In my eagerness to get back up the hill this morning and do some rock breaking in my trench I never even checked the forecast. I was up early enough and left the house to feed the pigs to be greeted by what can only be described as a ‘hair dryer’ of warm south wind, cloudy but with little sign of mischief in the sky. The pick and shovel that I’d been using yesterday were to be assisted by a generator and Hitachi demolition pick on this fine morning and I was raring to go.
Of course the first thing I had to do was fix the Chinese piece of cr4p generator that I was going to use to power my 30 year old Hitachi. It’s not my generator, for I wouldn’t be seen dead with one of these lumps of 5h1t. It is in fact my neighbours who’d been given it as a present by her sister. A fine enough looking copy of a genuine Honda item that ‘sis’ had bought from the back of a Transit van from Ireland. It never worked from the word go but of course the mobile phone number left ‘in case of the unlikely event of problems’ had long since been disconnected.
I pulled the thing apart for her and discovered that the rotor windings had not even been soldered onto the slip rings and after that it ran well enough for the little serious work that was expected of it. However it had always leaked petrol from the vicinity of the fuel tap and being as how the stuff is so expensive I thought that I’d better fix it for her.
Suspecting a simple case of a leaky washer I removed the tap and found to my horror that it was designed and fitted in such a manner that any halfwit could see that it was going to leak fuel from the start. It was constructed in such a way that no matter how tight the lock nut was fuel would get past the threads. On such a set up it would be customary to use PTFE thread tape but there was no sign of that here, and it’s not great stuff to use on petrol fittings anyway as it can end up blocking the carburettor jets. Still, it was all I had and I just kept my fingers crossed that the filter would keep the stuff out of the carb. And if that’s a genuine CE mark ‘I’ll show my ar5e in Woolworth’s window’ 🙂
With the generator strapped to the back and the Hitachi in the fish box, Molly and I set off without oilskins for Loch Beag a mile or so away. After checking that the siphon was still running we went back to the trench and started picking away at the large lump of Scotland that I’d discovered under the peat.
When the first shower came I just carried on whilst Molly sought the shelter of the dry heather in the lee of the quad, the second one had me joining her. It was a heavy shower driven horizontally by the near gale force south wind, consequently it was still perfectly dry for a few feet downwind of the trusty Honda. The next shower showed no hope of a reprieve astern of it so the ‘wee dug’ and I bailed out and by the time we got home I could not have been wetter had I jumped in the loch 😦 The rain was so strong that I had to drive with a hand in front of my eyes and Molly was cowering behind the long defunct speedometer and fish box on the front.
I suppose realistically that it didn’t curtail my mornings work by more than half an hour but it left me feeling cold wet and miserable. A complete change of clothes later I was heading south down through the sheets of rain to the ferry terminal on the first leg of a trip to Portree.
We were needing feed for the pigs, shopping and of course I had to pick up the Dude after his first full week at the Hostel. In all honesty I could not have picked a better day for it, as little else would have got done outside at Arnish.
All went smoothly on Skye and I met my long lost son at the 16:15 ferry, of course he was minus his clothes bag which he’d left on the bus, his jacket that he’d left in the bus and his phone which he’d lost but ‘hey ho’ that’s 12 year olds for you 🙂
With the Land Rover already full feed I acquired two extra boys and a bigger rock breaker from my good friend that drives diggers 🙂
Before heading home however we had a run along to the old ferry terminal to see the tug Red Baron (or at least I think that’s its name) getting ready for taking JST’s floating pier away to Glenelg.
After six months of the big Fendt 936’s hauling timber the roads will be very quiet on Raasay 🙂
We also had a run along to see progress on the new housing association houses at School Park where I found this chap busy at work laying the piping for the under floor heating.
He was obviously self employed as it was 17:00 on a Friday afternoon and pishing with rain, not only that but he made time to chat and explain the workings of the system he was installing.
RJ MacCallum plumbing and heating services could well be getting a phone call when the new house goes up 🙂