Tuesday, June 23, 2015

What an awful disaster

Today was pretty much an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. Let's start from the beginning...

Overnight insomnia kept me from having a good nights sleep. Thus at 4am I turned my 6am alarm off. The result was that I missed my Tuesday morning voluntary job. Had I gone in after two to no hours sleep, I'd not have been all that great.

I went out to the bus after breakfast and found I needed to go to the store to buy a few things. Mind, I needed to get out of the house. This was my first trip in a week! My usual job has quit on me for the summer so its a case of not spending anything and minimising travel.

So, I went to the store and got most of the things I need. As usual Lowe's was totally out of 1/8 drill bits. After chasing down a clueless shop assistant who had made haste to bugger off when customers looked likje they were about to approach, it transpired that he'd never heard of carborundum drill bits or diamond tip drill bits. Clearly something too specialised for Lowe's.

By the time I'd finished at Lowe's, I was feeling the heat a bit because it was still over 100F outside. Thus, other things I needed never got picked up.

Returning to the bus, it was just too hot to work inside and thus I decided to work on patching holes. About 12 were just screw holes that I treated for rust and filled with a rivet. Four holes were larger requiring patches. Thus I found a suitable strip of aluminum and cut four patches with my angle grinder. Then I picked up the wrong piece of metal and burned my fingers.

Recovering from signed fingers I drilled a hole in the first piece of aluminum which broke loose from the mount, flipped around and hit my fingernail, breaking it. Cursing, I drilled a hole for the rivet in the bodywork. Then after I slapped silicone glue on the back of the piece of aluminum, I riveted the aluminum on via the first hole. While drilling the second, the drill skipped and the hole didn't end up quite where I wanted so the aluminum when held by the second rivet wasn't straight. The next hole started well enough by then my 1/4 inch drill bit snagged on the edge of a second piece of body panelling, jerked and snapped. Bugger! Now I had a broken drill bit poking out of the hole. It took quite some effort to remove it. Putting the rivet in wasn't easy either as the hole wasn't completely clear. I located another 1/4 inch drill bit that was as blunt as can be. Somehow I managed to make a hole for a rivet then put the rivet in.

At that point I gave up for the day. This was clearly not my day! After going inside I found voicemail on my phone that I should have received days ago but which mysteriously only appeared today though it had been sent days ago. Then a voicemail from my real job saying they'd lost a document and demanding another by two weeks time!

On top of all that, one of my online accounts was questioned by the account provider to the effect they don't believe I am who I say I am. Well, fine. I just don't care. I was threatened with account cancellation if I couldn't produce documentary evidence within 7 days to prove my identity. So... One of my accounts might mysteriously vanish. I just don't care!

Tomorrow I'll have to drive to Lowes for a new 1/4 inch drill bit. It will apparently be well over 100F tomorrow so heaven knows if I'll even be able to work outside the bus. The good news is I have 5 holes ready prepped to rivet patches over. After that I don't have any more bodywork holes to fill.

More good news - I'm just about ready to put primer on the whole of the dinette/kitchenette. There's stuff I'll have to move out of the way but it'll be nice to have it printed. I might prime the bathroom while I'm at it even though I still need to lay down one more board. No photos today - every time I tried my phone, the battery was flat!

No comments:

Post a Comment