The parcel that I expected was delivered around lunch time so although I wasn’t able to get over to Malbec until this afternoon I managed to get a reasonable amount done on my Savannah’s new screen. The screen is now basically fully installed. The interior and exterior side trims are also now fitted except for those annoying pop rivets at the very top inside the wing root cavities and they would have been except the cut down 3mm drill bit I was using in the angle drive broke.

I’ll need to cut down another for tomorrow but this time I’ll make it a 3.2mm. So when I deal with those pop rivets tomorrow it’ll then be time to start on the roof top panel and replace the transparent polycarbonate window in it. It’s not that bad but as its weather sealing is broken as a result of removing the panel it would be silly not to put new plastic in to make it as clean and bright as the main screen, which as shown in the third image below is now excellent once more.

It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning, to paraphrase a very famous gentleman in history. I’m talking about my Savannah’s new screen. But before I get onto that, something else that’s been winding me up. I didn’t get to bed until 01.30 am after being preoccupied with yet another ongoing computer problem. Right now the cost of memory chips has gone through the roof, the reason being apparently, that supply cannot meet the demand of AI businesses and datacentres. Whereas in the past computer memory costs have fallen even as they have become faster now the opposite is happening.

The cost of the solid state disk drive that I installed in my current machine that I built in 2022 has doubled from just under 200€ to just under 400€ which is putting such drives out of the reach of many amateur builders like myself. The Chinese have been quick to notice this and all of a sudden, not because of philanthropy on their part I would imagine, many low cost solid state disk drives and RAM sticks have been arriving on the market. Knowing that I could return them for full refunds, in recent weeks I have purchased three inexpensive solid state disk drives. Two of them have failed immediately on loading them with data and the first failed a few days ago after having been installed about a month ago.

All have been refunded to me in full but my experience can’t be coincidence and the Chinese supplier(s) must know what’s going on. So why do they do it? Do they just calculate that not every customer who purchases the junk will send them back? That’s the only reason I can think of. I’m awaiting delivery of yet another more expensive SSD from China and I’ll be interested to see how that fares, but if it fails it’ll also be sent straight back.

So what kept me up last night? Because of my experience with the three SSD’s that I’ve mentioned, because I’m now in desperate need of computer back up storage I decided to go for a more conventional external USB disk drive. It arrived yesterday and during the afternoon I began copying data onto it, a lot of data because that’s how you find out if it will fall over or not. And it did. I persevered until 01.30 am because I knew that I had to get restarted on the Savannah’s screen today and needed to arrange the return of the disk drive before doing so. I managed to do that but it meant I didn’t get to Malbec until after lunch.

I did OK in the time available but wasn’t able to finish the job off. It’s something that you can’t rush because that’s how you mess it up. I started by removing the protective film that was still on the outside of the screen and placing it in position to get a feel for its fit, which wasn’t bad. So then I was able to fit it much more firmly using two wood clamps, one in the doorway on each side. The clamps are the perfect tool for that and once the screen was firmly in place I could see that the problem I had with crazing of the old screen around the two pop rivets that had secured it to the two vertical front struts would this time be academic.

The reason for this was that although it can’t be shown in photographs, the screen was standing some way off the struts and as the dimensions of this screen are not much different from the old one, it’s no wonder that the stress of riveting it to the struts eventually led to stress damage. This time I won’t be doing it, so I plugged the holes with pop rivets and gave the struts a refreshing light spray with matt black paint as now they’ll be more in view from both outside and inside the cabin.

So after that I pop riveted the screen lightly in position and called it a day. I found afterwards that although the passenger side of the screen is perfectly in place, the captain’s side will need a bit of adjustment to pull it down. That’ll involve drilling out a couple of pop rivets but it won’t be difficult and any spare holes will be hidden under cover plates anyway. But that’s for tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve received notice that a parcel I ordered is being delivered tomorrow and I just hope that I won’t be waiting in all day for it and wasting what would otherwise be yet more valuable time. This being France, I just have a feeling… 😕

Tell you what though… take a look at the final photograph below. It wasn’t until I’d taken the old screen out that I realised just how brown and cloudy it had become. The new screen will be almost like having nothing there. 🙂

For the first time in several weeks last night I went to bed a happy man. No, not for that reason… The reason was that I at last managed to crack the many computer problems that have been dogging me. In a previous post I mentioned that they all started when one of the secondary disk drives in my main computer crashed and I lost a considerable mount of important data, including the engine hour records for my Savannah. I managed to get just that one file back but much other data was still lost.

Then on top of all that, while I was trying to deal with the lost data problem the new CPU that I fitted in my computer by way of an upgrade began to run incredibly hot – dangerously so, at 100 degrees C which is its maximum before it shuts down before damage occurs, so that was another problem that had to be solved. I surmised that the root cause was a failure of the CPU water cooling system that I’d installed when I built the computer back in 2022 so went ahead and purchased a replacement from Amazon.

Fitting it meant dismantling virtually the whole machine as I had to extract the motherboard in order to fit a new cooler mounting plate and when I’d finished and had the machine back in one piece it failed to restart. It was totally and completely dead. Now Amazon have a great little scheme for various products, especially for many computer components, whereby they offer ‘second hand’ or ‘good as new’ items at reduced prices. If you read between the lines these are often brand new, unused items whose packaging has been damaged in the warehouse and can represent really good bargains.

On the other hand, they could be items that have been returned by previous buyers who have damaged them and sent them back for a refund without declaring the damage and often there can be no practical way for Amazon to test them before offering them for resale at a reduced price. My replacement cooler was one such item which left me in a complete quandary. My initial reaction for my computer’s failing to restart was to put the problem down to the cooler. It’s wiring is quite complicated and I thought that maybe a previous buyer had screwed it up and shorted the cooler out, but how could I test it?

But it got worse. I then tried replacing the new cooler with the old one which I knew was probably faulty as it was allowing the computer’s CPU to heat up, but it did at least allow the machine to boot to a running system while it was doing so. The result was a disaster. Even with the old cooler installed my machine now remained totally dead and I began to wonder whether I had unknowingly done something stupid while installing the new cooler which had possibly shorted something out and destroyed the motherboard. But, once again, how could I test it?

I’d already packed the new cooler up and requested a return and refund when I had a last desperate idea. I have what was a brand new motherboard which I think I foolishly damaged but which I knew powered up but did not fully boot into a running system. I wondered what would happen if I swapped the motherboards and installed the new cooler on the faulty motherboard. Now it just so happened that late yesterday evening I’d been watching a video on Youtube by someone who had purchased a totally dead computer on Facebook Marketplace for peanuts and got it running within minutes as a result of one simple measure, one that you learn about when you first start messing around with computers but which I’d forgotten and haven’t applied for donkeys years. It’s called resetting the CMOS.

CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor and in computer terms it’s a small memory chip on the motherboard which is powered by an on-board battery. The chip contains the motherboard settings which are stored in the factory but which can be subsequently modified either intentionally by the user or inadvertently by events. This hit me like a kick in the teeth. Resetting the CMOS is done by shorting across two pins on the motherboard and only takes 10-15 seconds. And I hadn’t done it.

So at around midnight last night I stripped apart my complete machine yet again, reset the CMOS on the ‘damaged’ motherboard which I knew would probably power up but not run and installed that with the new cooler that I’d had to unpack again. And bingo! Sure enough it and the new cooler powered up but sadly, the machine would still not fully boot. However, it told me that the new cooler was perfectly OK, so what about if I reset the CMOS on my previously working motherboard which had been running but now appeared to be dead and would not now start and reinstalled it with the new cooler?

And know what, it sprang into life. So there I was at about 1.00 am putting everything back together and then putting the machine through its paces. It was brilliant. It ran like a Swiss watch, totally silent and with its new CPU and an additional stick of RAM (memory) faster than I’ve ever known it. How crazy is that, after all the problems I’ve had. The images below show the machine running. The cooler fans change colour, which is the latest fad among ‘gamers’ but most importantly, the temperature of the CPU is being kept incredibly low by the new cooler, at not much above room temperature, which is amazing.

But on top of that I have more good news which is the cherry on the cake. While all this has been going on I’ve also been putting my ‘backup’ machine together and trying to recover the data I lost using two pieces of specialised software, Disk Drill and Recuva. The good news is that I’ve managed to recover ALL of the key data from the two disk drives involved, one that was internally damaged and the other which I must have inadvertently wiped during the data recovery process.

And there’s also a possibility that I may be able to recover even more, although I’m now not too bothered as what’s left is only old data that I was ‘hoarding’ for old-times sake. So now I can get on with reassembling the recovered data on the two machines, my main computer and the ‘backup’, so I can get back onto other pressing matters. Like fitting the new screen in my Savannah and the work in my garden. Happy days at last!

Today I was supposed to be getting straight back onto fitting the Savannah’s new screen but first I had to finish a task that I started yesterday, namely an attempt to recover the data lost on the computer disk drive that had crashed. I was using special software that crawls very slowly over a drive seeking each little piece of lost data and reassembling them file by file. It takes forever and cannot work on a disk drive, or parts of a drive, that have been physically damaged but it’s worth a try.

Initial results looked very encouraging because the software could ‘see’ almost everything that had been lost, but seeing it and being able to lift it off the drive are two different things. In the event the only file of real value that I managed to recover was the Excel spreadsheet of the Savannah’s hours. Don’t get me wrong. If I’d had to choose just one file this was it, but I’d hoped that I’d have got more. Nevertheless, I feel blessed and relieved that I’ve managed to recover this one.

I had some other things to do and by the time I’d done those I have to admit that I wasn’t motivated to then go to Malbec to work on the Savannah’s screen. Instead, later in the afternoon I thought I’d go and start my excavator up and raise its boom which slowly sinks as the hydraulic oil in the system passes the seals. That’s quite normal but previously the boom dropped far enough for the end of the boom to contact the tarp wall covering of the excavator’s garage and if I hadn’t noticed it would have ended up splitting it, so now I raise the boom on a regular basis to prevent that happening.

And then I had an idea. I thought that as the excavator’s engine needed to be run anyway I’d tackle something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. Looking from my house down to the bottom of my back garden the ground slopes downwards to where the front of my tool store/workshop will eventually be and then it immediately begins to slowly slope upwards again. This means that the ground at what will be the back of the structure will be higher than at the front and as the concrete base on which it will be built will be flat the ground on either side will have to be progressively shaved down from front to back and on the same level from side to side at the back.

It’s difficult to see in photographs but is easiest with the excavator garage in the picture. As both the dumper and the excavator needed to be started up and run and I need the practice, I decided to get them both out of the garage and tackle the side further from the garage. I had to be careful because the distance between the hole I’ve already dug out and the fence is pretty narrow and the ground is dry and soft without much support for the excavator’s weight. I’d swapped the buckets over to the wider, smooth edged one weeks (months?) ago before the heatwave but hadn’t used it for grading the ground. I also I have nothing like the skills of a pro but I’m quite satisfied with the results of half an hour’s work, as the photographs below show.

I’ll need to get to the back via the side closer to the garage but I feel pretty confident that it won’t take too much to get the ground around the hole level enough. Before pouring concrete the hole will receive a sub-base of stone and ‘remblais’ that will be pounded down with a compactor and wooden shuttering will then be put in place. Once the concrete has been poured any gap between the concrete and the ground after the shuttering has been removed will then be back-filled but before then I have to complete the work on my Savannah and also prepare the ground around my house for some other works that are planned. So much to do.

I’ve had an horrendous last couple of weeks. All I’ve wanted to do is let my lawn robot tick over keeping my grass under control while I finished replacing the damaged screen in my Savannah but events have totally prevented me from doing this. Yes, the lawn robot has continued doing its job but problems with my computer(s) have kept me indoors and well away from anything to do with my aircraft.

The computer problems have involved a serious loss of data due to equipment malfunction and specifically the failure of a hard disk drive that contained much valuable data, including the engine hour records for the Savannah. When I acquired the aircraft it didn’t come with engine and airframe log books the way a British registered aircraft would have. Instead I received only partial records in an Excel spreadsheet which I continued to maintain. However, that’s now gone together with all of the photographs from when I first acquired the aircraft that might have helped me to rebuild the record.

This is the second hard disk drive that has let me down since I’ve been in France and on both occasions I’ve lost valuable data as a result. As my computer is so valuable to me because of all the valuable data it still holds, such as photographs and videos, I decided that I needed to avoid it ever being able to happen again by building another machine which will essentially be a mirror of my main machine and holding the same data. However, my every attempt at doing so over the past couple of weeks has been thwarted, mainly because storage drives that I’ve acquired from China, three of them, have all failed while configuring the new machine.

But not only that. In the process it appears that I might have inadvertently wiped another disk drive that contained mainly old data that I rarely had need to consult but which I’d have liked to keep. It may be possible to recover that data using special software but I won’t know for sure until I’ve received yet another storage device that I’ve had to order and have not yet received.

But that’s not the last of my computer woes. I recently upgraded the processor in my main machine and was going to sell its original processor on LeBonCoin because it is still in high demand. However, I now won’t be able to do that as I’ll have to use it in my proposed back-up machine. I therefore thought that I was putting my problems behind me, but it wasn’t to be so. Up to the end of last week the new processor had been working flawlessly but I suddenly noticed that the machine was beginning to run very slowly. When I checked I found that the processor’s temperature was right on its upper limit so had to switch the machine off to avoid potential damage even though the processor, an Intel Core i5-14400f, has built-in overheating protection.

Because both this processor and its predecessor are of quite high power they both need an efficient cooling system. The system I chose when I built my main compute in early 2022 uses water cooling. It works much the same as a car’s radiator using a liquid coolant which is pumped around through small radiators that have air blown through them by electric fans. My immediate suspicion, confirmed by AI analysis, was that the electric pump had failed and this seems to be so as when the computer is running and the processor temperature is building up you can’t feel any hot coolant in the tubes connecting the processor to the radiators. The image below shows what I’m referring to.

So it appears that quite by coincidence I have also lost my main machine together with much of the valuable data on it and have also been prevented for the time being from building a secondary back-up machine. I have a replacement cooling system on order which should be arriving the day after tomorrow but in the meantime I dare not use my main machine for fear of losing even more data and am typing this on my old faithful machine that my current main machine replaced in 2022. It must by now be pushing 10 years old, runs Windows 10 as distinct from the hot mess that is Windows 11, starts and runs quickly enough for general use (but not for data intensive applications like video production), is reliable and never lets me down.

But guess what. My problems have since taken another turn. I love my lawn robot, see the image below, and it saves me an enormous amount of time by keeping my grass in trim while I do other things. In fact it does a much better job than I do with my ride-on lawn mower. However, it seems to be a bit like a Range Rover – great while it is working but leaving something to be desired in the reliability stakes. Early yesterday evening while it was tackling the last 25% of the grass at the back of my house it ground to a halt. It reported that its wheels were spinning, which they weren’t, and when I ordered it to return to its charging station it wouldn’t budge. Then when I’d returned it there manually it reported that it couldn’t exit again despite the battery showing 100% charge.

The Chinese supplier who has always provided superlative customer support can diagnose the machine over the internet and has reported that there has been a failure of the drive motor control board. They have kindly offered to send me yet another brand new machine, my third, and have told me that I can hang on to my current machine and not return it, which I think is absolutely unbeatable. Nevertheless, it’s still rather concerning that in the short time I’ve been using it, I’ll be on my third machine. I suppose I’ll just have to live with it and see how things go from here.

Problems, problems…

Working indoors today on the floor of my living room in yet another day of heatwave (40 degrees forecast yet again), I cut a new screen for my Savannah from the 15 years old sheet of polycarbonate that I brought with me to France from the UK (delivery date was 22 August 2011). When it was delivered a fairly large area of the protective film on one of its sides had been rubbed off and the surface underneath scuffed and as there was insufficient undamaged area to make a new AX3 screen from the supplier told me to keep it and sent a replacement. And then I forgot that I had it.

Fast forward 15 years and once again I need polycarbonate for a new screen for my Savannah, so I dug this old roll out and found that as far as I could see, there was more than enough undamaged material. However, usually you want to work on fresh material with protective film on both sides but as this sheet is so old much of the film on one side had fallen off. I therefore had remove it all and mark out the screen using a fine black felt tip direct onto the plastic surface.

After doing so, I took great care to protect the sheeting as much as I could while cutting and drilling it with simple hand tools as shown and ended up with what looks like a jolly good basic screen. I’m not going to drill its fixing holes this time until I get it positioned on the aircraft as after having done it once I think drilling it in situ will do a better job. There are fixing points to hold the screen in place on each side which will be under the aluminium side strips and I’ve also got two excellent wood clamps that will be perfect for holding it in position.

So the next job will be to clean up the pop rivet holes around the Savannah’s screen and install the fruits of today’s labours. Then I’ll need to move on to the roof panel the polycarbonate in which I also intend to replace.

Before just blasting away and cutting the new screen for my Savannah I’ve been thinking about how to fit it in such a way as to avoid the same problems that have affected the present one. I’ll explain what I mean using the image below.

I fitted the present screen in the same way as the damaged one that I removed had been, as shown in (1) in the image, which was by pop-riveting the polycarbonate directly to the two vertical tubes behind it inside the cabin. I could see that after I’d done it there were rainbow stress rings in the polycarbonate around the heads of the pop rivets but thought that these wouldn’t matter. In fact they did and over time stress fractures began spreading out into the polycarbonate from around the rivet heads. I stop-drilled them but this didn’t stop new ones forming and the result also looked very unsightly.

After stop-drilling the stress fractures I also modified the manner of fixing as shown in (2) in the image. This consisted of adding thick(ish) rubber washers either side of the polycarbonate supported by metal washers of the same diameter. However, it was too late and new stress fractures continued to form. I think that a contributory factor was that the holes in the polycarbonate and the washers, both metal and rubber through which the pop rivets passed were of the same diameters as the pop rivets and the holes attaching them in the fuselage tubes which I think meant that although the polycarbonate was cushioned, there was still interference as a result of vibration between the polycarbonate and the sides of the pop rivets.

What I’m therefore thinking of doing is shown in (3) in the image which is to retain the same cushioning principle but drill the holes in the polycarbonate with a greater diameter (what I’ve labelled as d+ in the image) than the holes in the washers and the pop rivets (that I’ve labelled as d). This I think will secure the polycarbonate sufficiently by compressing the rubber washers either side of it but will still allow it to vibrate without impacting with the pop rivets, thus preventing future damage. That’s the principle anyway and I’d be grateful to hear what anyone with any experience of this problem thinks before going ahead. Trouble is though, that this will be very soon.

I might add that if/when the new screen suffers the same fate as the present one, after 10 years or hopefully longer with the revised fixing method, at least it won’t be my problem. 😕

I wasn’t looking forward to it having done the job once before, back in September 2016 when the original screen was destroyed by spilt fuel after a rubber tube popped off a cheap Chinese electric pump that I was using to fill the Savannah’s tanks. My fear was that having drilled out all of the pop rivets holding the screen in once, doing it yet again would result in enlargement of the pop rivet retaining holes or even other kinds of damage and although I wasn’t totally happy with how things worked out, luckily nothing serious happened and any ‘problems’ won’t be visible anyway.

I started off as before by removing the side fairings between the fronts of the wing roots and the fuselage and this then exposed all of the pop rivets securing the screen side strips which are in two parts, outside and inside the cabin doors. I couldn’t remember how I’d done it before and had hoped that when I’d drilled out all of the rivets across the top of the screen I’d get away without having to remove the roof panel. However, looking beneath it it soon became clear that the screen extended some way underneath it and the whole roof panel would have to be removed to get at the rivets further back.

I’d remembered that I’d previously used an angled drill chuck to get at some rivets in the gap between the wing roots and the fuselage and sure enough I had to do so again. I’d bought an angled drill chuck from China for this purpose and searched for the shortest one that I could find. However, the Chinese supplier had totally lied about its dimensions and it was far longer than they’d stated, but luckily my friend Victor got me out of trouble yet again by loaning me what might have been the same tool as previously and cutting down a 3mm drill to the minimum length possible so it would fit into the space.

Eventually I got all of the side pop rivets drilled out but not without drama. The pins of several of them had broken off inside the rivet heads rather than below them which means that you need to take a pointed tool to tap them back before drilling out the rivets. If you don’t the drill runs off as the rivet material is much softer than the pins. Unfortunately one such pin was one of those at the top in the narrow gap. It took a long time to get it out and the rivet hole was enlarged in the process but I think it will work out OK when I come to fit the new screen.

Eventually once I’d drilled out the rivets along the back of the roof panel and the sides of the top window within it I was able to get to all of the rest of the pop rivets holding the screen in place. Before I come to fit the new screen I’ll have to go all around as before and ensure that all of the pop rivet holes that I’ve drilled out are fully open and clear but before that I’ll need to use the old screen as a template as I did previously to cut out a replacement from a sheet of new polycarbonate.

On inspection, the old screen that I made 10 years ago is now in pretty bad shape. It’s discoloured (brown tinge) and as well as having small cracks in its main surfaces on each side, it has bad crazing around the two rivet holes that secured it to the vertical front tubes and several cracks emanating from them. I’ve been thinking what to do about these in the new screen and to be honest, I’m wondering whether the securing rivets are necessary at all, or whether there might be a way to move the screen surface back closer to the tubes to reduce the stress in that area and/or to put rubber padding around the tubes themselves. But that’s for later after I’ve made the new screen. In the meantime I’ve temporarily replaced the roof panel and secured sheeting in the screen area to keep birds, insects and muck out of the cabin, all of which there’s plenty of at the moment.

I previously mentioned that I already have a sheet of polycarbonate that I brought with me from the UK when I came to France and had forgotten about. It was supplied in the UK when I repaired MYRO, my old AX3 after its landing accident back in 2011. When the polycarbonate was delivered it had been scratched and the supplier told me to keep it and sent a replacement sheet. The Savannah’s screen is much smaller than the AX3’s and when I laid out the polycarbonate sheet (which had a 2011 delivery date on it) as the final images below show, there’s plenty of undamaged sheet from which to cut a new screen for the Savannah. And even a new top window I think. Now I’ve got to go ahead and cut the new screen.

I’m back on my Savannah. Today I gave it a good wash and put its battery on charge as it was down to 60% and turned the engine over but not fast enough to start it. Tomorrow I’ll run the engine for the first time in many weeks and then take its screen out as the small cracks that I found have increased a bit in length, presumably because of the intense heat that we’ve been having and also because it has become a bit more hazy.

I have a roll of polycarbonate that I brought with me from the UK when I moved to France all those (14!!) years ago. I bought it when I replaced my old AX3 MYRO’s screen way back before I left the UK for France. When it was delivered one corner that would have intruded into the finished screen had been scratched and the supplier told me to keep it and sent me a replacement roll.

I’d forgotten about it when I had to make screens for the French AX3, 28AAD, that I rebuilt and also the Savannah whose screen was damaged by spilt fuel 10 years ago but I think it should be OK for a new screen for the Savannah which I think is smaller than the AX3’s. Anyway, that’s the plan and if everything goes smoothly the new screen should be in by the week-end. If not…

Below are some shots of my Savannah after I’d cleaned it and put its battery on charge. Now I’ve started I’ll finish the job off 😉

I’ve been painting my shutters since 16 June and finally they’re all done and back up again. I lost a few days because I ran out of paint twice and had to order some more but it’s been a marathon, ball-aching job and I’m really pleased to see the back of it. Well almost. I’m not happy with how some have come out, especially the large pair on the front. I think they, and all the rest as well probably, have suffered from having been painted during the longest, worst heatwave more or less in living memory and the quality of the paint hasn’t helped much either.

I wish now that instead of going for Dulux I’d just gone for a readily available brand bought locally. I’m sure that it wouldn’t have turned out any worse and might possibly have been better. Part of the problem was that when I bought the first two cans I didn’t realise that they were a lacquer and I now think that that was an unfortunate choice. A ‘normal’ gloss paint would probably have been much better, especially in the prevailing temperatures in which I had to work.

I also think that the first couple of cans that I bought, some time ago on line, had been mixed by the supplier on a machine, and not very accurately. The shutters I painted with them are all a bit redder than the last two cans that have been supplied directly by Akzo Nobel and this is especially true for the front pair that I’m not very happy with at all that are now a quite vivid red, although this is not clear in the photographs below. I may need to take them back down again, give them a light rub down and another coat of the darker paint that I have left over. If I do, I think I’ll leave it until it becomes cooler.

But anyway, for now they’ll do and I can get on with other things, in particular fitting a new windscreen in my Savannah as although the little hair cracks that have appeared in the existing screen are not bad and would probably not stop the aircraft being flown, you can’t be too careful. Anyway, that’s my next job. Below are some shots of the shutters as they now are and also one or two from before they were painted by way of comparison.

To anyone else this is just a picture of a pair of shutters. To me this is a significant milestone as they are the first of the full height shutters to be painted and remounted and they also mean that all of the shutters on the front of the house are now done.

Well wad’ya know. Yesterday the wind destroyed the small parasol that I had over the small round table on my terrace. Today I’m thinking that it did me a service.

For the past several weeks, ever since the manufacturer replaced my Isward lawn robot that developed a fault with a new machine, I’ve been unable to mow my front lawn without running into problems. The new machine would not recognise the mapped boundary between my lawn and the field next door and kept crashing through into the the long grass in the field. Neither I nor the Chinese manufacturer could understand why it should keep doing it, repeatedly, over and over again in the same area.

I narrowed the problem down to the system’s GPS RTK beacon which is mounted on a pole that I’ve placed next to the charging station. Even up to this morning I was convinced that the beacon was now faulty and needed to be replaced and the manufacturer had agreed to do so. However, I then noticed on a drone video that I shot about a week ago that the Isward was at about the same height as the beacon at the point where the boundary anomaly was the greatest and when I checked the signal I found that the machine was unable to connect with the beacon at that point.

So I considered trying to raise the height of the beacon to see if that would help and looked around for a means to do so. And know what? The lower part of the tube supporting the now-destroyed parasol turned out to be exactly, not approximately, exactly the right diameter to accommodate the pole of the beacon. So I banged it firmly into the ground, inserted the pole of the beacon and set Isward off.

And it now appears that all of my mowing problems are over! The parasol that’s gone didn’t cost much and quite honestly I’d have paid what it cost just to solve my mowing problems. It’s funny how things sometimes work out. Some people say that things happen for a reason. I don’t know, do they?

Some people say that bad things come in threes and I’m beginning to believe them. The wind has just done a stunning job of destroying my third and last parasol. It’s also been sending through gusts that have been seriously testing the new awning that I put up this morning, so much so that I’ve now pulled it mostly in. The little parasol was lightweight and fairly inexpensive but it’s annoying that the wind should keep being so destructive. I had no idea until this year that my terrace was so exposed as originally I thought it was quite sheltered because of being partially in a dip and below the tree line. It appears that that only applies for westerly winds. I’ll have to remember that.

And works a treat. Fitted the roller curtains first thing this morning and they did a fine job keeping the heat of the sun off the terrace area as it climbed into the sky this morning. The 3m x 3m parasol that you can see in the shots below can now join its companion that was destroyed by the wind a week or two ago in the décheterie as it is of very poor design and bends and twists in the wind. And to cap it all, one of the struts that supports the fabric tore through the fabric yesterday as it had been threatening to do for some time. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

And that included a shop this morning at Intermarché in le Bugue. I tried working outside in the beginning but the day turned into another stonker and what with the heat and being constantly attacked by biting horse flies of which there’s a plague this year, presumably on account of the weather, I soon moved inside to do the assembly work. It was more or less the same as the previous smaller version but a couple of little things caught me out and delayed things a bit, like a change in positioning of the strut fixings on the front bar.

By the time I was ready to mount the awning on the wall the sun had moved round and it was cooler but then the wind got up and some hefty gusts started to come through which I didn’t really need while I was in the process of lifting the awning up onto the shutters. I had to think a bit about positioning. It was obviously essential for the winding mechanism to be to the left of the living room door shutters and this dictated where it had to be mounted. I wanted it to be a little bit further down towards the kitchen window but it won’t matter in the long run because the current shape of the terrace and the positioning of the table and chairs will not be for the long term.

The pictures show the steps involved in getting the awning up onto the wall. I am less happy with the fixings this time around because they are not as secure as for the other smaller awning and I am concerned about that as this awning is heavier and more exposed to buffeting wind. No only is the wall constructed from hollow blockwork but I am worried that I might inadvertently have hit joints between blocks when I drilled for the anchors. Only time will tell if my fears are justified… I hope not.

All that’s left is for me to fit the roller front curtains and that’s a job for tomorrow. This working 7 days a week is beginning to take its toll on me and I’m feeling pretty knackered this evening. After fitting the front curtains I’ll take it easy for the rest of the day tomorrow.

Is what I did today. The manufacturer of my ‘store-banne’, my new awning, said that installing it is a two-man job. However, I’m always up for a challenge and I reckoned that I could do it using my shutters as supports and a bit of ingenuity. And so it proved today. Today’s awning was a 3m x 2m one, so a bit lighter than the 4m x 3m one that I’ll be installing over my terrace, but it was good experience to work out how to deal with the larger one.

Today’s job was to fit it over the south side living room window which receives direct sunlight for much of the day and is the source of a lot of heat, especially during the current heatwave, that permeates throughout the house. The plan was to lift the awning onto the shutters, lift it higher into its exact position that I’d carefully measured beforehand propped up each end by two 4m lengths of timber, mark the fixing holes and then drop the awning back onto the shutters while the fixing holes were drilled.

Once the anchors were securely attached in the fixing holes it would then simply be a matter of attaching each end in turn one fixing at a time and tightening the awning onto the wall. Easy enough, what could possibly go wrong? As it happens, nothing, aside from one of the anchor inners turning with its securing nut after it had been hammered (gently) into the wall so it couldn’t be tightened. Annoying, but the sort of thing you expect with this kind of job.

I’m not the first person in the world to put up one of these awnings but I took a series of photographs just in case someone who hasn’t can see what’s involved. The first few shots below show the initial steps in getting the awning mounted up on the wall above the living room doors. Remember, the doors open inwards but the shutters swing outwards so the awning has to be mounted high enough to clear them. I chose to mount it at eaves height as that’s the height the awning on the terrace will be at. And the mounting height also has to allow for a 14 degree angle of droop of the awning so has to be mounted even slightly higher than you might think.

For me that unfortunately meant losing the exterior light over the living room door. I haven’t checked yet but I may be able to get away with lowering it a bit, although I doubt it. However, I think I might be able to fit an LED lamp of slimmer design, but that’s for later.

But that wasn’t the end of the job. The awning that I chose comes with two roller curtains as will the larger one that I’ve bought for the terrace. The manufacturer’s instructions are for these to be fitted during initial assembly but I left them off as well as a front trim strip because of how I planned to support the awning on my shutters, which I thought would probably damage them. If I’d had a helper I’d have followed the manufacturer’s instructions but I had to fit them standing on steps after the awning was up, which took me longer than getting it up in the first place.

The final shots show the finished awning with its roller curtains in place.

So what is my final opinion? I’m very pleased with the results. Once the awning was in place I was working with it extended and it made an enormous difference. I think it will be a great help keeping the house cooler during the hot months. Although the curtains will be a big advantage on the terrace I don’t think they were really necessary on this awning in this position and in fact without them I might have been able to keep my existing light, albeit moved down a bit.

The whole awning seems to be of very good quality. The fabric is heavy grade Dacron and the metal fittings are all of good quality. My only concern is that in this position, on an end wall, it’s very open and exposed. This won’t apply for the larger one on the terrace as it will be mounted tight up under the eaves, or for the extra 3m x 2m one that I’m also going to order to go over the double doors on the front of the house as I’m so impressed by this one. I think I’ll make an aluminium enclosure for it, not difficult but just more time.

And what did this little beauty cost? Just 179€ including tax plus delivery, bringing it to a few cents over 200€. I think that’s pretty good, and the larger 4m x 3m one with curtains was just 20€ more. Both were from an on line supplier called ID Market, with whom I have no connection or affiliation, and are well worth the time and effort of assembling and fitting them I reckon 🙂

I don’t have a workshop so I have to do any major job outside. But yet again today the thermometer has hit 40 degrees C so it’s far too hot to do that. And especially so since the wind destroyed my large 4m x 3m parasol that offered some useful shade over my terrace area. And it’s because of that event that I’ve had to look for a new way to get shade back again because due to the shape of my house the terrace is a sun trap and the 3m x 3m parasol that I’m left with just isn’t up to the job.

So I had to find a much better solution which I think I have done in the form of what is called over here a ‘store-banne’, something resembling an old-fashioned extending shop awning. I say ‘I think I have done’ because any ‘store-banne’ would ideally need to fit under the light over the door leading onto the terrace. I think the one I’ve bought will do, but I won’t know for sure until I come to fix it to the wall, although I think it just will.

But getting back to the original point, like everything that you buy on line these days, when it arrived today it came in a big box and needed to be assembled. So where was the only place I could do that? On my living room floor, of course. As you can see, my living room looks more and more like a workshop because as well as there being three fans whirring away trying to move the hot air around there are tools and boxes of fittings in every direction.

So that’s how I got around the heatwave and assembled the ‘store-banne’ ready to be fixed on the wall. Given its price I’m surprised by the quality of its construction. It’s 4m x 3m so should nicely cover my terrace table and chairs and the main reason I chose this model is because it also has two full-length roller-blind curtains along its front which will be especially useful when the hot sun rises from the east. Formerly I had to tilt my old parasol but the curtains will make it much easier to create shade early on.

Anyway, below are pics that I shot after I’d finished the basic assembly. All that’s left are the front curtains and I’ll show those in a later post when I’ve got the thing up on the wall. Ideally you need two people for that but I’ve never shied away from a challenge and I’ll work out how to do it 😉

A short time ago I purchased a nail gun from a supplier on Aliexpress in readiness for when I (eventually) start building my garden tool store/workshop. I’ve not yet had a chance to use it properly – I’ve just fired 10 or 15 nails by way of practice – so when the trestles I was using for painting my shutters collapsed a couple of days ago because their joints had never been fixed I was pleased to get an opportunity to put it into service.

I decided to use staples rather than nails but unfortunately after the first half dozen or so one jammed in the nose of the gun and when I tried to get it out it broke off at both ends rendering what is in effect a brand new gun unusable. So I contacted the supplier asking for advice on what I needed to do to extract the broken piece of staple.
They said they would check with their engineer and came back the next day with a proposal to send me a replacement part which I could fit myself. I replied saying I’d need instructions in advance on how to do so and they helpfully sent me a video showing how the gun had to be disassembled.

I could possibly do it but the person in the video was a skilled assembly worker, so I expressed my reservations and asked if there was any alternative, thinking that my gun could be returned to their German warehouse. They came back with an immediate response saying no worries, they will send me a brand new replacement gun.

I expressed my gratitude for what I considered a very generous gesture and proposed that if they sent me a return label I would return my gun. They replied saying that they don’t have a return label and that I could keep the original machine.

I admit to having had some dodgy experiences with Chinese suppliers but this one has proven to be exceptionally outstanding. And who are they? They are the Onevan Global Store who can be found on Aliexpress. I recommend them.

Despite the temperature – 42 degrees forecast again for today and for several more to come and even after that it’s forecast to not fall to much below 40 degrees. So working outside on the excavator is a no-go and I’ve more or less given up on doing much more work on my garden tool store/workshop until the autumn. And I can’t see me installing my swimming pool and doing the work I have planned for my terrace until next year. But there’s nothing I can do to control the weather.

But that doesn’t mean I can stop work altogether. It’s cool enough in the early morning and evening to get things done. I got Isward going yesterday evening on cutting the grass at the back and restarted him mowing again this morning at not long after 6.00 am. As I type this he’s just about finishing off. I’ve also been pressing on with painting my shutters. In a day I can give two pairs two coats of undercoat per side followed by two top coats the next day.

Shown below are the second pair after their first top coat on their fronts (their backs were top coated yesterday). I’ve just got two more pairs of small shutters to do (for the kitchen and bathroom) and then I’ll be onto the large pairs for the living room doors. If I can’t get much more work done outside in my garden at least it will be nice seeing the shutters back up in colour.

As we’re expecting 42 degrees today my day started off at 7.00 am while it was still relatively cool. I set off Isward the robot to mow the front grass which it has done successfully many times previously. But not today. It got half-way through before deciding to head off into the long grass on the boundary with the adjacent field. I reset it, set it off again and it did it again shortly after in the same place.

A GPS problem? Anyway, I restarted it and after a while it decided to once again head out of the lawn boundary onto my driveway. So I then remapped the lawn entirely, cancelled the first mow and set it off again and later it decided to head off yet again into the adjacent field in the same place, at which time I decided to give up on mowing the lawn for today and concentrate on the next pair of shutters which I’d washed earlier after removing all their furniture. By this time it was after lunch and after all my trials with Isward I thought that it would be a relief getting back to something as simple as rubbing down and undercoating the shutters.

Wrong! Almost as soon as I started rubbing down the first one the trestles that the pair were lying on collapsed. It appeared that all the trestles that I’d purchased were cheap for a reason – their frameworks are all tongue and grooved but the tongues had never been glued or otherwise fixed in the grooves. No problem, I thought. Just the job for my trusty new nail gun. And so it would have been, except after the first 20 or staples one jammed in the nose of the gun and I can see no simple way of getting the jammed piece out as in trying to do so it has broken off on both sides.

I’ve contacted the Chinese supplier to find out what to do but for the time being the gun is partially in bits on newspaper in my kitchen. And it’s still only 3.00 pm so plenty of time left for lots more things to go wrong. I’m waiting in expectation…

I took some photos this morning of the first pair of shutters hung back up on the wall and I have to say that they certainly do make a strong statement! However, this is not far off of how I envisaged them when I initially prepared the plans for the house as shown by the final image below.

We’ve had another scorcher today so not a day to be working outside. But much as I would have liked to be out early getting some excavation work done I decided that my top priority was to try to get the hardware and software rebuild of my main computer done and with this in mind I’ve spent the last two days doing that and painting shutters. The latter has been a thankless task. I’m usually pretty good at hand-painting and proud of the results but painting these two small shutters has been one of my worst painting experiences ever and I shudder that I’ve got several more pairs to do.

I’ll never touch another can of Dulux paint ever again because as I said in my previous post, based on this experience it isn’t what it used to be. What should have been a relatively straightforward and easy job – painting large flat surfaces laid horizontally – has turned out to be a nightmare as the paint has meagre coverage and covering power and even after two top coats the undercoat was still showing through in several places. I refitted the furniture earlier this evening and found that some patches painted this morning were still not dry which I find unbelievable. The final results after yet more retouching are shown in the images below. The shutters don’t look bad but they don’t stand up to close scrutiny and I’m not proud of them.

I’ve been painting the first pair of shutters for the past two days, one coat of universal undercoat on each side of each shutter yesterday and two coats of top coat today. I’m not that happy with the results because even after the second top coat you can see patches of undercoat beginning to show through again as it dries. So much for hoping that I’d be able to get away with one coat each of undercoat and top coat.

The paint I’m using is Dulux Basque Red, a traditional colour for shutters and doors in these parts. I had hoped that with the red being such a full colour it would have good coverage and covering power but it appears that I was wrong. Back in the day Dulux was a premium quality brand (at a premium price) when it was owned by the UK’s ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) but since being taken over by Akso Nobel it appears that the quality bit has been dropped and only the premium price now remains. If I’d known what results I’d be getting I’d have gone for one of the multitude of lower price paint brands, many with no need for undercoat, and got similar, if not better results.

The images below show how the undercoat is beginning to show through again, especially on the edges. If I have to do a third coat it will (a) take more paint and (b) take more time. Even if tomorrow I can turn the shutters over and paint the fronts that means the two pairs will have taken three days to paint. Do the math. I’ve got nine pairs to paint so even if I can keep painting at the rate of two pairs every three days, which I doubt I’ll be able to as I have other things to do (like my excavation work), it’ll take me between two and three weeks to complete all of them. And I shudder at the cost if I keep using Dulux given at the amount of paint I’ve used just on these small shutters.

Yesterday I got to the bottom of why my excavator wouldn’t start and appeared to keep having a flat battery. I surmised that its new battery fitted In China had failed and ordered a new replacement which arrived on Tuesday. I fitted the new battery yesterday and it didn’t solve the problem. The machine stayed totally dead. When I put a meter on both batteries – the original and the new – both were fully charged which told me that the original battery was being charged on the machine and the reason it showed a full charge so quickly when placed on a battery charger was because it was already at 100%.

I then removed the new battery, replaced the original and the machine was still dead so I decided to try it with a fully charged jump pack. Still dead. Then I connected the earth of the jump pack to a a grounded bolt on the machine, got power and the machine started. That told me that the problem was an earthing problem and when I checked I found that because the main engine earth connection had never been tightened it had vibrated and become completely unscrewed (see the left bolt in the photograph below).

In fact NEITHER of the two bolts clamping the fuel tank, the left of which also makes the engine earth connection, had been tightened and that also explained why the tank was sitting about 2 cms too high and too close to the top of the engine cover making it almost impossible to remove the fuel filler cap . I’m very annoyed about this because due to the bolts not being tightened during manufacture I am now 70€ out of pocket for a battery that I have no use for which I’m now trying to return. The Chinese manufacturer is, as usual, very apologetic and admits it was at fault but that doesn’t make up for the time I’ve lost over the past ten days or so. 🙁

It’s been getting really hot inside my house during this latest ‘canicule’ – around 30 degrees Celsius most evenings – and one of the reasons for this is the absence of its shutters. I removed them nearly two years ago – see HERE as they were getting rained on at the start of a wet winter and becoming streaked with dirt. I intended to paint them the following Spring but as usual, events got in the way and they’ve remained where I put them, securely under thick covers under the trees in the front of my house.

That all changed today. I’m unable to do anything in my garden (except watch Isward roll up and down making a beautiful job of mowing my lawns) as the new battery for my excavator, which was promised for last Saturday, did not arrive and won’t do so until tomorrow, and I can’t fix my main computer, which is still not functioning as I’m waiting for a disk that I need to be delivered. So I decided that this would be a good time to start on my shutters.

All I’ve done today is mount them back on the house where they can stay until I can get each pair down again in turn in order to remove their fittings, thoroughly clean them, paint them and put them back up again. They can stay there now as we’re expecting a hot, dry summer and hopefully I’ll get them finished before the weather begins to change again in the Autumn. They didn’t do at all badly under the covers. Rodents managed to get in as they do everywhere but although they took in nut shells, acorns and stuff like that they didn’t make any nests or do any damage to the shutters themselves.

Putting the small shutters up wasn’t much of a challenge as they aren’t very heavy to carry or rehang. The large ones for the full height double doors in my living room were a different story. I remembered what I job I’d had taking them down and humping them round to where I stored them and wasn’t looking forward at all to the job of carrying them back again and rehanging them. I even wondered if, after nearly two years, I’d be able to do the job alone but would you believe it, I managed humping and hanging all six of them (3 pairs) without too much difficulty. Maybe I’m healthier and stronger now than I was then 😀

I have to say that I’m pleased to see them back up again. They make the house look more ‘finished’ again, even though they’re not painted, as the images below show.

Tomorrow I’ll start the job of painting them kicking off with the small ones on the front of the house, which are not affected by sun and with which I’ll then replace the ones at the back as I go. And hopefully if I work in the front of the house under the trees I’ll be able to do it without being affected by the heat, which is expected to get up to around 40 degrees Celsius over the coming days. I’ll possibly even think about finishing painting them before I get back to my excavation work, but I’ll see how things go. In the meantime, here is the first pair stripped of fittings ready for cleaning, lightly rubbing down and painting.

“What’s next?” I asked in my last post. Well, I’ll tell you.

While I was in my old house I bought a couple of very nice parasols, the larger and the more expensive of the two being 4m x 2m in size to completely cover my outdoor table and chairs set. Although they were acquired 5 or 6 years ago, both have spent most of their time in storage, have only been used 20 or so times the whole of the time I’ve had them and were still like new.

I’ve been unfurling the larger one on several days in the last couple of weeks as my terrace has been subject to direct sunshine and was getting very hot. All was well until yesterday when a huge gust of wind came apparently out of nowhere and blew it over despite it being very heavily weighed down. Due to its weight it was badly damaged and although I intended to at last get back to my garden excavation work today, instead I had to spend a miserable morning cutting it up and taking it to the décheterie for disposal.

Anyway, after lunch I was able to get out into the garden to at last continue excavating. But it was not to be because yet again I was prevented from doing so. After starting the excavator up once and switching it off again the battery then wouldn’t even crank its engine over and it was impossible to restart it even with a jump pack. So that was that. The battery has been playing up over the last couple of weeks and today it decided to fail completely.

I’ve told the supplier in China what has happened and informed them that I’ve had to order another locally in order to resume working. Because of the time difference I’m waiting on their reply but I fully expect to be recompensed and will be very annoyed if they prevaricate in any way.

There seem to be forces outside of my control that are intent on preventing me using the (expensive) equipment that I’ve purchased and doing the work I have planned in my garden. It’s one calamity after another and I can hardly keep up with them.

So I decided to devote my time this year to sorting out my garden, right? Getting it into the shape I wanted, building a garden tool store/workshop, installing an above-ground swimming pool that I’ve had for a year now, fixing the ground around my house that’s collapsing a bit because as I told the builder at the time, there wasn’t enough earth to backfill the void under the building, plus a few other jobs. And I equipped myself with the tools for the job – a mini excavator from China and a motorised dumper. So what could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot as it happens. First several weeks were lost due to continuous heavy rain that prevented me even getting the excavator out of its garage let alone driving it on my land which its tracks would have cut to pieces. Then, when the rain did stop we had a couple of weeks of totally unseasonal intensely high temperatures that made working outside without cover more or less intolerable, so still very little progress was made.

Little, but some as despite the heat I managed to get cracking on digging out for the base of my planned tool store and transporting the earth up to the top of the garden in order to reshape and reduce the severity of the downward slope from the (collapsing) terrace to the garden. So I was able therefore to concentrate fully on my garden work? Well, no actually.

Before I could I had to allocate several days of perfect working outside weather getting my car ready for its bi-annual test (CT). This unfortunately had to include stripping out its under-bonnet in order to replace the windscreen washer plastic tubing that had been gnawed away by the mice that got into the car a few weeks ago as if left it would have been an automatic fail. As it is I couldn’t fix the tubing for the rear washer that still doesn’t work, but that wasn’t needed for the CT, which my car fortunately sailed through.

So back to the garden, then, only to be confronted almost immediately with something of a personal disaster. Many months ago before I went off to Istanbul for implant work, I placed myself for a course of treatment in the hands of a dentist in Montignac. To say that the man is incompetent is an understatement. Crowns he fitted at my great expense were falling out repeatedly while the treatment was in progress and when in Turkey I had one of his crowns replaced with an implant in addition to the ones I’d planned for. The disaster was that a double crown, bridge almost, that he’d fitted then fell out leaving me in need of emergency dental treatment.

The problem is that it’s impossible now to find a dentist in this area and at the time of writing this the work hasn’t yet been done. I’ll have to try to find a local dentist (perhaps there’s one who has lost a few patients since I last phoned around) but if I can’t I’ll probably have to spend more time travelling back to my old dentist in the UK. I’ll have no alternative as my son is getting married in September and I’ll have to get the work done in time for that.

So then back to the garden? Well yes, but it soon became clear when the grass front and back of my house began to rapidly start growing that unless I did something I’d be spending all of my time keeping it under control rather than doing what I needed to do, namely following through with my plans to reshape my garden. So I took the plunge and invested not an inconsiderable sum in a lawn robot that I thought would take over the task of controlling the grass and thus freeing the time up for me.

But there was just one snag. Setting the robot up was, let’s just say, more error-prone and more complicated than I’d reckoned for. And it took several days, the best part of a week actually, with Whatsapp messages going backwards and forwards between me and China. However, I eventually I found my way through the maze of instructions in the ‘user manual’ that in the usual Chinese way somehow omitted the ‘how to’ details of several of the crucial steps in the set-up process.

But I did it, albeit with several more days lost, and the robot began to do its job and pretty well too. In fact I have to say that I’ve never seen my weed-infested apologies for lawns looking as good as they do after a few days of Isward the robot quietly humming to himself as he rolled up and down and back and forth in my garden seemingly enjoying the job of keeping the grass and weeds under control while I did other things.

I’m especially pleased with the area close to my house’s northern wall where the septic tank is sited. The contractor placed it closer to the house than I would have liked making the spaces between the house and the septic tank covers rather steep. However, I’m succeeding in resolving the problem by building it up using earth brought up from the excavation and although it’s not yet finished, I think that eventually it’ll be possible to get a mower or strimmer around the area in question.

OK, so now if I put my tooth problem to one side I can concentrate solely on my garden? Unfortunately not. The day before yesterday while I was clearing more brush and scrub away from the corner of the garden where I’m excavating the base for tool store I noticed that Isward hadn’t moved for a while so went to investigate. It turned out that he’s expired. Not dead exactly but mortally wounded by a technical fault that couldn’t be cleared even after many attempts at doing so.

I followed the instructions of customer services explicitly but it transpires that a servo motor controlling the height of the cutting blades has failed. They apologised profusely for wasting yet more of my time and promised to send me a brand new replacement machine, together with yet four more replacement blades as a goodwill gift. This is already on its way from Germany but in the meantime before it arrives lawn mowing has come to a halt and I only hope that the grass doesn’t grow too long again requiring me to mow it manually.

So back to uninterrupted excavating then? No, dammit! Just as I thought I’d be able to my computer has broken down. I’m writing this on my slow old laptop that I can’t continue using as all of my files, photographs and programs that I use are on my main machine. I thought I’d discovered the problem and bought a new network card, but before I could install it (after unpacking it unfortunately) the machine stopped booting up entirely.

I built the machine myself in the caravan while my house was being built so I know it pretty well. I think the problem may be the motherboard, the second most expensive component after the processor so have had to order a replacement. Luckily Amazon had a ‘used’ replacement at less than half price which I’m now waiting to be delivered, but it’s a complex machine and fitting it will involve almost a complete rebuild. My worst fear is that if it’s not the motherboard it’s the power supply. If it is, although it’s still within its 5-year warranty period, I could end up facing yet more delay.

As mentioned, the day before yesterday I spent several exhausting hours in quite intense heat cutting and clearing away scrub, brush and small trees from the area at the back of the excavation to allow access for my excavator and the images below show the results. I need the access to clean up the hole I’ve dug and also adjust its side, front and back levels.

The following morning, yesterday, I looked out first thing and was amazed by what I saw. The wild boar, which I haven’t seen any sign of for months, had come up during the night onto the field next to my house that the local farmers had cut and cleared of hay while I was doing my brush removal work and had dug a large crater just yards from my garden.

I still haven’t had a chance to finish my fence to keep them out. I ordered the parts to connect my post auger to my excavator but specified the wrong size and am still awaiting two connectors. My fear now is that they may try to get into my back garden and wreak havoc as they did several times previously and have set up some barriers that won’t really be up to the job of holding them back.

On top of all this, did I mention that due to an ear wax problem I’m almost deaf and need to arrange an appointment with my doctor to get my ears syringed? No? Sorry, what did you say? I couldn’t quite catch it… 🙁

I’ve got a huge amount of work to do in my garden over the next few months so I’ve got to make the best possible use of my time. We’ve had almost constant rain over the last week or so and in all that time I’ve only managed to do two or three hours of work digging out the base for my planned garden tool store/workshop because I don’t want to work in the rain digging out wet earth and I don’t want to cut up my garden with my machines.

I also have another problem. I have quite a lot of grass to cut here and while I’ve been unable to work outside it has been steadily growing. When the weather does dry up I’ll need to get that back under control first and will be unable to get back to my excavation and building work until I’ve done so. And then, for all I know, it’ll start raining again and I’ll be back to square one.

This conflict of priorities is a problem that I really need to solve and I can only do so by having the tools for the job. I’m not the sort of person who likes to buy toys just for the sake of it and never have been but I will seriously consider anything that is of real value. And I think I have found something that fits that bill in the form of a lawn robot.

A lawn robot cuts your grass for you so you don’t have to and therefore has the potential to free up a lot of time for you to use doing other, potentially more productive things. Once set up it works automatically, day and night if you wish, keeping your grass neat and tidy and also weeds under control without any effort from you. Well a bit, maybe, with a strimmer going around from time to time tidying up some edges and areas which it’s unable to get into. It’ll work on wet grass and even in the rain when you wouldn’t want to be outside mowing the grass, so long as it’s not too heavy.

And the weed thing is quite important for me. Because my garden was up until quite recently just a farmer’s field weeds are still a problem as they grow faster than the grass and some are difficult to cut down even with my ride-on mower (possibly I need to sharpen or replace the blades). However, because the robot is constantly cutting the grass down to a low level, the weeds can’t grow either and can even die back as the grass thickens.

The machines come in all shapes, sizes and prices from a couple of hundred euros to several thousands depending on the features you want but the main consideration is the area of grass that you want to cut. A Lidl Parkside robot at 230€ wouldn’t be much use for me as it’s only suitable for small lawns of up to 250 m2 and I have something like 2000 m2 to keep under control. Even a machine suitable for an area of 1000 m2 probably wouldn’t be suitable because its speed and battery life would mean that it would need to be running for many hours with lots of recharges to cover the whole area and keep my grass in trim.

The low cost machines are also predominantly ‘old’ technology. Without going into detail, lawn robots have to be set up to remain inside and mow specific areas. The ‘old’ way of doing that was to lay a wire around the whole periphery of the area in question which the machine could detect and when it did so it turned automatically and went off in another direction, eventually covering the whole lawn by ‘bouncing’ off the wire. The technology was never perfect and still isn’t, and some cheaper machines have been known to drive over the wire and cut it.

This problem was overcome by using GPS which doesn’t need to have a ‘hard’ periphery around the area needing to be cut. Instead you ‘drive’ the machine around the edges of the area so the machine ‘learns’ where they are and stores them in its memory so it never exceeds them, and if you have a more complex garden, like mine, you can store details for several areas which the machine then deals with separately as and when ordered to.

The latest machines don’t even use GPS. Instead they use a system of laser radar called Lidar. Its main advantage is that machines with Lidar can operate where a GPS signal is weak or where it can be lost, under dense trees for example. However, it’s more expensive and offers little more than cheaper GPS machines where there is a good GPS signal. Also, current GPS machines are now incorporating AI that allows them to continue working should they lose their GPS signal for a short period.

The machine I’ve gone for is the Isward GX 2026 model, as shown in the images below. It’s Chinese, of course, and I’ve ordered it from Aliexpress. It uses what is referred to as GPS RTK technology which involves setting up a small GPS receiver in your garden to which the machine links wirelessly and it also incorporates AI obstacle avoidance so it doesn’t chew up your guinea pig or any object in its path in or on your lawn. A machine of the size I need with Lidar costs a bit more than I want to spend and as my garden is very open with a good GPS signal I don’t think I need it.

I won’t say any more about it for now. Instead I’ll wait until it arrives and I can set it up and use it. Like all lawn robots, it’ll need the grass to be cut with a standard mower before starting work but then I hope it’ll do the job I want it to and free my time up so I can get back onto my excavation and building work. Like all lawn robots, it comes with a charging station that the robot automatically returns to without supervision when necessary. It needs to be placed on flat ground and my first problem will be finding a suitable area that’s flat enough. However, I’m sure I’ll be able to overcome that.

I’m nowhere near the speed of a real pro but slowly but surely I’m getting quicker with my new mini excavator as my skill level improves. I’m making fewer mistakes and managing to pick up full bucket loads of earth to transfer to my new dumper much more frequently now. One problem I’m having is that the excavator can occasionally be very jerky.

Other people have complained about this problem with small excavators that they’ve bought from China so I’m not alone. The result unfortunately is that you can scoop up a full bucket of earth only to lose most of it if, while you’re lifting the boom and spinning the excavator round towards the dumper, it jerks so violently that it throws all of the bucket contents into the air.

This is annoying but not so bad if the earth just falls onto the ground, but several times it’s been tipped onto the dumper itself with a quantity going onto its engine. You also have to be careful to ensure that a jerk does not cause the excavator bucket to hit the dumper by making sure every time that the bucket has been raised high enough so it can’t hit the dumper bin if a jerk does occur. However, it makes emptying the bucket into the dumper a lot slower than it need be.

In my last post I said that I’d show how the excavator swing beam works and the first few images below do that. Without a swing beam the excavator bucket can only move in a direction perpendicular to the excavator’s cab which can be very restricting. For example, later on I will need to dig a trench down to the bottom of my garden for the electricity cable for the new garden tool store/workshop that I’m currently working on. I’ll want that trench to be as close to the boundary fence as possible but without a swing beam the minimum distance will be half the width of the excavator itself.

With a swing beam the distance can be reduced to near zero because the swing beam allows the excavator bucket to move in a direction perpendicular to the excavator’s chassis but to one side of the excavator itself. In the images the excavator’s chassis is parallel to the direction of the trench, the cab has been turned to the left and swing beam to the right effectively allowing the trench to be dug on a line perpendicular to the excavator’s track or further even to one side. This is necessary because the reach of the excavator’s beam is less than the distance from the back to the front of the area being excavated.

What about my new dumper? It has been a godsend as the images of it with a full load show. Imagine digging out the amount of earth that it can carry by hand, let alone then pushing the load up the slope of the garden, then up an even steeper slope and then tipping it out by hand. The dumper makes this easy, if not exactly effortless. Its bin has been designed to be delicately balanced so it can be easily tipped out by hand on the level. However, I’m driving the machine up a slope and tipping the bin while the machine is still on an upslope, which still requires quite a bit of effort.

I’ve managed to shift quite a lot more earth today. Once again it has been slower than it might have been because as well as digging the earth out of what will be the base of my new garden tool store I’ve then been using it to transform the slope at the rear of my house. I don’t know whether I’ll have enough earth but I’m trying not just to reduce the steepness of the slope but also to extend it away from the rear of the house and create a flat area of grass before it falls away from the terrace, as shown in three photos that I took at the end of the day.

I’m now about half way through digging out the base for the garden tool store.

The job hasn’t been as straightforward as it might have been because of the number of tree roots that the excavator is having to rip out. Doing the job by hand would have been totally impossible and I am so relieved that I made the decision to acquire my own equipment which is allowing me to work without stress at my own pace. Difficult to put a price on that 🙂

Starting with putting barriers around my newest apple tree in my back garden and the already chewed Japanese Flowering Cherry in the front. As far as the latter is concerned, it still has a few leaves on it and as they are reputed to be avid growers and I don’t have the time to do anything else with it for the time being, now I’ll just wait and see if it recovers. If not…

Then I refuelled both of my new machines which was a slow process as neither have any means of showing the level in its fuel tank until it overflows. That’s undesirable at the best of times but at the moment fuel on the ground, or worse, fuel all over the engine, is an expensive waste that needs to be avoided. Then I could get on with my digging, except that I couldn’t.

The reason was that I decided to continue from the other end of the excavation, the left hand side closest to the new excavator garage. The reason was that I thought that if I ended up there I’d be boxing myself into a relatively tight squeeze. The big problem, though, was that now the big old walnut trees and other greenery have leaves on their branches, they had dropped down into the area in which I needed to position the excavator.

I knew that this was going to be a problem that would need to be dealt with at some time so today was as good as any to take my life into my hands and risk almost instant death by climbing up into the upper branches and sawing off the ones against which I’d be leaning my ladder. After a couple of scares when the ladder threatened to fall down taking me with it it actually went quite well and I lived to fight another day.

The amount of foliage that I removed turned out to be much more than I expected. I’ll leave it for now but as soon as I can get around to it I’ll have to chop it all up with my electric saw, put it in my trailer and take it to the ‘déchèterie’ at Rouffignac for disposal.

I also took my saw (hand, not electric) to the large root from yesterday and cleared the area of ground from which it had emerged.

Only then was I able to get excavating again and at the end of the day I’d managed two more bucket-width strips. This was much slower than a ‘pro’ would have done, especially with a bigger machine, but I’m still learning the knack of working both levers in order to scoop a good bucket-load of earth cleanly out of the ground, then raise the bucket, swing the machine and drop the load into the dumper.

The other thing, of course, is that I’m running each dumper load up the garden, depositing the earth on the slope behind my house and then spreading it with a large rake to reduce the steepness of the slope, all of which takes more time.

After digging the first strip the excavator’s swing beam came into its own as I had to dig the second strip to one side of the excavator, as I will have to for all the subsequent strips. All of the ‘cheap Chinese mini excavators’ that you see on the internet don’t have swing beams so are much less capable than my machine. I didn’t take any photos of it in action but I will next time.

Finally, two shots of the earth I’ve dumped and spread on the slope behind my house in order to reduce its steepness. It doesn’t look like much but I’d guess that it must amount to around 2 tonnes, so an impossible task to do by hand, especially single-handed.

My two new machines are performing exactly in the way I hoped they would 🙂

After waiting indoors this morning for a delivery that needed a signature – batteries for another labour-saving tool that I recently purchased, of which more later – we kept getting intermittent light rain that I didn’t fancy working outside in. So I went shopping instead and after a light lunch managed to get outside later in the afternoon to start on some serious work with my new excavator and dumper.

The first job requiring some proper earth moving is the base for my planned garden tool store and workshop. It will measure 4.5 x 3.5 metres and I intend to lay a concrete base 12.5 cm thick which will require about two cubic metres of concrete. I set out the area at the bottom of my garden a week or so ago with red pegs linked by light string and today marked it with fluorescent marker paint as I wanted to remove the pegs and string so I could start work.

It didn’t take me very long to find out how tricky working the excavator actually is and my admiration for the guys who have done work with much larger machines at my old house at Plazac and here grew by the minute. There’s a definite learning curve and it’ll take me some time to become even half-proficient, if I’m lucky. As it was I drove my new dumper into the excavator’s bucket when initially getting into position to tip earth into and whacked the side of the dumper’s bucket a couple of times while dropping earth into it, fortunately without doing any damage.

It was slow work compared to how quickly a pro would have done it and I only dug out one strip down one side of the base, but knowing how hard the work had been digging out the two bases I laid at my old house in Plazac by hand, I know that I could never have done the same here. There were a few smallish roots there but here there were both stones and a lot more roots, including one very large one which the excavator ripped through with relative ease.

I’ll need to cut it with my electric saw before continuing tomorrow but on the whole I was quite happy with what I managed to get done in not much more than a couple of hours or so.

I may be digging out a bit deeper than necessary but I’m not too worried about that. The reason is that in the fullness of time I will have to lose all of the black stone put down by the builder in my driveway entrance and all around the house, so putting some in this base and the base for my swimming pool to bring them to the correct levels will be a good way of doing that and freeing up some earth that will be highly usable for modelling my garden. But that’s for later.

I already started doing that in a small way today by using my new dumper to transport 400kg of earth at a time to the top of the garden to begin reducing the slope from the back of the house down to the garden. Ultimately I intend to do much more of this and may even need to bring some topsoil in to get what I eventually want to achieve.

So that was it for today. I was very happy with what I managed to do which would have been impossible without my new little excavator and dumper. And this was only the very beginning 😉