{"id":2531,"date":"2011-07-21T23:25:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T22:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=2531"},"modified":"2011-07-22T11:53:06","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T10:53:06","slug":"generator-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/generator-games\/","title":{"rendered":"The generator game (loadsa fun!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u00a390 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

‘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 \u00a340, 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.<\/p>\n

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 \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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 \ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2531"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2544,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2531\/revisions\/2544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}