Month: April 2024

By Jove, I think I’ve got it! I’ve looked all over my new bike in an attempt to find a frame number and up until this evening my searches have yielded nothing. But as readers probably realise by now, I don’t give up that easily.

I got back onto the internet this evening to see if I could eventually crack the problem of how to register a Speed Bike and found a reference that said to do so, you must provide the bikes unique identification number which I guess is then used in a similar way to a motorised vehicle’s VIN number. So I set off looking to find where this unique identification number comes from and found that you seem to be able to apply for one which must then be attached to the bike by something as simple as a sticky label or by engraving it on the frame.

This immediately made me think of bikes I had when I was young that all had frame numbers stamped on them and quite by chance I then happened upon another web site on which you can register your bike in France as an anti-theft measure. The process naturally uses the bike’s frame number and helpfully it offered a little pop-up screen showing the usual places where frame numbers are located.

So that encouraged me to restart the search for a frame number on my new bike and lo and behold, on the last place I looked by lying on the floor and looking up at the bottom of its frame through which the pedal spindle passes, there I found a number.

I could hardly believe it. Why hadn’t either the manufacturer or the seller in Germany, with both of whom I’ve discussed my registration problem, told me about this and why didn’t they include it on the bike’s paperwork? I had to lay the bike down on the floor to read the number but as far as I’m concerned, this is the unique VIN that the registration authority is seeking to register my bike in France.

I’ve already resubmitted my registration application so now I’ll have to wait another two weeks for a reply. But this time I think I’ve cracked it, I really do 😉

I’m still trying to get my new electric bike registered as required in France to legally use it on public roads. My first application was rejected but although I don’t know for sure, I think it was because the delay receiving the manufacturer’s Certificate of Conformity that hadn’t been included with my application was too long and the registration authority just closed my file as a result.

Now there’s a new twist. As far as I am aware, bikes like mine cannot legally be used in many countries (the UK included) and France is the only one that requires them to be registered in order for them to be used legally on public roads. This is because they are treated under similar laws to cyclomoteurs and motor scooters with engine capacity up to 50cc.

As a result, I’m now being asked to provide a VIN number for my bike but because it doesn’t have an internal combustion engine and, presumably, because no other country that allows them to be used asks for them to be registered, bikes like mine do not come with VINs.

I’ve just pointed this out to the registration authority and asked what on earth I can do to satisfy the legal requirements as surely I can’t be the first person in France asking to register a bike like mine. The whole process has been a bureaucratic nightmare right from the very beginning and to be honest, I’m getting a bit sick of banging my head against a brick wall 🙁

I’ve spent literally the whole day, more actually as I didn’t finish until this evening, assembling a base for a bed for bedroom 2, what’s called a ‘sommier’ down here. It was inexpensive but I thought that as I’d sourced it from Conforama it would be of reasonable quality. But some hope. The manufacturing quality was appalling. Several of the long allen-headed screws that hold the main framework together didn’t line up with the inserts they had to screw into and it took a long time to get them to go together as I didn’t want to drill out the holes through which they passed for fear of weakening the assembly.

One of the inserts was also missing, so I’ve had to email the supplier to try to get one sent to me ASAP and I also found that one of the white-painted legs was heavily scratched when I unpacked it. It also crushed a bit when I tightened the securing screw so I may have to add some filler under the head of the screw to improve its appearance. I’ll have to touch up several areas with white paint anyway where the coverage is poor so it won’t require much more effort to make it look better.

Apart from the problems with screws not lining up, assembly required much more time and effort than I’d anticipated and my guess is that there will be some purchasers who’ll give up before completing the job. The instructions were almost too small to read without a magnifying glass and parts labelling was non-existent. I had to dis and re-assemble parts I’d put together three or four times after I’d realised what was required and the manufacturer also had the bright idea of chucking several different types of screws all together in one plastic bag. Oh what fun it was finding just the two of one type I needed at one point from among the 150 or more that were in the bag.

Despite all this, it didn’t look too bad when I’d finished. The mattress for it is due to be delivered in four days time but in the meantime I threw the duvet and pillows onto it to see how they’ll look when the bed’s ready to be used.

I’m very pleased. If I said that I’d painted the wall to match the duvet cover I’d be lying. It was pure luck. I couldn’t even remember having a duvet cover and matching pillow cases in these colours until I unpacked the bedding that I placed in storage when I moved out of my old house and I can’t for the life of me recall when they were last used. It could be years and probably is. I’ll certainly hang onto them for now though, but may end up buying a new, better ‘sommier’ for this bedroom and moving this one into bedroom three where it will get much less use. But it’ll do for now 😉

Today was all about my ride-on mower. I needed the repair that I’d done to work because although today was a good day to be working outside (sunny all day, temperature 22 degrees C) and tomorrow will be similar, I really need a break. And if I could get my grass mown today, that would be possible tomorrow. I’ve been going non-stop for several days and loading and unloading stuff single-handedly to move it round to my house from storage has, quite honestly, taken a bit out of me.

I started by cleaning off all the dried mud and other debris that had collected on the underside of the deck and was surprised by just how much had accumulated. No wonder the deck was so heavy – it was far lighter to manhandle afterwards.

This was the deck after being cleaned and ready to be mounted back on the mower. I’d lubricated what I could but major things like bearings were sealed of course. I thought that it all looked pretty good after the repair.

It took me longer than I’d expected to get the deck installed. I’d forgotten how the cables and springs went and had to find a Youtube video that showed me and it didn’t help that my ride-on mower lifting mechanism is still in storage. But I was super relieved when I’d finished and was able to test it out, with the result that even with its old, worn blades, my ride-on is now cutting as well as it ever has and considerably better than it was up to recently.

I finished all the grass at the back so with a bit of luck I’ll get the break I want tomorrow. If I do, I think I’ll have earned it 😉

By way of summary, in order to use my new bike on public roads here in France it has to be registered and conform to various other legal requirements. For it to be registered it has to have a Certificate of Conformity signed by the manufacturer to confirm that it meets the necessary standards of roadworthiness and safety and it didn’t have one. So I set about researching what the regulations and standards are, produced a Certificate that I believe met them and sent a copy off to the manufacturer, Dakeya, in China for them to add their official stamp and return it to me in order to try to get the registration through.

Then it all went deadly quiet and despite further messages from me it seemed to be impossible to get a response from Dakeya. This seemed weird because what I’d done was to help them out and would, if successful, also be of value to them by making all of their bikes of the same model legal for use in France. In the end it got to the point when on Tuesday I sent a registered letter off to CDiscount, from whose web site I’d purchased my bike, saying that if I couldn’t register it I’d be looking to return it and would seek a full refund from them.

So, of course, what happened was the vey next day I eventually received a very nice reply from China saying that they were very grateful for the information and suggestions that I’d provided and that they had carefully read through all of the paperwork I’d sent. And attached to the email was the Declaration of Conformity that I’d submitted to them, officially stamped and dated.

I immediately uploaded a copy to the French registration web site and now await a response. It’s been a few days and at least my application hasn’t been thrown out again, so with a bit of luck it’s now going through. I guess I’ll have to wait a little while longer to know for sure.

Have you noticed how just when you need your car for a special reason, that’s when it always lets you down? This year it was the same with my ride-on mower. Just as the grass began growing furiously and needed to be cut before it got too long, my ride-on stopped cutting. Luckily only a smallish area was left at the back and I was able to finish it off with my ‘débroussailleuse’ (brush cutter) but that was only a short-term solution as the grass was only just getting into its stride and was going to continue growing at a fast rate, especially with all the showers we’ve been getting.

I had the possibility of another temporary solution while my ride-on is out of commission in the form of a self-propelled rotary motor mower which I put into storage nearly three years ago when I moved out of my old house. This, however, was always going to be a desperate lifeline as it was never reliable when I was using, or trying to use, it regularly. Once it was running it was a good worker but getting it started was always a frustrating business.

Anyway, I removed it from storage and it spent last night in my living room before I took it outside to see whether I could start it and keep it running for long enough to cut my grass front and back. This is it before I tried to see if I could remove, strip and clean its carburettor, which I suspected to be the source of the starting problem.

After checking, cleaning and re-gapping the spark plug the ruddy thing would not start. I couldn’t remove its carburettor because it’s held on by what appear to be 9.5mm bolts (I guess they are an AF size but the spanner(s) I need are in another tool box that’s still in storage) and one of them is impossible to get to anyway, so all I could do was remove the carburettor bowl (which was perfectly clean) and blow up into it the best I could.

After reassembling everything I kept pulling on the starter cord until I got a blister on my right index finger (even with gloves on) and just as I was about to give up and consign the machine to the ‘déchetterie’ it started out of the blue. I kept it going long enough even with a restart to refuel until I’d done the grass in the front by which time I thought it time to have something to eat and a cold beer before starting on the grass at the back. But it was not to be because I could not get the damn thing to run again no matter how many times I pulled on the starter cord.

When I’d dismantled my ride-on to investigate why it had stopped cutting I’d found that the problem was more serious than I’d thought. The spindle of one of the cutting belt pulleys on the cutting bed is mounted in a bracket which evidently is subject to considerable load because over time not only had the hole in the bracket been extremely ovalled by the bolt that forms the spindle but the bolt itself had actually sheared off. When I measured the thickness of the metal bracket I found it to be 5mm which gives some indication of the extent of the load it is designed to take.

My searches on the internet turned up that I could buy a complete new cutting bed, bare so I’d have to transfer over all of the parts from my old bed, for just over 250€ and I’d seriously considered doing that as my mower has been really good and trouble-free the whole time that I’ve had it and a new bed would, I’m sure, keep it going for many more years.

However, I thought that if I cut out the damaged section of the bracket, I could weld in a new piece that would, after drilling, make the bracket virtually as good as new. I’d ordered a small piece of 5mm thick steel which arrived today so I thought that as it was fine and I’d taken my welder out of storage in anticipation, I’d get cracking straight away today so I’d know sooner rather than later if a new cutting bed was actually going to be needed.

The next couple of pictures show the damaged section of bracket that I cut out. It’s standing on a piece of white paper on the repaired bracket because I didn’t take a picture before starting work.

The next couple of shots show the repair that I did. I’m no welder by any stretch of the imagination and it took me a while to weld, grind off the excess and repeat the process before I eventually got to what I thought was an acceptable result.

Once I’d cleaned up and cleared away I turned up a can of matt black spray paint in my ‘abris’ (tool shed) so although I didn’t have enough time to do a proper job, I rubbed off several areas of surface rust and gave them a coat, including the drilled and finished repaired bracket.

And finally, a couple of shots of the repaired cutting bed ready for the belt pulley system to be reassembled and the bed remounted on my ride-on.

It looks as though we’ve got a couple of dry days coming up with afternoon temperatures of 22 and 23 degrees C respectively, so with a bit of luck I’ll be able to put everything back together and try the repair out on my grass. I just hope that it works OK because I don’t fancy stripping and rebuilding the machine again. I’ve ordered a new spark plug for the old machine and if that doesn’t solve its starting issue I think that it’ll be time to send it off to the rest home in the sky for elderly mowers, especially as I don’t really have enough space for it anyway 🙁

Our home before our divorce was big enough to accommodate our dining room furniture but since then the houses I’ve lived in have not been. After coming to live in France coming up to 12 years ago, my last home in Plazac was much too small and the dining room table and chairs that I’d brought with me from England were never used as my living room was far too small.

So they’ve been unused for the whole of that time and have been in storage during the construction of my new house for the best part of three years since I moved out of the old place. But no longer! Since I finished my new cloaks cupboard which represents the last area of interior storage that I’ll have, I’ve been gradually removing stuff from the storage space I’ve been hiring over that time and yesterday that included my dining room table and chairs.

Here’s how my living room looked this morning. Yes, that is a lawn mower that I want to use to cut my grass while my ride-on is out of commission. It needs to be indoors until I can strip and clean its carburettor as I’ve no room in my ‘abris’ while my ride-on is in bits and it can’t be left outside because we keep getting passing showers.

But my dining room table and chairs have found their permanent home at last, permanent during my lifetime anyway. They fit perfectly into the space I planned for them, even including the table centre extension, and all that now remains is for me to bring the two matching floor cabinets out of storage to join them, which were too heavy for me to also bring over yesterday.

It’s been a tiring job because I’ve loaded several car and trailer loads single-handedly over the past couple of days and I didn’t think for a moment how much effort would be involved in putting it all in cupboards and on shelves, mainly because there was no place to store it all in my old house and much of it remained unpacked in boxes for all the years since I arrived in France. But it’ll be worth it because little by little everything is falling into place and my new house is becoming the home that I wanted. At last!