Eons ago when I used to be soundly beaten in any human powered vehicle race by Mr Slade, irreverently known as Slash, I was disturbed - indeed mildly humiliated - to learn that he was in fact a year older than I.  However I now learn that he is only 60, which means that Mr Einstein was right - if you travel at high speed, time slows down for you.  Which sentence, moderately rearranged, becomes With time you're  interesteder in low speed human powered vehicles, of which the usefullest is the handcart.  Having sheep means attending to their thirst, and having a river at the bottom of a steep drive means building a handcart suitable for pushing two large buckets of water up the hill.  Water being heavy, wheels are better than shoulders, I find.

First you need wheels and tyres and innertubes and since I have been given an inexhaustible number of 26" perfectly good gentlemen's mountain bicycles I have both wheels and an abundance of front forks. 

First - a second first but let that pass - you need to make your wheels run parallel, or the cart will be hard to push and the tyres will rapidly wear.  A mitre saw and a holesaw provide four identical pieces of MDF (medium density fibreboard) which you can lash to the rims at four opposing identical spots.

Now you attach sawn-off front forks...

...and start delicately welding...

...because if you weld indelicately, the welds shrink and everything goes out of alignment.

If you chance to have found the shards of a bedstead thrown into the long grass at the side of the road, New Zealanders being lax in this regard, and you have brought it home to the general dismay of your family...

... you can reappoint its components to form the floor...

...for your buckets...

...taking care not to breath in the zinc fumes from the galvanized tubing. Then you weld the one to t'other...

... adding handles, and a stand to stop it tipping over, being a bit careful to make the handle far enough back so you don't trip over the cart when pushing.  Buckets can now be gaily added, and all that remains to be said is that a lid on each bucket will stop the water sploshing out on the way up the drive.

Hurrah!  another slice of garden clutter.

Sheep valve

'Tis midwinter once again: the six sheep we employ have neatly trimmed the bottom paddock and since nothing is now growing in what we dignify with the name 'orchard' it is time for them to move in there and save me the use of my Famous Allen Scythe.  I had some flimsy bits of wood which looked like planks though they were a bit bendy, and nailed them across the awkward top corner.  But there wasn't enough wood for the rest of the fencing. Accordingly I hammered waratahs into the ground and liberally laced them with sheep netting - if you don't know what waratahs are, or sheep netting is, I shan't enlighten you because you probably live in Alderley Edge or Guildford where these things aren't necessary - and opened various gates and drove the sheep into the orchard and retired to rest.  The orchard contains an olive tree and an apple tree and many weeds, along with the grass. The apples have all been disposed of (refrigerated - they keep well in the fridge) but from time to time I slice one and the sheep come and beg and I graciously give them a few bits, but not so much as to make them die which they're inclined to do for any number of arcane reasons, one of them being, I suspect, over-indulgence in apples.

Lo, glancing out of the window I saw that the sheep had teleported out of the orchard and were calmly grazing the lawn. On with wellies, and more gate-opening and gate-closing and sheep driving, and they were back in the orchard.

 Woe! Again, there they were on the lawn. 

Wellies again, and this time out with the little security camera which detects and photographs movement, theoretically all the burglars but actually the neighbour's cat.

And the mystery was solved.

So it appears I have invented a sheep valve.

Rural life

I find myself chided for not posting for a while.  This is miraculous: it suggests someone actually reads this blog. What can I say? My life is uninteresting. There's creeping buttercup in the top paddock and a tree fell down on the stockyard - will that suffice? - It didn't do me the courtesy of wiping out a few creeping buttercups but it's July and the buttercups don't creep in winter. - If you know that creeping buttercups are Ranunculus repens I can date you because everyone had to do it for biology o-level and judging by the age of school textbooks I'd estimate an English Education, sixties or seventies.  What they didn't teach was that nobody likes creeping buttercup.  Sheep don't and horses don't and cattle don't and our fences aren't up to deer and the wild pigs are a farm away in the forest and goats are immune to fences and we don't have donkeys. We don't have any animals actually, so Matt the builder lent us six sheep but they're in the bottom paddock where there are no buttercups.  As far as we know.  We never go in the bottom paddock. Actually he lent us five sheep and they multiplied last year reaching the dizzying total of ten but alas, one escaped and died when Matt chased it round Gavin's field for two hours, his idea of shepherding consisting of throwing a log at it and shouting "G'wan, yer fucken bitch".  Another abruptly lay down and died, and a third fell ill and Matt took it off and gave it whatever random medicine he found in his shed and it too died (an argument for veterinary surgeons' long years of study) and I forget what happened to the fourth.

This, alas, illustrates my ignorance of rural life.  A pompous soul would claim to be cultured instead, but this would necessitate me knowing things like why Schubert came to a full stop. There he is, strumming happily along (Unfinished of course. What other Schubert does anybody know?), and he gets to bar 60, and thinks whadda I do now? And there's a complete and utter bar's rest while everyone incl. even the oboist wonders why he stopped right then.  And then there's a great big din and everybody plays what the fuck they like and the second violins (my fave, natch) have a field day because nobody can hear what they're playing so it doesn't matter if it's sharp or flat or even the right note or key or instrument, so you know Schubert has said it to himself - Fuck, whadda I do now? So for four bars he just shouts Fuck, and then gets in a rage and goes shooting up to the ceiling.  And don't say there's some kind of subtle musical rationalisation because there isn't.  He just had these lovely themes - da da, de da-didaaa, de da-dida da da da da, daaa, and he didn't know how to join 'em up.  And that's the truth. I bet old Nigel Osborne or some other music professor would say it's unfinished because the last movement's missing but it isn't.  It's because he couldn't think up a twiddly bit.

Also, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no 1.  Honestly, why bother with the middle movement? Nobody knows it and nobody likes it.  Furthermore there are heaps of bits in the first movement which are flagrantly wrong.  That first bit comes to a fullstop just as badly as Schubert's. And later even when you've got a tune going, suddenly you shut the orchestra down completely and you let the pianist play some twiddlies that don't belong anywhere and have neither melody nor the other thing.  What was he thinking? There's just heaps that Tchaikovsky could have improved upon if only he'd had an editor or a competent critic, like me, f'rinstance. Can I claim to be a judge of music? Nope, and nor can the judge who played in the Sat'd'y Morning Orchestra when we were Youths.  He played in the Sat'd'y Morning Orchestra and he played in the First Eleven, though the latter was only because his mother had already bought him white flannels though he couldn't bat and he couldn't bowl and he couldn't field. He used to go out with Janey and when Janey played wossname in Yeoman of the Guard and I played in the orchestra for it (second violins, natch) and she came to the front of the stage and wept and I took out a hanky from my dinner jacket pocket and put it on the tip of my bow and held it up for her and she said Thank You, the entire audience collapsed with laughter.  - My proudest moment. What d'you expect from a second violinist? - He wasn't a judge then of course, and I will forego the pleasure of saying who he is since it's unwise to vex judges in case you ever find yourself at their disposal. Which is most unlikely, since he judges in England where I don't live any longer.

Allen scythe

 About a million years ago when I was a small boy in Yorkshire old Joss Littlewood, who lived in apparent poverty in the next farm but who had ten thousand pounds stashed under his mattress, a fact undiscovered until his death, taught me how to make a dry stone wall and how to use a scythe. I built a dry stone walled den in my father's wood and when I last visited our old house, thirty years later, gratifyingly found it still standing. New Zealand is made out of earthquakes so dry stone walling is a redundant skill, but swinging a scythe is an agreeable way to dispense with the otherwise ubiquitous line trimmer. Actually that's a fib - it's a disagreeable way. Hard work, scything. The trick is to cut long grass in the early morning. Then dew adds mass to the upper reaches, and the blade cuts, rather than knocks over. Old Joss Littlewood carried a whetstone and sharpened the blade every half-dozen strokes, but confided that this was only to allow him to get his breath back. I am not now as old as he was then, but one day it occurred to me that the hedge trimmer, unused since we left England, would be easier than swinging a scythe. Cutting the long grass in the top paddock proved easy but holding the hedge trimmer at ground level didn't, and I did have a bicycle trailer with a platform long enough to carry two dustbins of horse manure, one of those vehicles built more out of curiosity than for a purpose. (Can you tow a trailer full of horse manure? Yes, slowly, since the momentum tends to swing the bike with every pedal-stroke.)

Off with the wooden platform; long strips of rubber inner-tube; couple of short branches of the kanuka tree that the linesmen trimmed to stop it growing into the overhead power cables; bind everything firmly together with the hedge trimmer lashed in place; behold! an electric Allen scythe.

Having tested it to see that it worked - it did - all that was necessary was to cut up a mount from a TV satellite dish and weld it together as a replacement for the kanuka twigs.

The lashings of rubber serve to hold the safety switch permanently on so a switch had to be interposed in the cable, and this ain't brilliant when the blades encounter a steel fencepost. It cuts off-centre of the wheels of course but that turns out to be an advantage in that you can twizzle it round for awkward corners.  A wary eye has to be kept on the cable for obvious reasons, but the contrivance is easier on the arms and shoulders and eyes than a line trimmer, and it doesn't leave tiny bits of nylon cord everywhere.

e-recumbent

Chief disadvantage of riding a recumbent is that outside le supermarché some random git sees you as an opportunity to come up and deliver himself of a lecture on:

1. Why that is a handful in traffic

2. What a poor lock it has

3. Not much suspension on the front with that little wheel

4. I'm a farmer, so I know all about solving problems

5. I've been riding motorbikes for, let's see, 60 years

6. Back in 1970 I made an aerofoil for the back of a Ducati

7. I knew the airport traffic controller so I could test it there at 130 mph

8. He waved me off if a plane was coming in

9. That was long before John Britten, puh

10. Oh, you've got electric assist

11. I'm importing electric scooters, platform this wide, they'll do 150 km and 50 kph

12. I'm an entrepreneur

All this rather negates the speed advantage of a recumbent, which is only ever a meagre 5mins in the hour.

 

The electric assist is only throttle-operated, the 36v controller with the torque sensor being broken by an unfortunate trial with the 48V battery, and the 48v controller having no do-dads for a torque sensor. I was riding it yesterday on account of the wind. Had a massive tail-wind going into town, so I used this machine knowing I'd have a massive head-wind going home.  And so it proved.  But e-assist is glorious when you have a headwind.  14mph alleviates the bad feelings of a meaty headwind that you know will have you down to a pathetic 8mph.

 

Incidentally, if anyone does happen still to read this blog, this is what became of the Raleigh whose Duomatic back wheel was sacrificed to the Rain Bike.

 

 

Cable repairs

 Yesterday I saw that the front mech cable was frayed: the attention of the Frayed Cable Investigation Committee was brought to bear: today the repair was effected.  Citizens of New Zealand are currently locked down so a visit to the bike shop was outwith the options available. 

Decades ago I acquired brass tubing suitable for the manufacture of model steam engines: an inch-and-a-half of 3/32 x 0.014 tube was cut, the frayed cable snipped, a rusty spare from long ago located, and the ends of each piece of cable were dipped in zinc chloride flux. Small flame, application of electrician's solder, splashes of solder on the floor. None on the cable ends. More dipping in flux. More heating, more solder splashing on floor. After half-a-dozen goes the solder began to take in the cable, and drips solidified at the ends preventing insertion into the brass tube. Minor application of brain: cables up-ended so the solder would run back along the length. 

Now flux was generously applied to the inside of the tube using the end of a cable as a spatula, and both ends were inserted to meet at the middle. Heat tube: solder flowed. Applied more solder, the tube being hot, till it dribbled out of t'other end. Being in tension, fingers crossed that the annealed brass won't give way.

This whole operation had to take place with the cable still in the bike since the brass tube now prevents it going through the cable housing. 

 

And since we're on the subject, cable housing has been in short supply since Covid hit all imports, so maybe here's where we advertise the Middleton Patented Method for extending cable housing too. - The police firearms officer assures me that every farmhouse has a .22 rifle, and empty .22 brass cartridges are easily found. Take two such cartridges, solder them back-to-back, drill a 2.5mm hole through the joined bases, and ends of housing will go into each. La! swords into ploughshares.

Chair

 This is my chair:

I was going to throw it out when we moved house but notwithstanding the rips and the repairs it is a comfortable chair and much work has been accomplished thereon.  However a daughter spotted it while moving.

"What's THAT?"

"It's a computer chair. From 1928."

"How come they had computers in 1928?"

"They didn't of course. It's an office chair."

"Woz they like, 'Guys, we got the chair. Now we'd better invent computers' ?"

Anyway I sat on my chair, and leaned back and there was a loud bang and the chairback, normally springy, flipped backwards and I nearly fell off. I looked below and a bolt had sheared, and the impact had cracked the cast iron.  I tightened an adjuster instead of the spring and we must now pray it remains comfortable for seven more years and then it can be wheeled round the garden and earn itself a knighthood.