{"id":4929,"date":"2013-07-02T20:43:35","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T19:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=4929"},"modified":"2013-07-02T20:43:35","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T19:43:35","slug":"strange-things-sometimes-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/strange-things-sometimes-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange things sometimes happen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life often plays tricks on us, doesn’t it. Sometimes it gives us a nasty surprise just when we least expect it and occasionally something nice unexpectedly happens right out of the blue. And there are also those occasions when we think it’s just given us a good kick up the backside only for everything to turn out better in the end than we could possibly have imagined. Well, today’s series of events was an example of one of the latter.<\/p>\n

To be specific, things started to happen last thing yesterday evening while I was getting ready for bed. While I was cleaning my teeth I noticed a pool of water growing steadily larger under one of the compression joints I did last week for the water heater pipework, the very first one actually. Now, it’s very unusual for that type of joint to fail some time after it was done and has been working without leaking, so you can imagine how annoyed I was. I became even more so when, after I’d grabbed a couple of spanners and tried to tighten it up, the steady drip became a stream from around the thread of one of the nuts. I dashed to turn the water off and after trying unsuccessfully to cure the problem, I just had to leave the main water supply turned off and fill a large water container from the outside tap for my immediate use.<\/p>\n

One of my problems was that because of limited access, I’d had to use a shifting spanner and grips to tighten the nuts up in the first place and to be honest, the fitting didn’t look anything like pretty as a result. So this morning I went in search of another large spanner that I knew I had somewhere and that I’d hoped might fit the body of the fitting without slipping, which it did. Luckily I already had another new 16mm coupling, which is what this was, so I then set to to take the old one out and replace it with the new one. The leak was coming from where the new fitting was joining up to old tubing and the problem was probably due to standards having slightly changed in the years since the old pipework was put in. I removed the old leaking nut and cone and replaced them with the items from the new fitting but left the nut and cone on the end of the new tubing that I’d put in because that hadn’t caused a problem. This left me, of course, with a spare 16mm nut and cone, but I thought that they’d come in handy sometime, never for a moment thinking just how soon that might be \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I was mightily relieved when, after tightening up the nuts on the new fitting and turning the water back on, the leak had been cured, so I was able to pack up my tools, have breakfast and think about today’s jobs. The main one was to install the new tubing through the wall to the outside for the gas, but I’d also had to start thinking how I’d then connect this up eventually to the hob unit. Although I’d used a 10mm rod to get through the wall, I’d worked it around pretty well and I hoped that as a result I’d be able to put a 12mm tube through. The reason for this was that I’d noticed during my various forays into the plumbing sections here and there that there seems to be a greater variety of 12mm fittings than there are of 10mm. So when I dropped into Les Briconautes this morning to pick up a 1m length of 12mm copper tube, I also checked out the fittings to see how I might connect it to my hob at one end and the gas cylinders at the other. I picked up what looked like the correct union for the hob end and then cast my eye over the gas section. I found a rubber tube connector and it looked as though I could combine this with a different type of 12mm union to achieve my objective.<\/p>\n

Sadly, when I got home and was able to check this out, I was proven wrong. The union for the hob was spot on, but as I already half suspected, the thread on the rubber tube gas connector did not match that of the other union that I’d bought, and the worry was that I hadn’t spotted anything else at Les Briconautes that might have been suitable. Then I had a brainwave. What about that spare 16mm nut that I’d kept from this morning – might it be able to do the job? Voil\u00e0! It not only screwed on as smoothly as silk but it also held the tube nozzle part firmly, perfectly in the centre on its fibre washer. So what a bit of luck my having the leaky coupling had turned out to be, when I’d originally thought it was yet another annoying disaster. I’d been mulling over and worrying about how I’d be able to connect the hob to the external gas cylinders and now the solution had not only been given to me, but it had also been dropped right into my lap \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

After that, in some ways the rest of today’s work was a bit of an anticlimax. I prefabricated the interior part of the gas pipe before poking the other end out through the wall, which it did much more easily than I’d thought it might. Then it was just a matter of making the job good, ready for me to continue tomorrow with making up the pipework for the new sink and bashing out the dirty old one. Here’s how each end of the new gas pipe looked just after I’d finished the making good.<\/p>\n

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So I’m all set now for tomorrow. It’ll be impossible to get the new base units and<\/em> worktops and<\/em> sink all in tomorrow, so I’ll end up without a kitchen sink for a couple of days or so. But that’ll be a small price to pay to get rid of the disgusting old one that I’ve had to put up with ever since I moved in just over a year ago. It’s one old traditional rural French feature that I’m happy to do away with, thank you \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life often plays tricks on us, doesn’t it. Sometimes it gives us a nasty surprise just when we least expect it and occasionally something nice unexpectedly happens right out of the blue. And there are also those occasions when we think it’s just given us a good kick up the backside only for everything to … 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-4929","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\/4929","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=4929"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4934,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4929\/revisions\/4934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}