I hate things breaking!

This week: I hate things breaking!; Delivery to the island is a problem; The drill press stand;

We have had a warm week this week.

There have been four days where the temperature has been 30°C or more, with the hottest being Thursday when the mercury reached 32.2°C

These are not record temperatures for here and nothing like the record breaking 40.3°C recorded in Portugal, or the 35.2°C in the UK.

Most days we have had a steady cooling wind blowing off the Adriatic, so even though my temperature is an “in the shade” recording, it did not feel too hot.

A lot of my time this week has been spent with issues around my new dishwasher.

Once delivered I spent a good part of the day disconnecting and removing the old one and installing the new one.

It actually went into place quite easily and for once, the cupboard under the sink really looks quite tidy!

I read the manual, no, really I did, and then activated it for the first time on Friday night. It has a built in time delay so I can run it at night on the cheap rate electricity. On Saturday morning, everything inside was sparking clean.

Now I need to find a way to properly dispose of the old machine. The lack of a WEEE recycling facility in my municipality means I think I will have to wait until the next time I hear the scrap metal dealer come round in his old pickup.

Down in the polytunnel, I have been irrigating and also watching weeds grow.

Especially my raised herb bed seems to be sprouting a number of things which a) I did not plant and b) are not herbs!

This resulted in some time being spent in hand-weeding the bed to remove the immigrants.

I have continued my perambulations through the Maquis, once again keeping an eye on the Violet Birds Nest orchids.

One flower spike’s seed pods continues to swell and ripen.

Whilst another pod on a different flower spike has split open.

I have mentioned before that orchid seeds are tiny. Those white grains on my fingers are the seeds.

Each one is less than 0.25mm long and will, if they find a suitable seed bed, with the right Wood Wide Web mycorrhizal network, will germinate and then spend the next eight to ten years underground, before producing a single flower spike, dying and setting seed.

This orchid has no chlorophyl, hence the brown colour, so cannot photosynthesize food and relies entirely on its underground fungi network.

Orchids are truly some of the most amazing plants.

I hate things breaking!

Home maintenance is a never ending task. There is always “something” which needs adjusting or repairing.

What I hate is when something breaks and I can neither get the parts nor a local repair man to fix it.

Local repair men are curiously absent on the island and those which do exist say they “can’t get the parts”, then disappear, never to return.

So there comes a point when one doesn’t even try…

Last week my dishwasher broke down. It will turn on, starts the process of washing, then switches itself off with an “I’m done” light.

The controls are manual, so I am guessing that it is a problem in the contacts/brain of the unit, because the pump etc seem still to be working.

It is a “Hoover” which I bought 15 years ago when I was in Abu Dhabi, so it probably doesn’t owe me much and on that basis, I ordered a new one. I admit I didn’t even try an find a Hoover service agent here in Croatia!

With the imminent arrival of my new machine, I brought my sack-barrow out, so I can easily manoeuvre the new, boxed appliance up all the steps into my kitchen.

The sack barrow has a flat tyre. The same tyre which was flat last time I wanted it and the tyre where I put a brand new inner tube in on the 5th March, so it has lasted just over two months and one use…

I keep a box with cycle repair tools in my workshop, so brought out the tyre levers and a new tyre repair kit.

While I was repairing one inner tube, I thought I might as well repair the other three tubes which have been in the “jobs pending” tray.

When I removed the tube from the tyre, what surprised me was that the new tube has failed on the vulcanised joint where the brass tyre filler tube is fixed in place. This is the same place as two others. Clearly there is a manufacturing fault with this batch of new tubes.

After carefully preparing the inner tube surface, I applied rubber cement to both the repair patch and the tube, and then clamped the patch in place and left the tubes to dry for 24 hours.

Even with tyre levers it took a while to manoeuvre the repaired tube into the tyre and back onto the wheel. Everything has to be done by hand and sometimes three hands would be more useful than two.

Once back in place, I reinflated the tyre and was pleased that the patch held.

Delivery to the island is a problem

With delivery of the new dishwasher scheduled for Tuesday, I was happy when I got an SMS message at 8am on Tuesday with a link to check on the progress of the delivery.

Checking the Gebrüder Weiss website, it said I was № 12 on the schedule and delivery would be around 12:30. So I set about doing some jobs.

Stopping for coffee at 10:20, I thought I would check again. This time the website informed me that my new machine had been delivered to my address at 09:44!

I checked outside and nothing had been left near my car, so I spoke to a neighbour to ask if it had gone to them in error. It hadn’t and my neighbour said there had been no delivery vehicles on the lane that morning.

That set off a chain reaction of trying to contact Gebrüder Weiss to tell them I had not received my machine.

There was no telephone number or contact details on the website. A web search located the parent company in Germany. The only means of contact was a web form, so I completed it and received an automatic acknowledgement that the company had received it. Then I waited and waited.

In the afternoon, I used their social media page to message them. There was another automatic response which gave me a different link, to submit another web form. when I tried this, there was a web form error, so I couldn’t send any message.

By tea time, when I had had no answer from Gebrüder Weiss, I contacted the dishwasher supplier and late on Tuesday night, I received an email saying they were urgently raising this with the delivery company.

I had a phone call on Wednesday morning, when the company tried to tell me that I had misread their webpage, and it was really telling me that the appliance had arrived at their depot in Split and would be delivered on Friday.

I keep screen shots now of everything because it is often the only proof you have. These days it is so often just your word against the word of the company.

So I read the message to the employee and offered to send a copy of the screen shot.

The employee on the phone then reverted to the “Oh, it must be a computer problem” excuse, confirming my goods were still in Split.

I asked why no one could be bothered to reply to web forms and social media messages, but he didn’t have an answer, just promising I would get the appliance on Friday.

So after several hours of trying to sort out the delivery mess, which was not of my making, I prepared for my delivery at the end of the week.

I was surprised on Thursday morning, when I received a call from a delivery driver in Jelsa, to tell me he had my appliance on his van. It was duly delivered 15 minutes later.

At least it was undamaged and my sack barrow was ready!

Nothing on the island is simple or easy….

The drill press stand

This is one of those projects which is not especially high on my list of priorities.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had ordered and received castors, then life continued and I did other things.

This week, I came across an old 10 x 10 cm three metre timber baulk which I decided to use as the base of the drill press stand.

My idea is to use a pair of small stainless steel tables to take the weight of a drill press. At the moment when I need the drill press, I have to set it up on a work bench, then take it down again after use.

This is at the best inefficient. With a sturdy wheeled base, the drill press can be moved to where I need it and then put it back out of the way after use.

After cutting the timber to size, I cut 15 cm lengths of threaded bar, to attach to the tables and then go through the timber, bolting the tables securely to the timber.

The next job was using a small portable drill stand to open 11 mm holes in each length of timber. The pieces of timber are substantial because of the weight they will have to carry.

The final job of the week, before it became too hot to work comfortably in the courtyard, was fixing the new castors to the base of each piece of timber with five 3.5 x 40 SPAX stainless steel wood screws.

After doing a trial fit of the tables, next week I have some work to do to join them securely together, before I fit the wooden top and mount the drill press.

Sometimes my work seems like one of those well known IKEA hacks, that change the use of the Swedish furniture for the better! NCG