General Witterings -
Serious Stuff - Eisenhüttenstadt

Lots of bits 'n' pieces to report, as quite a lot has happened in the past couple of weeks.

On the social side, we spent a lovely evening with Klaus and his wife.  Klaus is President of the boat club whose moorings we are on.  Klaus is very interested in the history of the boat club and Eisenhuttenstadt, and has an extensive assortment of books, pictures and documents.  There was a POW camp on the other side of the canal - Stalag III B - where the inmates worked in a chemical factory.  This sounds odd to me, as my understanding is that POWs were not supposed to do any work.  Anyway, Klaus was only too pleased to have an interested audience. 

He also had an account book from the turn of the 19th to 20th Century.  At this time, Germany was in the process of changing from the Gothic script to the alphabet letters as we know them.  The book had been kept by two clerks, one of whom used the old writing and one the new. 

His mother was in Dresden on the night of the big bombing, and survived it.  The 60th anniversary of this raid is on 13/14 Feb.

I took delivery of a new All-in-One laser printer - a Samsung SCX 4100.  It only prints b&w, but this is no limitation as I very rarely print in colour.  Actually, I print so rarely that ink-jets decide they have used all their ink after I've printed less than 100 pages during a 12 month period.  My experience of lasers in the past suggest that although they are designed for higher volumes, they are well able to cope with lower volumes.  The sewing machine kindly made a shroud for it.

The automatic system for refilling the header tank is finished and is working well.  Our only real problem was with the effing pump - a new Jabsco 'gear' pump - where instead of a rubber/nitrile impellor there are a pair of brass gear wheels.  The pump is a bit noisier than a rubber impellor pump, but the problem was a very much excessive noise and the pump getting extremely hot.  As we needed to get the pump going asap (as soon as possible) the option of returning it to the UK supplier, or Jabsco, could not be entertained.  So we took it apart.  One of the spring clips used to hold the magnets in place was malformed, causing a bulge that was in metal-to-metal contact with the rotating motor.  Reforming the clip and re-assembling the motor cured the problem.

My main contribution to the project was in soldering together the copper piping - a job that I enjoy - largely because I can do it, and partly because if it is wrong, it is easy to rectify.

We have also managed to fit a smaller pulley onto the alternator, allowing the alternator to give a decent charge to the batteries at lower revs.

Then a dreadful couple of days cleaning out the engine room bilges.  It is foul work as the space is cramped, and the bilges are swilling with very cold mixture of anti-freeze, diesel, oil and water plus Fanny hairs which seem to get everywhere.

Fanny is fine.  She has a boy friend - a strange creature who is 80% poodle and 20% questionable.  They run around together, but he doesn't understand balls - he grabs it when he can, then rushes off with it to a quiet corner to eat it.

The bloody bike decided to get in on the 'repair me' act, and organized for the rear wheel to develop a severe wobble and a couple of broken spokes.  This, plus a rim that has been a problem for years, caused an expenditure of hard earned cash on a new rim and new spokes.  The result has been a quantum upward shift in my bicycling experience - even the 3-speed hub gear has joined in the fun for the first time for 8 or 9 months, and is now co-operating and behaving itself.

The only low spot was today, when two unfortunate events occurred.  One was that Fanny fell in.  The first time for ages.  She jumped ashore, and as per usual, instead of putting effort into the jump to land well onto the land, she gave a feeble hop onto the edge of the land - which was icy so she lost her grip and fell in.  Luckily there was only a skim of ice on the water, so she was easy to fish out.  The trick then is to constrain her for a moment until one gets her to an open space, then to put her down, then to run like mad to avoid her vigorous shaking, then to give her some comfort and re-assurance and a rub down with her towel.

The second event was when we went to buy some bits of steel for the refurbishment of the barbeques.  My excuse was that that I wasn't involved in the deal, but those who were enquired as to the availability of the steel, stated their requirements took delivery of it and then … AND ONLY THEN … enquired as to the price.  Hence I was required to pay 10 Euros for a bit of 2mm steel some 60 cm x 40 cm.

Toodle pip!!

Bill.