TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS. (09/06/15)

For the last couple of days the cold wind has gone so apart from a couple of very brief showers it is gorgeous. I have been; not grass cutting as yesterday the drive belt from the engine to the hydrostatic transmission came off and took an hour or more of struggle and nasty words before it went back on. I hadn’t been mowing for ten minutes when I ran out of fuel. It’s a thirty mile round trip for petrol so I left a note for Andrew to pick some up on his way back with the big dumper trailer. He hadn’t got a jerry can with him so phoned a friend to bring five gallons this morning. It arrived at the crack of coffee o’clock and I set to with the mower. I mowed unhappily for ten minutes then a bearing on the mower deck collapsed. Two and a half hours later after finding one new bearing here and begging another new one from the local engineer I was back mowing. The job was a real mauling business, like repairing a one ton domestic washing machine, no easy access, everything just too heavy for comfort and lots of sharp thin metal about. I managed to get the old bearings out and the new in with the aid of my high tech implements. A big hammer and an even larger drift.

Here is the mower. It looks very snazzy, has loads of little switches for magnetic clutches, that offer high and low ratio, lift and drop the cutter deck, even headlights for folk who fancy mowing in the dark. It’s a domestic model and a real pain to drive. A push along flymo would be easier. The front wheels come off the ground when the grass collector is half full and there is nowhere to hang a counterbalance weight. I did think of filling the front tyres with water but decided it would make little difference. When Ken gets back I’ll offer to weld a little bracket on the front to hang proper tractor weights on. It’s a bit like Dithery Dave, a rich mans dream but of little practical use.

Last night I wandered down to Polly’s farm as she makes cider and I fancied a drink. She wasn’t in and so I wandered back and on the way noticed a beautiful little patch of Red Campion and Blue Bells. I decided to take the Bronica down but only had B&W film. I took the Canon.

They don’t look good in monochrome so just as well I didn’t fire off a roll of 120 on them.

They don’t look much better in colour.

Neither does gorse and Hawthorne. I got fed up with monochrome.

Decided to go half and half as a compromise. Compromise doesn’t come naturally to me so I took a couple of flowers.

Welsh Poppy.

And a normal one.

Common Carder Bee, bum on as usual sitting on a blue flower with riggledy raggeldy petals. The first correct ID gets a mention on a sometime leading video. It’s a White Tailed Bumble Bee that I hope to stack and 3D. I could make the 3D interactive. Did I say sometime? Next week maybe, next year is more likely. I’ll shoot a couple of hundred images of it tonight as it is dead and fresh, I’ve already started to build the mesh. I’m making my bee five times real size and it is hard. I will have to think of a way to UV map the images credibly I’m working in metric and in Blender it is good. Blender units are just a metric unit but I’ve never used it as a CAD package apart from the silly bar of chocolate and even then I was more interested in using Bezier curves to generate the molten chocolate than using particles or a fluid system. For those that missed it here, I hope, is molten chocolate.

 

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It’s a good job the days are long as Polly has just brought me a litre milk carton of rocket fuel. Houses are few and far apart here but she knew I’d been down to see her last night. I’ll maybe save taking the bee pictures till tomorrow morning.

Have fun.