I haven’t posted for a few days but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s been going on. Far from it – life here has been particularly hectic just lately. Let’s start with the house front.
Before the builders start work, I need to have a concrete base laid for the 4.5 x 3.5 metre metal store that I bought just after I first moved into my caravan at the beginning of July. This has been held up by not having water end electricity on my land but there was a light at the end of the tunnel when Véolia eventually provided a connection to water. But this still left the problem with electricity which would be necessary to run an electric concrete mixer.
However, as my own is stuck in storage and will be inaccessible until either my new house is built or I decide to spend a day moving the stuff blocking it out of the way and then replacing it all, which I don’t fancy doing, I began to think of alternatives, the main one being somehow acquiring a mixer with a petrol engine. As I don’t like the idea of hiring things like this, I began to troll through the ads on Le Bon Coin, the free ads web site, and came across one for sale at an attractive price because, the seller said, its carburettor needed cleaning.
I like the idea of having a petrol driven mixer that can be used virtually anywhere on my land as needed, so my thinking was along the lines of if this one actually was any good, I could sell my current electric one when the time comes at a good price as it is in excellent condition. So last Thursday (30th September) I headed south with my trailer to take a look at what was on offer.
On the way I had an extraordinary and very scary experience. About a half hour away from my destination, I was approching a right hand bend up a slight incline when all of a sudden, a small Peugeot came hurtling down the slope around the bend from the other direction. It was travelling much too fast and was totally out of control and as its rear fish-tailed out to the right, it was coming straight for me.
I braked and yanked the wheel to the right and just before our two vehicles collided the other driver yanked their wheel to their right also. Somehow their car missed mine and my trailer by millimetres and it then fish-tailed in the opposite direction at high speed, straight into the ditch on the other side of the road where it overturned having spun through 180 degrees. At that time I was the only person on the scene, and indeed the only witness to what had happened, so I jumped out to see what I could do.
There happened to be a single house on the other side of the road and an old gentleman was in the garden so before I ran to the upturned car I told him to call the ambulance and the police without delay, which is what he did. When I got to the car all was silent and when I got no reply after I’d called several times to the occupant I thought the worst. However, as I climbed up on the vehicle’s underside, which was tilted in excess of 90 degrees and leaning against a high hedge on the other side of the ditch, the passenger door began to open and the head of a young woman emerged.
I asked if she was the only occupant, she was, and if she was injured, she said that she wasn’t, so I helped her to climb out of the partially opened door, with some difficulty as it couldn’t be opened very much against the hedge. However, she made it out and I helped her down to the road just as one or two other drivers began to stop to give help. Having established that all was as well as it could be under the circumstances, I said that I had to go and left everyone to it at the scene of the accident.
By way of a conclusion, I returned from the opposite direction about an hour or so later. I saw the ‘Pompiers’ (firemen and first aiders) leaving as I approached and found that the upturned car had been recovered and the scene was being cleared up. There were two young police officers on the scene so I stopped to tell them that I had witnessed what had happened just an hour or so before. ‘Ah’, the young lady officer said, ‘So you can tell us about the lorry then’. ‘Lorry?’ I replied, ‘What lorry? There was no lorry. She was just driving much too fast and I was lucky to come out of it unscathed’.
So it appears that I might have blown the young woman driver’s account of how she had come to end up upside down in the ditch. It seems that she might have made up a story about having had to swerve to avoid a lorry and if so, I have no regrets. She was driving in a grossly irresponsible and unsafe way and it was only with good luck that I came out of it uninjured. The outcome could have been completely different and if she got a ticking off as a result for making up stories, then too bad. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
But what about the concrete mixer? Well, it seemed to be in pretty good shape but as I couldn’t start it, although it was on offer for only 90€, I knocked the seller down to 80€ and bought it. Here are some shots that I took after I’d got it home, the next day.
The seller had been very vague about the problem that he said the mixer had and had mumbled an incomprehensible reply when I’d asked if it had a spark. However, it had compression and hadn’t made any nasty noises when I’d spun it over, so that’s why I’d decided to buy it. Now it was time to look into things further.
The first thing I found was that the spark plug was loose, so somebody had obviously been in there. When I removed it, it appeared to be brand new and unused but it had a huge gap, I think in excess of 50 or 60 thou. Briggs and Stratton say the figure should be 30 thou, so I regapped it, poured a few drops of neat fuel into the combustion chamber through the plug hole and replaced the plug finger tight. When I pulled the starter cord, the motor fired up immediately!
I’d also removed the carburettor air cleaner. The seller had said that the problem was that ‘the carburettor needed cleaning’, which sounded pretty unlikely to me. So I then poured a few drops of fuel straight into the air intake and pulled the motor over again and again the motor roared into life!
To cut a long story short, I’ve now run the mixer for several minutes and apart from a bit of normal wear-and-tear, I think that there’s nothing wrong with the motor at all. I think that the seller was, like many French men in my experience, not very mechanical and didn’t understand the need for a spark plug to be accurately and correctly gapped. There is no way that with the plug gapped as it was the motor would have even started, let alone run, and I think that he had blamed the carburettor and a blocked fuel system as being the problem.
But whatever the reason, I’m now very pleased with my purchase of a petrol driven concrete mixer for the princely sum of only 80€ and I look forward to being able to get around to using it some time in the very near future.
So with the concrete mixer ready to go, it was time for me to get the materials together for the concrete base of my little metal tool store. I need several big bags of ballast (a mixture of stone and sand) together with eight 35kg bags of cement and 8 sheets of reinforcing metal for the concrete, so went off to Brico Depot yesterday with my large twin-wheel trailer to pick up my first load. This consisted of a big-bag of stone and 6 bags of cement and as each big-bag weighs about 400kg, it wasn’t a load to be trifled with.
The first problem came at my end. The big-bag had been loaded onto my trailer by fork-lift on a small pallet, which made it very difficult to remove. A big-bag is much too heavy to lift by hand but because my trailer bed tilts, it’s usually possible to slide one off, albeit with some effort, onto the ground. Unfortunately, the pallet made this much more difficult than usual and the outcome, drat it, was that the bag fell off the trailer and toppled over onto the bare ground, spilling quite a bit of its contents.
I decided to deal with that problem later and to return to Brico Depot to pick up another big-bag and the remaining two bags of cement. Regrettably, this time I was served by a fork-lift driver who had been at the back of the queue when brains were being given out. Instead of approaching my trailer from the rear through the open tailgate, he decided to do so from the side. This meant that he couldn’t place the load in the middle of the trailer, but over to one side instead, and in doing so his machine also impacted against the side of my trailer.
When I got back I found much to my anger and dismay that in doing so he had ripped off two bolts securing the wing to the trailer body, although it will now be impossible to prove that. But there was even worse to come. By placing the load over to one side, it was on a relatively unsupported section of the trailer floor. I’d done a hasty floor repair at the time I moved out of my old house and knew already that it was on the weak side, but this load was too much for it. On the way home, the floor partially collapsed and the big-bag fell part-way through, luckily not falling the whole way as it was then supported by the two bags of cement.
When I realised what had happened I stopped and secured the bag as best I could with a length of rope and luckily made it the whole way back without further problem, except for one. As I was driving on the long stretch of road from Les Versannes to St Geyrac, luckily not too fast so as not to disturb the toppled big-bag, I saw a small lorry driving towards me in the opposite direction. Just before it reached me, a driver behind it in a small white Peugeot suddenly put his foot down and pulled out to overtake it, obviously having not seen me coming in the other direction.
For me it was a scary déjà-vu moment as the Peugeot came straight at me as had happened a few days before, and as I’d done then, I yanked my wheel over to the right. Just at the last moment, the other driver did the same and with millimetres again to spare, an accident was miraculously avoided. And how they missed colliding with the back of the small lorry I’ll never know, but for me it was my second near-miss of a head-on collision in less than a week.
Here are a couple of shots of the first big-bag that fell of the trailer and overturned, depositing some of the stone that it contained onto the bare earth.
And here are some shots of the second big-bag that collapsed the floor of my trailer.
I covered the cement up but left the big-bag problems until this morning while I slept on what I might do to resolve the problems in the easiest way. The solution that I came up with was to buy another new, empty big-bag, transfer as much of the material from the toppled bag on the trailer into it until I could remove the bag either from the top or bottom, transfer the material left in it to the new bag and then transfer the stone from the toppled bag on the ground into what would then be another empty bag. Here’s a shot of the new (very) big bag that I bought at Leroy Merlin this morning.
My plan worked a treat. I lost hardly any of the contents of the bag that fell through the trailer floor and only a couple of shovelfuls of the stone that fell onto the ground. Here are a couple of shots of the collapsed trailer floor after the big-bag had been removed.
And here are some shots of the material on the ground ready to be used to make concrete.
But all my problems are not yet over – far from it. I still need to pick up two more big-bags and 8 sheets of reinforcing steel and it would appear that my trailer is now out of service. But maybe not. I think that if I make two trips and lay four sheets of steel on what remains of the trailer floor with a big-bag on top each time, the steel itself will act as a floor and spread the load. That’s the theory anyway and only by trying it out tomorrow will I find out if it will work or not 😉