very smart camel coat, of the type once stereotypically favoured by used car salesmen - and boxing promoters.  Coo er, I thought. Plus ça change, eh?

The fights all started out on a very small scale, with "non-decision bouts" featuring very junior chaps of about 9-12 wearing so much protective clothing that it wasn't clear how they could see over the top of it, in some cases.  It was fairly clear that being tall is advantageous over being short, but everybody got medals anyway, and there was polite applause all round.

Then we got on to some more athletic stuff with a variety of ages, body shapes and fighting styles.  Some people seem to be basically trying to avoid getting hit; some perform dramatic superman punches and whirling head kicks (which everybody likes, except presumably the recipient).  Some punch a lot, some hardly at all.  There's a lot of kicking aimed at the legs (which doesn't appear to have much effect) and some people favour clinches, in which the combatants try to lever each others heads off while launching their knees at each others' waists rather feebly from very close quarters. Occasionally everyone flails around dervish style and it's impossible to see what's happening, although it is quite exciting, and sometimes someone ends up on the floor, which is obviously excellent.  Muay Thai allows leg sweeps, which are particularly effective if your man is only standing on one leg at a the time you sweep it away.  Anyway, they all bow graciously at the start of each bout, and hug one another at the end, and there are medals, and it all seems like quite good fun.

It all changed for the first title fight though.  This was to decide the 2019 European Championship 70kg class, (Muay Thai rules).  It turned out to be between a Spanish chap called Jesus something-or-other, and an Exeter local hero called Jake Purdy.  The Spanish chap came out first, and they booed him!  Not very sporting at all.  Jake, on the other hand, has his own supporters' song (which I can't remember, sorry) and is so popular that people at the VIP tables in front of us were standing on the chairs just to get a picture of him.

standing on chairs...

Fortunately, Jake was triumphant. The Spanish chap suffered quite a few cuts early on, so there was actual blood everywhere (just like normal boxing) and he never looked that much of a threat, despite making a good stab at the flailing style at the start of the third round.  He lasted for the full five rounds, but Jake was awarded the usual triumphal belt with an elephantine shiny bit in the middle, and the crowd was pleased.

Then, rather incongruously,  we had a "normal" boxing bout between a huge fat bloke wearing a tee-shirt (is that really allowed?) and a tough-looking, fit chap who looked, and moved, like a boxer.  The fat bloke just walked around, defended his face, ignored all the body blows, and never found opportunity to throw a punch.  The other bloke bobbed, weaved, ducked, dived, threw lots of punches, and was awarded the win.  Hmmm.

Eventually, after standing in the same place for really rather a long time, we got to Jacob's fight.  Jacob was first into the ring and surprised everyone by doing a bit of leaping around and going "Raah!" to the crowd like an old pro.  I say!  He did look confident though.  His opponent was a big bloke, with a slight height and range advantage.  Jacob started off right away in the flailing style, and it seemed to pay off.  It all seemed to be roundhouse punches, with a bit of grappling and very few kicks.  Actually it looked surprisingly like a playground fight to me, but of course I'm no expert,  They both took a few hits, and the other guy lost has footing and stumbled at one point.  Then it all slowed down for a while and Jacob landed a few firm blows to the head while his opponent slowed down more and more until Jacob kicked his feet away. When the first round was over it seemed pretty clear that Jacob was coming out on top.  Round two started with more flailing, and a lot of leg kicks on both sides until Jacob landed a couple of seemingly undefended hits to the face, and the referee stood the big man up against the ropes and counted him out.  I don't know whether he resigned, or the ref decided he couldn't let the poor chap go on, but either way the result was a win for Jacob by a knockout in the second.  Informed sources tell me that the leg kicks were a crucial factor in facilitating the final decisive head-pummelling. At the end of it all, our boy had been on for about 3 minutes in total.

Jacob being refuelled

We, on the other hand, had been standing for over five hours by this time, so we decided to forgo the possibility of another fantastic title fight and go home for a little late supper instead.

And so it was that the lovely Jackie's early karate training came full circle, and landed squarely in my unsuspecting weekend as an evening out to remember.  There's so much more I could mention, like the extraordinary tattoos, the tennis racket headgear, the frilly shorts with golden hankies on the side, and the bored, restless trophy WAGs at the VIP tables, all of which seem to be part of the MMA culture; but I suspect that like me, you've had enough now.  All I can say in conclusion is that I hope that when we eventually get there, the water skiing doesn't involve quite so much standing around.

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?

Patio Exercises

I know you must be wondering what has happened to the tennis court, so here's a update.

It's finished!  Here's what it looks like now.

As you can see, we've retained the death-drop, fenceless-edge design feature from our old house; partly for the fresh, clean aesthetic, and partly to keep our guests on their toes.  We don't want people getting too complacent while they are sipping cocktails on the terrace, do we?  Anyway, it's only a couple of feet drop onto grass now, so you'd probably get away with non-life-threatening injuries, especially if you'd already sipped your way through a few cocktails before making your ill fated step backwards into the void.  At the old house we had a five foot drop onto masonry, and still managed to avoid any fatalities.

Of course, when I say it's finished, I just mean we've sent the builders away with a cheery farewell and a big pile of money.  There is still the painting of the retaining wall (which apparently we decided to do ourselves, although bearing in mind previous posts about painting, I must have sipped a good few cocktails before I agreed to it) and a considerable amount of garden recovery work to be done.  The lovely Jackie, ever practical, and also observant of the fact that all my jobs outstanding after the extension was "finished" are still awaiting completion, has a plan, which involves employing a gardener.  And, I suspect, yet more capital outlay.  Oh well.  At least gold is on a tear (at least in Sterling, whose value continues to plummet).  It just reached its highest ever price of £40,000 per kilo, which is good news if you have some.

So much for the patio - or possibly terrace.  I prefer the word terrace, and since it actually  is one, I think I'll call it that.  I also prefer to call our utility room the scullery, as a nod to the Victorian house which was my family's home for 50 years or so.  One day I hope to have a duggery to go with it.

But what of the "exercises" in the title of this post?  Ah, well, it's like this.  The lovely Jackie talked my into signing up for the gym (in the forlorn hope that we would encourage each other into doing more gym-type stuff, and, I suppose, to ward off the effects of too much cocktail sipping on the terrace).  I went along with this because the gym has a yoga class which I quite like.  Part of the deal when signing up is that you get a free session with a personal trainer (or PT, in gym lingo), in a flagrantly transparent attempt to hook you into some proper ongoing costs.  I didn't really follow this up for a long while, until I fell into conversation with a PT called Will, who won me over with his enthusiasm for yoga and functional strength training, and also his hugely positive reaction when I told him my goal is to able to do a front flip.  Preferably with complete confidence on concrete, but I'll settle for grass if necessary.  Anyway, the result of all this is that I took the free session with Will, he completely won me over again, and I signed up for ten more.  So it's all about glutes, IT bands, lacrosse balls and balancing the body now.  But mostly glutes, in my case.  And I am re-learning how to jump, since I seem to have forgotten that somewhere along the way.  It seems a lot harder than I remember it being when I was 10 or 12, anyway.

Will played rugby for Exeter when he was 17, is madly into surfing, and has a sister who is a house DJ called Miss Foster.  She plays all round the world and is currently killing it in Bangkok (according to Soundcloud, anyway).  All pretty groovy stuff.  I feel enlivened. Right up until I try to do those crazy lunges with a forward bit at the end.  Then, obviously, I feel deadened.  It is working though; I am definitely stronger than I was - which isn't saying much, but it's a start.

Speaking of surfing, we just spent a weekend at Polzeath with our bodyboards.  That's pretty good exercise, just standing in the shallows and wading around in the waves.  And although I found it very frustrating (because I am really crap at it, and catch about one wave out of every twenty excellent ones) it does have a similar addictive quality to windsurfing.  The main difference is that in surfing you have to do all the work yourself, which frankly seems a bit harsh, in this day and age.  Unless you get to be skimboard World Champion, in which case you can simply run to the shore, fling a tiny, thin bit of fibreglass at the sea, jump onto it, pump it along by jumping up and down until you catch the wave, and then surf back inland.  All without getting noticeably wet.  If you think this sounds a bit far fetched, check out this video at 8:15, and watch the guy in the black wetsuit.  He's Blair Conklin, and he's been doing this since he was four.  Oh, and by the way it only really works at the Wedge in California, although I dare say he could still show us a thing or two down at Polzeath, if he chose to visit.

In other news, the table is undergoing another transformation, and getting its folding leaves covered in laminate.  Unbelievably, there will also be yet another as yet untested type of paint involved.  More of this later (I bet you can't wait!). But right now, I have to prepare my mind and body for another session with Will tomorrow.  Or perhaps I'll just do a bit of sipping on the terrace...

Hard Gardening

Once again, there is a digger on the premises.  This time it's being operated by a chap called Neil, acting in his capacity as a garden hard landscaper.  I suppose that once they reach a certain level, they turn their noses up at easy landscaping.  Anyway, he is kindly putting a patio where there used to be grass, just outside the new dining room.  Unfortunately, this area is only held up from collapsing into the lower part of the garden by a shallow "wall" made of wood, supported by wooden posts - at least, it was when they built it.  Now it's supported by force of habit, since the posts have already completely rotted away, and the wall has bowed out where the huge pile of earth from the Battle of the Somme leant against it.

But that's all in the past!  Already Neil and his sidekick Ben have removed the fence, dug a ditch for the foundation of the new wall, put a big pile of earth where the trampoline is going to go, and then flattened it out again with the grader.  Generally speaking, they've turned all the previously grassy areas of the garden into the world's worst clay tennis court.  And this is just day one!

Neil digging

world's worst clay court

And it hasn't rained yet.  I suppose there's plenty of time for that in days to come.

Meanwhile, I've been sitting on this little snippet since our last trip to Yorkshire.  Taylors of Harrogate, makers of the venerable Yorkshire tea, have come up with a new idea.  I haven't seen this down south, so I guess they are testing it out locally to see what happens.  Personally, I hope that (a) nobody buys it (even at the knock-down price of £2 for 40), and (b) the person who came up with the idea is either sent for retraining at an establishment run by actual humans, or quietly "disappeared", but I suppose you are free to draw your own conclusions...

Too lazy for a proper tea-break?  We've got you covered... 

I am genuinely shocked by this marketing wizard's attempt to exploit a previously untouched super-vulnerable sub-group within our society. But are there really people out there who can't find the energy to eat actual biscuits?  I hope not.

If you want a proper composite drink, by the way, it's got to be chocolate Ovaltine (with milk - not the stuff you make with water).  Extremely yummy.  The lovely Jackie showed Layla how to dab little bits of the powder onto a wet finger (from a special little pile in a special little dish) but Layla has developed the concept one stage further.  Her technique is to pick up the dish, stick her nose right into it, and lick greedily.  This process distributes the sticky brown powder across her face, her clothes, the table, our clothes, the chair, the floor, and very probably some other places we haven't found yet.  Adorable!

No Crisis Management

Warning:  this is one of those techie posts about metal working and stuff.  I can't imagine that everybody out there likes this type, but since you are all too polite to leave any comments, I keep writing them...

Yesterday there was a crisis at the House of Luuurve!  The magnificent three-pane bi-fold door which forms the back of the house completely refused to close.  This would have presented a bit of a security risk, except that Dales was down for a visit and staying there, so he could be on the lookout for marauding ne'er-do-wells bent on mischief until some sort of fix was found, while everybody else went to work as usual.  And it wasn't even raining.  So when Leo called me up and asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a look, it wasn't even a crisis really. 

It turned out that the reason the door wouldn't close was this.  The system relies on nearly all the weight of the moving parts (i.e. everything) being taken by a little truck which runs in rails at the bottom.  The weight is taken by the bottom hinge, and thence goes down through an 8mm bolt which is threaded into the truck.  This thread provides the adjustment needed to make sure the truck at the top of the doors runs inside its track, and all the doors stay clear of the threshold at the bottom.  Alas, the thread in the aluminium body of the bottom truck had stripped, so that the door couldn't be raised enough to adjust it properly.  It must have been sitting on only the last turn or two of thread, and progressively stripped more and more threads under the (fairly huge) weight of it all until the top truck fell out of place and the whole thing became unworkable.

Here's a picture of the bottom truck with its partially stripped thread in the middle at the bottom:

stripped

There are ways to reconstruct a thread, of course, but the fundamental problem would remain - not enough turns engaged to support the weight.  However, the necessity of the bolt being so high up offered the possibility of a better solution - add more threads above.  Fortunately, my M8 nuts collection provided this rather appealing offering:

appealing...

A few minutes work with a hacksaw and grinder resulted in this:

counter-bored and ground to size

i.e. a threaded fitting with threads slightly longer than the thickness of the plate (because the hole is swaged) which drops down the funny-shaped slot in the truck and can't rotate there.  I counter-bored the stripped-thread hole a bit, to make room for the swage. You get full thread engagement when it's adjusted to suit the House of Luuurve's door, and it's made of tough steel, rather than an aluminium alloy that's optimised for casting.

So, stick it all back together again, and it's fully functional again before teatime.  Hoorah!  Another not-crisis averted in the nick of time - or, as we used to say in the 16th century, in pudding time.

However, I was surprised by another aspect of the engineering of the whole thing.  This is the hinge assembly in pieces, showing the bolt (upon which most of the the weight of all the doors sits).  The weight-bearing interface between the hinge and the bolt is that little collar (between the bolt and the allen key), which is retained by a 4mm grub screw!

grubby engineering

The whole weight goes through that collar and its grub screw.  There's no locating step in the bolt or anything, it's just down to the clamping force and the single-sheer strength of the grub screw.  There are two more grub screws which locate into the machined grooves to the right, which clamp the bold to the hinge after adjustment and help a bit - or maybe a lot - but even so, it all seems amazingly optimistic to me.  Anyway, that part seems to work just fine.  So far...

It's just occurred to me that while the hinge fits into a slot in the truck so that it can't rotate, it's not a tight fit (because the hinge needs to be adjusted up and down).  So whenever the door is opened and closed, there is a slight movement between the two parts.  Since the bolt is clamped to the hinge, this movement must take place in the bolt thread.  Maybe that's another reason the thread failed.  And maybe one should lubricate the thread, in anticipation of movement there.  Who'd have thought?  I bet that's not in the installation instructions.  Not that that matters, because the door was installed by a builder, and builders are always far too busy to worry about installation instructions.

Incidentally, our builders didn't do a great job (re)installing our patio doors, either.  I improved the fit quite a lot by adjusting the hinges (they hadn't bothered) but they are still tight to close because the top and bottom rails just aren't far enough apart to provide any clearance.  Oh well.  Maybe one day I'll do something inventive with my big angle grinder!  Fwooorh!

Table refurbishment

When I started this blog, I had no idea that I would end up writing about emotional distress, self-doubt, and failure.  But that was before the table refubishment project...

It's been a learning experience, that's for sure.  And some parts have been successful.  For example, I did get BoConcept to supply me with a nice new pair of fancy hinges for the extension leaves, despite their best efforts to ignore me for weeks at a time. And - and - well that's about it for successes really.  Almost everything else has been a monumental disaster.

At times, I did succeed in getting a pretty good finish on the copper leaves, but I always managed to spoil it somehow.  On its own, the copper paint is so useless that if you touch it, it leaves a mark which you can't get out - hence putting (1-part acrylic) lacquer over the top to protect it.  That's fine, except that the lacquer redissolves the paint and then forms a seal over the top of it, so that if the paint's thick, you can still leave a finger print in it even after several days.  At one point I had to resort to removing everything from one leaf with cellulose thinners and starting again.  And yet, I just couldn't learn to leave things to dry properly.  Right at the end, I stupidly reassembled the extension leaves into the table when the lacquer was only touch dry, and left a set of prints in it (again!).

Then there was the two-part lacquer.  This is the stuff that costs £24 for a 400ml aerosol can. I'm sure it's very hard-wearing,  and it is the only half-matt lacquer I could find (another demanding requirement from the chief of interior design) so I gave it a go.  When I got some, it came in a can with no English writing on it, and no instructions apart from a frightening safety leaflet, so I looked it up on the internet. It turns out that it's full of isocyanates, which can give you life-crippling asthma if you inhale it in doses which are too small to detect (if you're unlucky) and so the only sensible way to proceed is using forced air respiration.  Ah! So that's what they mean by "for professional use only".

So I made a forced-air respiration system.  Here it is, looking surprisingly like the Russion spacesuits in the Speyer Technik museum.

It's made from a fancy full-face snorkelling mask, which provides a surprisingly air-tight seal, even with my beard to contend with.  I filled up the air exit holes with hot glue gun plastic, so the only way out is through the front valve.  The air comes down a big flexible pipe from outside the building and through a valve, which can isolate the headset completely so that you can detach the feed pipe when you want to leave the building.  At that point you just have to hold your breath until you are outside.

Outside, the air pump is my trusty garage hair dryer, taped on to the end of the pipe and supported by the pole the "sold" sign used to be on, to keep it up in the fresh air.  The steps keep the door shut. I need hardly mention that everything I needed for this entire life support system was already lying around, just waiting for a way to be useful.

There was one moment during the spraying when I could smell paint, so I stopped breathing for a while and just let it flush through.  I guess there had been a slight gust in through the open garage door (even though it wasn't windy) which wafted some paint-laden air out through the side door and into the hair dryer.  Apart from that it all worked faultlessly. Of course, I had to breathe gently, and I couldn't wear glasses under the mask, and the mask wasn't very good optically; all of which made the painting just a bit more difficult. But overall, I haven't suffered any ill effects, so hurrah!

Sadly, the same can't be said of the table.  Despite my best efforts at aerosol wielding, my almost reasonable paint finish turned into a trompe l'oeil interpretation of the mowing pattern on Wimbledon's centre court when I put the super-lacquer on.  And I ran out before I'd finished both copper leaves, so one of them is  shinier than the other.  And I dripped a bit (glove too near the nozzle, a rookie mistake) which leaves, well, drips.  All in all, it's been a hard life lesson in accepting one's own inadequacies.  However, I am determined not to let my ego get the better of things, so I state quite openly, "Thus far in life, I have turned out to be completely crap at painting".  So there.

Still the table is proving effective at keeping things off the floor, which is something.  Here it is in various states of functionality.

so, what do you think you can bring to the table?

nice leg - shame about the face

best viewed in the dark

it's flat really.  honest.