The replaced parts.

10/5/2012 - Failed Generators.

We took them to the generator fundi Kelvin today, and he had the problems pinpointed within ten minutes. The carburettor was condemned - it was not going to get better. The electrical fault was determined to be a failed capacitor.

I wondered where we would get a replacement carb, and asked anxiously if they were obtainable. Yes, he said, you can get them at the shop here, and the capacitor also.

The generator and motor cycle fundis just work more or less in the gutter on a certain street. Once they got established there, someone opened a shop at the spot to sell parts - symbiosis.

Adia teases me from time to time about buying a Chinese generator. But if I had bought a Honda, then a) I could never be certain if it really was, and b) it would have cost me pushing $1000 rather than the $322 we paid. You can visit Kelvin a few times for the difference.

10/5/2012 - Further Action in the Bathroom.

I fabricated some wooden blocks with the required profile carved on the bottom. The idea is that these will eventually be finished to a tidy rounded shape, and painted white to match the toilet. These seemed likely to work.

The next battle was with the screws. I had some long screws and plugs that looked like they could do the job if I shortened the plugs to allow for the considerable thickness of the toilet base and wooden blocks combined. That too seemed fine until it came to actually tightening the screws. There was no room to get a sensible size screwdriver in there, and with a little stubby one I was having great difficulty.

Eventually it dawned on me that the screws and plugs were designed to make strong connections into low density concrete block walls. These have a habit of breaking up some as you put a masonry drill into them, and the plugs were designed so that they would open up quite considerably as the long screw went in, thus getting some purchase on the soft block. For that they work very well.

In this case though, my 8mm holes were drilled into very solid concrete that left the plugs with nowhere to expand. After successively enlarging the holes to take 10mm and then 12 mm plugs I finally got the screws to screw down with just the normal degree of violence, and the toilet was secured.

Then there was the wash basin, which was in a state where you could wiggle it up and down on its mounting bolts. I took it off to discover that a piece of the porcelain had broken away, and that I needed to replace it. Fortunately I got another one from one of the Nane Nane hardware shops at a decent price. It is a little wider than the original and suits the room better.

This time, as well as the bolts to hold the thing to the wall, I made a strong mninga wood bracket to provide positive support from underneath. It looks pretty decent, and the sink feels very solid.

5/5/2012 - May

We had a WC in a small bathroom associated with one of the guest rooms that was an embarrassingly poor flusher. Some time ago, after a lot of searching, I had bought a replacement toilet that was a size suitable for the room and of more modern design. Unfortunately the position of the original vertical drain pipe was too far from the wall for the new toilet, and also at the wrong angle.

To get the new one in would involve butchering a section of the tiled floor, excavating the drain pipe below, and modifying it to be quite close - actually partly into - the wall and terminated at the required angle. This is a sequence that provides plenty of things that could go wrong.

I was lucky in various respects. I succeeded in hacking out a tile and a half and the underlying concrete without damaging other tiles or the pipe. In the course of the hacking, the right-angle joint in the pipe below the floor fractured by failure of the PVC cement. This allowed me to tidily remove the section to be modified without having to butcher any more of the pipe. The two 45° bends that were required to get the required pipe position and angle fitted comfortably into the space available, and without creating a pipe section that would be a significant flow restriction. Mouse over the pictures for commentary.

After I'd packed around the pipe with sand and gravel, then topped up the hole with clean rubble, Ali, our tiler, came today, applied a layer of concrete, then cut and fixed some leftover tiles of a similar colour - most of the area will be covered by the toilet anyway. It just needs a touch of white spray lacquer to cover the dark cement joins.

The unusual outlet angle of the new toilet will make it easy to fit. The angle makes the joint very accessible, and the thing would probably work OK without the joint even being sealed since it is pointing downhill - it is just an odour seal. Depending on how the new toilet fixing holes align with the floor tiles I can probably fit it tomorrow.

Tonight there's the Chelsea/Liverpool Cup Final at 19:30, so that's another Boogaloo visit, to be followed by another at 15:15 tomorrow for the Man City/Newcastle match. There's never a dull moment ;=)