That’s it, I’m in for the night now and it’s not even 19:00, truth is, I was in almost an hour ago and have just demolished an awesome risotto cooked up by ‘wife and child’. Better start teaching ‘the boy’ to cook if he’s going to uni 
Contrary to all predictions it’s been a fine warm, nay even hot at times day today with just a few specs of rain around 17:00. Looks like there’s been plenty of it round and about right enough but we seem to have missed it.
I kinda ‘fell asleep at the wheel’ yesterday so never really finished posting, it had been kinda physical with me making shuttering, moving rocks by hand and digger. Not to mention making a wooden fence and creosoting it. I was hoping to get a couple of tons of concrete mixed and poured yesterday but as usual it ‘got complicated’.
The plan is to ultimately concrete all the way down to the caravan about 5m out from the fence then just do the rest of the area in those 20mm blue ‘chuckies’. This is a task I had no intention of starting, planning instead to continue build my road through the hen enclosure. However I’d 2 tons of 20mm concrete mix sitting in my tipping trailer and I needed that to collect the 20mm ‘chuckies’ from the quarry. Of course I could have just tipped it out onto the 2 ton pile I already had ‘in stock’ but I got it into my head it would save time to use the stuff now.
No sooner had I finished the shuttering when I had a brainstorm. There’s a 50mm duct running through the wind turbine base and if I was canny I could feed some twine through it to pull a cable through after. This seemed like a good way of supplying mains power right down to the other end of the croft. It would save me running a 50m plus extention lead down to the caravan and would give me a suitable connection for the digger/dumper shed.
This ‘simple’ task took me most of the afternoon once I’d dug a trench, dragged some heavy duty water pipe up from the chalet and then fed the twine through with a length of regular 32mm MDPE water pipe. It was only the section under the road that I’d do in the thick walled water pipe, the rest would just be in 6m lengths of 50mm Polypipe.
As I hadn’t actually planned doing this I’d no reinforcing mesh so had to ‘improvise’ with steel scaffolding tubes Me thought that 5m by 2.4m would be a good size to start off with as I’d got 12 bags of cement and just shy of 4 tons of 20mm mix. Typically, by the time I’d finished ‘faffing’ about it was late afternoon and it wouldn’t have been sensible or good for my marriage to start mixing concrete.
I did get everything ready for making a start today right enough so on the whole I was pretty chuffed with the result. Other things achieved since my return from the 1940’s have been a new gearbox fitted to my mate’s 9.9HP 2 stroke Yamaha outboard.
Four into Two will go
My mate’s gearbox failed at Easter on account of the oil drain plug going AWOL and the bearings being lubricated by sea water 
Methinks the parts to repair were about £1000 !!!! Anyway, as fortune would have it another mate had a newer model four stroke engine that was seized but had a good gearbox. It wasn’t a completely straight forward swap as the gear selector pushrods were different lengths and of course the water pump housings on both gearboxes were seized into the casings. Still, lots of heat, WD40 and new seals and water pump impeller had it sorted.
As I mentioned yesterday, my son and I gave it a good testing by heading up to see Bill Cowie on Rona.
By the time we returned to Torran ‘bearing gifts’ of wine and venison burgers the tide was well out
That’s where a plastic boat quad and winch come in handy, these Pioner boats are all but indestructible.
A new exhaust for Phoebe
The front pipe failed on the Daihatsu and I could probably got a new one for £50 or £60. I seldom repair exhausts as it just does not usually make sense but on this occasion it was just the flange that had broken so I made another from scaffolding pipe and 6mm steel plate.
The scaffolding pipe was just the right to slip over the front pipe so I just cut two slots in that and clamped it. The flange got a weld run all the way around it, methinks the car will fall apart around this repair
The pigs never turned up for dinner the other night, which is very strange, however cos we’d been away for a few days and they were being irregularly fed by the boy, I thought nothing of it.
That was until the following morning when they didn’t turn up for breakfast either, had they been rustled!!! Apparently not, they turned up at the Torran Schoolhouse, someone must have left the gate open or I guess they could have followed someone through. These two boys are very sociable and do like following people about.
Today
Having got all prepped yesterday I started mixing at 9:00 and worked right through until 15:00.
The first half went really well and I got a great finish on it but it started getting really warm in the afternoon and I started to slow down so that last half was going off too quick. Stupidly I didn’t put any retarder in the mix even though I had some!!!! That’s old age fer ya.
The boys were never far from the action either, chewing at the sleeves of my overalls through the fence as I was smoothing out the concrete.
The first bite
I usually get the first midge bite around me birthday a week ago but like the cuckoo it was late this year. The first ‘wee blighter’ sunk his teeth into my arm last night!!!
Anyway here’s a log of the battery current from yesterday, much to my surprise considering it was a cloudy day with no wind.
The line above zero is discharge and the negative value charging (typical German logic). The sun comes up at 6:45 (clock 2 hours fast) and the mixer starts at 9:01but after that it remains fairly positive until the wife arrives home and switches on the washing machine and immersion Whereupon I start the generator for an hour
