New Toy, New Games

I picked up a GPS yesterday while looking for something else entirely - but at under $200AUD it was a reasonable price - and today decided to play a bit of a game with it.  Trish and I picked a region quite close (within 50km) of home, and then scrolled through the points of interest in that region until we found - a winery.  Set that as the destination and just set off. 

Okay on the way to the destination, we spotted a nice little river spot and pinned it for future reference.  Went to the Winery/Restaurant and baulked at the prices - $12 for a scoop of icecream (no matter how glowingly it's described) is just bullshit - and continued on because the Margaret River Chocolate Company was just up the road a ways.

Had a great lunch, retraced to the pinned river picnic spot, took a few photos, and wended our way back slowly. 

So new sport - stick a pin in the GPS and just go.  GPStrailing, anyone?

Whalemma

So now we're in the situation of having objected strenuously to the Japanese about their killing of whales in and around our waters, and having to put down a whale calf ourselves....

Portents and omens

Two things.  Make that three:

1900 hrs txting while sitting upstairs waiting while bookclub and couchsurfers occupied the blogger usual corner "teddlesruss: Is the blogger meetup on? about 2 hours ago from txt "

2130 hrs finally got home and decided to check twitter to see why I'd had no response "goatlady: bloggers meetup now INSIDE at the brass monkey - our regular spot is closed about 2 hours ago from mobile web"

2132 hrs reading the fine print on the website too "Please read about important changes to our SMS service."

Bugger!

Foxes Bears and News Of The Weird Oh My

Someone is playing some kind of a pun here - two talented young girls, both named Emily, one named after one animal, the other named after another animal.  This gets into the "classic middle name" territory, where fact is weirder than anything you could make up... 

Random pun thought of the week:  If you took a bunch of grapes and glued them together into the shape of a large citrus fruit, would that be a visual/artistic pun? 

Ch-ch-changes...

If you've been following the story, you'll have seen pictures at Flickr, and the odd article here, as I fiddle and fart my way through "minor" refurb and refit work on the bus now known as DuckZilla.  I say "minor" but it's turned out to be a fairly large lot of jobs. 

The bus now has real plumbing rather than garden hoses, can use mains water instead of just running off a pump and internal water tanks all the time, the 12V solar electrics have been reworked to prevent the shorts and intermittents, rollout annex awning instead of the old rope track slide-on, there's a gas hot water system almost finished installing, some roof leaks have been fixed, and I'm planning to replace thermally inefficient all around windows with insulated panels and smaller more efficient widows placed where I need them. 

Now when I look around me, I see familiar panels behind which are things I know intimately.  I know that if I get stuck any place, I will be able to manage just fine thank you, and I will be able to fix most anything that might fail, and that experience alone has made all the skinned knuckles, bruises, and aching muscles worthwhile. 

The remaining work is now mostly downhill, and now that I've kitted the bus out (at a cost of around another $3500 as near as I can figure) with all the extras, I will be able to live off the grid for four weeks at a time if I use my water sparingly.   The wild blue yonder is looking better and better by the minute...

Now they're coming out of the walls!

Another sandwich panel system that seems would be good for filling in excess glass on converted buses.

cf Bondor coolroom wall panels.

Check your spam count.

I don't think this is good, even though theoretically the volume of spam should decrease.  It's sad though that he tried to take his family with him and in the process left trauma that will never leave his daughter whom he shot in the neck, and a series of questions that will haunt the baby boy.

It's not good that his frame of mind wasn't picked up on and he wasn't on any kind of suicide watch, that just shows a lack of attention by the authorities.  Although, of course, they might have been distracted by all that spam in their inboxes promising Russian brides.

Also not good is that it took four days to find him - after having collected his family, and found at a house he had obviously recently lived at - again, there's something seriously wrong here.  Even if he'd had 20 residences that's still 20 places you'd think the authorities would keep a watch on.  Or perhaps they were too busy ordering viagra or securing their share of $40,000,000 in state duties imposed on some Nigerian company...

Seriously, it seems to have been a lot of inattention, a lot of not very clear thinking, and a lot of laissez-faire attitude that led to this.  Also a tragedy that he killed or attempted to kill all his family. But he left his baby son, in what would appear to be a bit of a cheat to keep one successor alive after him.  It gives an insight into a slightly different mental process, and is vaguely disturbing. 

But deep down inside, I'm satisfied that a person who has driven millions of people to the edge of spam hell has now gone there himself.

Reviewing Wittenoom - a case of Government once again stealing heritage.

There was once a little town called Wittenoom. At one time it was the largest town that far north in WA. I and a few hundred other people lived there in the late 60's and early 70's - and then began as shambolic a process of throwing those lives into disarray as has ever happened in totalitarian countries, let alone a supposed democracy.

As a kid growing up there, I should by now have died of mesothelioma. I'm not. Nor has even one of my contemporaries that I am aware of had the least bit of asbestos-related health issues, in fact I'd say we're in better shape than the national average.

I'll refer to this document in the WA Parliamentary files for some ammo, but first of all some personal experience and observations:

My peers and I played in the town's supposed "deadly" atmosphere, and that means kid style panting and if there was any asbestos fibre in the air we with our young lungs should have died by now. But we haven't. My personal experience with the asbestos fibres was that if you wet the broken fibres, they would seemingly stick back together. Don't know how true that is, but remember kids observe and don't judge, and I was a pretty inquisitive kid.

Then suddenly there was a government intake of breath, a kind of collective gasp of horror - look, have you read that .PDF yet? I suggest you do that, it makes stark and frustrating reading. The government was and still is not so much concerned for the lives of we the ex residents, as they were apparently scared that they would be sued for dereliction of duty of care...

We were told that our house was being reclaimed by the government, one way or another, and they were offering us the princely sum of $1000 for the house and land. Yes, we'd bought the place for that price, but had since spent tens of thousands rebuilding and renovating and refurbishing. I was young and didn't understand it all. I grieved for a place that had been more home than anyplace I'd lived before, and I was and still am saddened everytime I think about it.

But before that happened, Wittenoom rallied. Out of their own pockets, the residents installed air monitoring and wore air monitors. The quantities of airborne fibre measured were only slightly worse than the recommended maxmium, and certainly below that could have been measured (at that time, the late 70's early 80's) beside any major road in Perth - because vehicle brake shoes were still made of asbestos back then, and between those brakes and Super Six asbestos fencing, asbestos roofing, and asbestos wall claddings shedding fibres in a far more densely populated area, had the committee that took my home from measured those levels I think they would have been far more concerned to close Perth than Wittenoom.

Pages 13 and 14 of the document pretty much say it all - Wittenoom was "wound down" not because it was any less safe than any other place, but because once the government measured any amount of risk, they preferred to cut that limb off rather than risk being sued. This is an important point I will return to later - the government admitting that once they become aware of a risk, no matter that the risk is no worse than in unmeasured areas, they consider themselves liable if they don't eliminate that risk.

Why is that important? Well, the government now advertises extensively admitting that cigarettes are deadly poison, and if you examine the records I am sure you will find that this was already known 20 - 50 years ago. So there is another form of risk that the government was made aware of but failed completely to act to eliminate. It's important to me because you know how I said I wasn't dying of mesothelioma or asbestosis or lung cancer? Well I AM dying of emphysema caused by cigarette smoking - which I had been doing for longer than the government had been trying to bury Wittenoom. Surely if they admit to concern over derelcition of duty of care, then they owe me for allowing tobacco manufacturers to advertise and sell tobacco products to a 12 year old kid?

And my last question is: Considering how much of my personal history the government has bulldozed along with my home, and considering that there is still a chance that one day Wittenoom will rise again - what will the government do to compensate those of us that they have displaced for what will have turned out to be no defensible reason? Is there anything they can do that actually will compensate us? They've pretty much stuck themselves on a cleft stick on this issue and I'm eager to see what bastardry they will get up to next. If there's one thing my contacts with the government has taught me it's that our government is not there for the good of the people...

I would love to see justice for all the people the government stole the history and heritage of. Pity that just like the Stolen Generations and the now famour Sorry, it will probably come too late for the people they affected the most.

Getting to the inevitable leaks

If you buy a second hand motorhome or caravan or whatever, you're likely to have inherited some leaks. The biggest sin of mobile living is not checking for these, and unfortunately, most previous owners have pretty much decided they didn't want the vehicle and have probably let this maintenance slide.

I've found two full on leaks, one through a cracked/rusted roof skin and the other through a very old and perished roof vent. The roof vent will get replaced (and sealed) the same time as the hot water system gets installed. The other - has been dealt with.

Here's a picture of the offending leaky spot. Sorry there was no before picture, but the long and short of it is that this Nissan Civilian bus has several seams in the roof, covered with a bonded-on plastic capping. This leak had obviously bothered the previous owners because there was some sealeant against one edge of the capping.


When I dug out the rust, there was a 2cm long, 0.5cm wide L shaped hole right through the roof. Sorry - I'd already hit the rust with passivator fluid so it's all turned black and hard to see. But it's there... And speaking of rust passivator, it, automotive body filler, and a can of spray paint form the backbone of your seek and eliminate mission.



Don't skimp on these - they don't cost all that much (about $8 for the rust convertor/passivator and $14 for the body filler) and will be all that stands between your belongings and a deluge. (The black duct tape was just there for emergencies, as the weather was varying between bright sunshine and rain showers, and if it had set in for rain I would have temporarily put tape over the spot.)

The first step is to remove the paint, the rust, and any flakes and crap around the "wound." I use a screwdriver for the first attack, then a hand wirebrush, and then a bit or emery paper or cloth if you're finicky. As long as the surface is clean and all the rust is exposed and the majority of it scraped off, you should be okay.

Apply the rust passivator with a bit of cloth, or a brush. USE RUBBER GLOVES. This stuff is generally a nasty acid like phosphoric acid, and you don't want to get it on your skin. If you have access to the leak inside, go inside now and remove the rust in there too, and also brush some passivator on this. Give the outside time to dry out completely, that takes a few minutes. Take a piece of wet paper towel or cloth and lightly wipe over the area to remove excess.

Dispose of the passivator-contaminated items responsibly. Washing out the brushes/cloths in water is perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned, you should not have used more than a few mils anyway, and water apparently breaks it down. Just don't get any on your skin nor let it go into your garden.

Mix the body filler (aka "bog" in bodyshop parlance) as per directions. This is important - don't try and hurry the setting by adding more hardener, or you'll end up with a less than ideal density of patch. I'd chiselled away a lot of the plastic capping so I elected to very roughly follow the profile of that capping, you can apply the bog as you like, as long as it's a little proud of the surface. That allows you to sand it back if you want to achieve bodyshop standards of finish.



I pretty much left it like that. I could have spent time sanding to profile and so forth but the rain was approaching and I just wanted to get finished before I had to tape over everything and then I'd have to probably start again...

Bog takes between 10 minutes and several hours to set, I go for the rapid cure type for preference. After 30 anxious minutes watching cloud banks scud to either side of me, the bog had set dry on the outside and was no longer flexible.

The last stage is - PAINT IT. Don't leave body filler and raw metal exposed to the elements, that's just asking for a recurrence of the rust. I use an enamel type undercoat white, because this gives a good surface that I'll be able to spray tropical white over at a later stage, you could use touch-up paint matched to your vehicle if you prefer. Faster drying is better, but this is up to you. While I was at it I sprayed a short distance either side of the repair, on the theory that filling minute crazing and cracks in the plastic capping with paint would protect against further rust developing.



I just lightly keyed either side of the capping with sandpaper, maybe a centimetre either side, and sprayed on a few thin films one after the other. The undercoat enamel dried within minutes so it was quite easy to apply three coats in about 15 minutes.

And that was it - repair effected in about two hours, the rain actually came in an hour later and the leak is gone.