Tuesday 28 June 2011

Gotham City

The bats are back !! well one bat or it could be two, they have decided that the gap between where our wood burner goes through the ceiling and into the roof space is an ideal place to launch themselves from come twilight....The only problem is that they launch themselves inside our house. I think it's a pipestrelle but I could be wrong it seems bigger than the ones we had in our previous house. Either way both Andrea and Lauren were hiding under a Charlie and Lola blanket like a pair of quivering girls... eventually I trapped it in the hallway and opened the front door and out it flew....alas later on it came back and had another fly past before I went to bed, I've named it Douglas after Douglas Bader the battle of Britain spitfire pilot. We've also found a baby bat in one of our bathrooms.... so it looks like they are breeding up there..... 

Xbox Boy is in Zante in Greece for a weeks holiday with his friends which he can barely afford, but that's up to him, He does start another job once he comes back in Pendine, it's only seasonal but it's a better job than he had...

Lauren is working in the same place and she works hard.... I think it might be a bit of a shock for Stewart... but there you go time will tell. Stewarts work history thus far has been far from glowing.....Although Lauren got a dose of reality the other evening when she asked Andrea for bus fare to get to work a few days AFTER she had been paid... erm no... 

FOMO boy had a nice birthday, he asked for money for his birthday and he put it towards something called an E-Pad, which is basically a HUGE android phone or a wannabe iPad... but without the phone bit... He broke the charger within a day.... I don't think it's going to survive very long if I'm honest, either the screen will get cracked or it will befall some other terminal damage, just like his DSi. call me cynical....

On the subject of technology as I predicted several months ago Lauren's brand new 12MP camera is on the verge of death, it's very obviously been dropped (probably more than once) and has an intermittent lens error... I see little point in buying Lauren any type of technology because she simply doesn't value it or look after it....In fact her answer to being questioned about it's lack of working properly was "Well you should have got insurance with it" "Erm no.... You should have bloody well looked after it, insurance is for genuine accidents not stupidity" This Christmas I think it will just be cash....In fact I will insist upon it.. at least that way I won't get predictably upset when it gets trashed, which of course it won't because it's cash.

Andrea is still running, she was out last night on a club run and she's out again tonight in Lampeter on another run, she enjoys it and it keeps her fit and trim so who am I to complain ?

We are planning on going camping in North Wales in July, so hopefully the weather will hold... but knowing our luck it will tip down, because thus far this summer is turning out to be much like the summers we've had recently....par for the course it seems.

The only news that has made me chuckle recently was the prediction that our Sun is going into an unpredicted solar minimum when it should be entering it's solar maximum now, and this minimum is along the same lines of the little ice age of the middle ages when the river Thames froze over predictably every year and they held winter festivals on the frozen river.... That has to hack off the Anthropogenic Global Warming zealots, because it cancels out the predicted rise in temperature because of CO2, and the ONLY way to counter the impending freeze (if it happens) is to pump out more CO2 to warm the Earth up.... You've got to laugh, they haven't got a clue and if anything it shows how little they know about climate... I also had to laugh at the IPCC when they stated that renewables would provide most of our energy by 2050, a paper written by a guy in the IPCC who is Greenpeace, but worse than that they let him review his own paper... and NOW governments are using this data as fact.... erm no epic fail

Sunday 5 June 2011

Bugger !!!

Our car developed a seized front right disc brake which was causing the disc to heat up alarmingly, not only that it was costing us money in petrol pushing the car harder to gain the same speed.... So I bought a brake refurbishment kit which replaces all the seals and rubber bushings....

It's not a hard job to do, you just need to remove the brake caliper from the wheel and push the piston out and clean everything up in there, replace the seals and away you go..... normally ...... 

The piston proved harder than I thought to get out... I eventually reverted to pushing it out via hydraulic pressure on the existing brake line.... and at the moment the piston left the piston chamber..... I was doomed :( but I didn't know it then.... I only discovered how doomed I was later...

the worst part was figuring out that you can only put the dust seal on AFTER you have pushed the cleaned and lubricated piston all the way in which took about an hour after various combinations I was ready to fit it back on the car and bleed the brakes......

But it wasn't to be....... I was defeated by a minuscule bleed screw which had last been opened in about 1998... it was rusted solid into the brake housing/piston chamber..... it didn't matter what I tried I couldn't get it loose or get it to even move.... I could have used brute force but all that would have done was ripped it clean off the piston housing......

Which presented me with a problem.... without being able to bleed the brakes they wouldn't work as they are intended....So the only thing I could do was to fill up the piston chamber with brake fluid through the tiny hole where the brake line attached (not an easy thing to achieve) and "try" and make it air free.... then reattach the brake line and hope the braking on that disc was good enough....

unfortunately it wasn't although they work  there is a lot of travel in the brake pedal and the brakes fade.... naturally because they aren't air free.... 

My father is arranging a visit to a blacksmith to remove the offending bleed screw by welding a nut onto it and getting it out....and putting a new bleed screw in if that fails it's a new caliper I'm afraid and they ain't cheap :( 

Which has more than hacked me off because I've already spent more than I wanted to on the refurbishment kit and pressure bleed system.......

Moral of the story..... Always have a exit strategy before embarking on something which might not work.....