Friday the thirteenth arrived

 It was only a day late. I went to work on the bus today and if it could cause a problem it did cause a problem. In hindsight it was all rather comical really. 

The goal today was to replace the broken camera that's currently dangling due to my own ineptitude. On the first time around covering the back windows with fridge steel I had a case of butterfingers and dropped a sheet of fridge steel on the camera, breaking the mount. Well that had a few curses floating around afterward and it embarrassed the bird on the tree next to me so much that it turned bright red and flew away only to be mistaken for a cardinal by a nearby hunter who shot it and had it for dinner.

The camera to be installed is a bit different in that it's flush-mounted and circular. It came supplied with a little cutting tool which I put in my Walmart power drill. Well, that didn't seem to want to start cutting so I had to drill a pilot hole. The pilot hole didn't achieve much because the bit didn't cut the steel. That was probably because it was designed to be installed in the plastic bumper on a car. It certainly would not have done anything with the 1/4 inch thick steel bumper on my bus!

So, I tried to enlarge the pilot hole with a step bit. The cordless Walmart HyperTough drill crapped out immediately - the battery never holds a good charge - not even from new. I switched back to the corded Walmart HyperTough drill and the chuck siezed on me immediately, refusing to tighten on the drill bit.

Hunting around I found my new Harbor Freight cordless drill but all three batteries were out of charge. That led on to a long hunt for my Harbor Freight corded drill - the one I bought by accident. Eventually I did find it and put the step bit into it.

Having cut the hole to size, I sprayed it with primer and then half an hour later with grey topcoat.

Holding the camera up to the hole I discovered that the cutting tool supplied with the camera had been hopelessly undersized. Imagine somebody less capable buying the camera kit and carefully drilling the hole then finding it too small. It might even turn them away from DIY.

The drill bit being clearly undersized I pulled out the step bit again and enlarged the hole fairly swiftly. 

After cutting the hole near enough to size I used a grinding bit in the drill to enlarge the hole slowly. Well after an hour of that I went back to the step bit and cut the hole big enough.

When I left the project due to darkness falling with a thud, I'd cut a piece of aluminium bracket to rivet above the camera in order to protect it from as much precipitation as possible. Having cut and drilled and primed the bracket I went inside for the night.

This was a simple two hour project that turned into an all day project due to Walmart's wonderful HyperTough tools turning out to be HyperCrap. In fact I think the frequently derided Harbor Freight tools are of much higher quality that the Walmart tools. Having seen Walmart customers, perhaps their tools are intended for people that would spend left over money on tools after supporting their meth habit.

Tomorrow maybe I'll finish painting the bracket and install the camera as well as the bracket. It's a good job I didn't do anything with brakes!

Speaking of brakes, Carolina International never got in touch to say they had the flexible brake lines I'd ordered. At the moment I have a working brake flaring tool having returned the Autozone tool that had clearly been manufactured by a drunkard. This one I bought from O'Reilly. 

In order to replace the broken front brake pipe I have to remove the pipe for the back brakes. That means I have to empty the whole braking system so I might as well install all the brake lines while the system is dry. As I don't see the point of draining the system, installing a couple of pipes, bleeding it and then having to repeat the process to install the next batch of pipes when they arrive, I held off on brakes for the day. At the moment the main brakes (the back brakes) still work.