The generator game (loadsa fun!)

When I worked on MYRO originally, it was in my garage where I had cover and electricity, but now MYRO is under a tarpaulin in the open at Ken’s place and that’s where I will have to do the repair work. As I’m about to start on it very soon, I thought it would be a good idea to get hold of a generator off Ebay so I’ll have power for a drill and any other power tools that I might need. I spotted a likely one for only £90 that seemed a good buy because it has an output of 2kVA which is quite a lot it seems (I don’t know much about generators as you can see), so that’s what I went for.

When I turned up to collect it I could hardly believe how big and heavy it was, much more so than I’d appreciated from the pictures on Ebay! In fact the seller threw in a wooden trolley with wheels on that makes it easier to push around. Apart from a crack and a bit of damage on the plastic front panel that didn’t affect its performance it actually looked pretty good. The seller wasn’t there so I started it up the best I could without knowing how really, and the deal was done. It was dusk by the time I got it home so I couldn’t do much with it until the next morning, which was yesterday. Then when I went to start it, the throttle control lever came off in my hand!

‘OK, that’s it’, I thought, ‘It’s going back’, so I phoned the seller and said I’d be back with it shortly. When I got there he turned out to be a young Polish chap. He was very helpful and fixed the lever back on in a trice (I’d been fiddling with it previously for about half an hour and still couldn’t see how it went back) but I said I still wasn’t happy with it. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you your money back but you can still keep it, because I’m going back to Poland in 2 days time and have to clear my flat. If I take it back I’ll just have to dump it in a skip.’ Well, as you can imagine, that made me feel really guilty. How could I take my money back and still keep the generator? After all, it worked even if you had to be a bit careful with the throttle lever, so I said I’d take half my money back. He handed me back £40, so that was that, except he then decided to throw in a circular saw that was in his shed that he didn’t know what to do with and will probably just end up going from his shed to my garage, because I don’t really have a use for it. And then I set off for home.

Well, it was a bit quiet yesterday so with my recently honed plastic repair skills, I thought I’d sort out the damaged front panel. Out came the epoxy resin and fibreglass mat again and with careful use of my newly acquired heat gun, I had the ‘missing bits’ back again quite quickly. Then a couple of applications of fibreglass paste (heat gun again), a rub down and a spray of grey paint that I happened to have in my garage and which was a perfect match and – job done! Not bad, even though I say so myself… here are a couple of pics I took after I’d fixed the front panel 😉

I even managed to tweek the metal tab that holds the throttle lever in place so I’ve ended up with a now quite nice looking generator for not too much money, with an output large enough to power a small town. Although it’ll be OK for the work I have planned, it’ll be a bit too large, for example, to routinely take down to the airfield if I need to do a job on the aircraft that needs power. So I’ll have to decide what to do with it when I’ve done the work on MYRO, but with its now-repaired front panel, I think I’ll have no problem getting my money back.

Just one thing though. When I told Ken that I’d got hold of a generator, he told me he’s got one already that I could have borrowed anyway. How typical is that, eh 😕