I hate cars !!!!

Not quite as planned could have been the title of today’s effort but since that’s the story of my life I’ve probably used it already. The day has been busy indeed, but not actually doing anything that I’d intended, but such are the ‘ups and downs’ at ‘the end of the road’.

It’s been a while since I posted, not through any lack of enthusiasm or things to rabbit on about but I’ve just been spending hours online trying to get to grips with fluid dynamics, the laws of physics and a reluctant siphon on my penstock (water pipe). Consequently my ‘single track’ brain has been unable to concentrate on much else.

As far as I recall Saturday was not such a bad day and I spent a good deal of it down below cleaning the bilges and searching for oil leaks in the engine room.

One of which turned out to be from a cover on the forward main engines timing chest and the other from the auxiliary drive gear housing O ring. The blanking plate is on the left with two bolt holes and the auxiliary drive on the right with three studs.

That’s the drive gear and its pulley back in position with the new belts.

I don’t know who organizes, or what this rally is called but every September around the equinox Skye is visited by a convoy of old commercial vehicles for a couple of days. This one’s an old Volvo tanker that probably has the same engine in it as the Loch Striven as they’re of similar vintage.

Here’s an Atkinson eight wheeler from the 1970’s

and another Volvo tractor unit from the early nineties, probably got a leaky auxiliary drive too 🙂

There was however no sign of this beauty

 

an International Loadstar from Jack Bradley’s in Accrington, where I lived for many years. These American trucks were, for a while built in Doncaster and there’s some much better pictures here http://paulanderson.pikfu.net/set1744699/.

I clearly remember seeing them at his depot when I was a lad in the late sixties, then around twelve years ago I saw this very truck at Clunie but have never seen it since 😦

Sunday was a pure 5h1t of a day, and had we been working from the old terminal at Suisnish there would have been no 10:00am sailing. The rain came down in bucket loads and Raasay House http://www.raasayoutdoorcentre.co.uk/ had a ‘changeover’ 😦 The fifty odd going out got absolutely soaked in their short journey from the waiting room to the ferry. Their coach driver had trusted his ‘prat nav’ instead of consulting a map and ended up in Mallaig 😦 So they got even wetter waiting for the delayed coach but the new group arrived just as the rain stopped 🙂

 

Monday, as I recall was not a bad day,

all the fleet out fishing

and plenty of rainbows.

Tuesday however was very much like Sunday 😦

Not quite so much wind but hellish showers. Still I was not caring, for it was my Friday and the forecast for the ‘week off’ was good 🙂

At lunchtime I went along to http://www.raasayengineering.co.uk/ for  gas and saw for the first time no timber, for JST http://www.jstservices.co.uk/ had moved it all and pretty soon they’d be taking their excellent floating pier away too.

Wednesday

Today was a rare day indeed for a September day on Raasay, screaming south wind all day and no rain 🙂

Not only was it dry but it was warm and a pleasure to be outside.

 

The day started to go ‘pear shaped’ yesterday when I arrived home to an extinguished oil stove and escaped pigs 😦 So that was two jobs that I had to attend to before I could even start the ‘to do’ list. Then there was the wife’s dads car that had developed a hole in the catalytic converter.

Now I’m big on the environment but the catalytic converter has to be the biggest load of eco bollox on the planet, full of precious metals, uses far more resources than it saves and friggin expensive. Fine on your big US gas guzzling tank but on small European or Japanese cars it saps more power out of the engine than the emissions it saves 😦

   

Dad in law’s gazillion pound ‘cat’ had a hole in it and I spent a few hours removing it and patching it up. Of course it wasn’t straight forward because the escaping pigs had chewed through the gas pipe on my MIG welder and I had to fix that first 😦

Then it was repairing the fence so the pigs could not repeat the incident, a job that was severely hampered by the fact that it’s solid rock 😦

However, with an extra square post some innovative straining, a few boards, an old bed and a 38mm Hitachi drill I had it sorted 🙂

Then after what would hopefully be the ‘final cut’ of the lawn I tuned my attention to the radiator fan on wifey’s dads car, a Peugeot 206 estate. Now when I was a lad it was quite simple, you had a switch in the radiator that turned the fan on and off when it got hot, there was usually a fuse and occasionally a relay. Of course nowadays it’s all controlled by the ECU via the temperature sensor for the gauge and the relay and fuse are hidden :-(  That’s just fine, well apart from the fact that you really need to take it to a garage to get it checked, for every time you disconnect something to check it by conventional means the ECU registers  a ‘fault code’. No big deal there then, that is until you reach 50 ‘fault codes’ and need a new ECU. Give me an old Land Rover any day, I just hate these modern cars 😦