General Ramblings

The 42nd Great Dorset Steam Fair

If you've never heard of it, the Great Dorset Steam Fair might sound like a bit of a strange little event, but in reality it is one of the biggest events of it's type in the country (and probably in Europe).

Over 500 acres of pretty much every type of vintage machinery and equipment you can think of.   Steam Traction Engines, Road Rollers, Stationary Engines, Vintage Cars and Commercial Vehicles, Military vehicles, diggers, tractors, Heavy Horses and hand implements, historic tools, motorbikes, fairground rides......   and a lot more !

I don't want to sound like an advert for the event, but it is a great attraction, especially for families with boys who like big machines !

There's a gallery of images online for you to enjoy....   CLICK HERE for the full set, a few samples below :

The Dorset County Show

It's the time of year where half of the county descends on Dorchster for the county show.   Everything is on view including traditional country pursuits, livestock, horses, machinery old and new and a good selection of arena events.

James and I popped along for a brief visit, mostly to look at the tractors and diggers (the fun of a 3 year old boy !) and to watch the HE services Dancing Diggers perform in the main ring.

We had a fun day out, and took a few photos and a bit of (fairly ropey) video.   If you fancy a day out, it's well worth a  visit.  (Always around the end of Aug / Start of Sept).   To see the photos, click on the thumbnail below, and the video is below that.

Link to the video on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6K-5O-3e4Y

All change on the working front !

If you've followed the site for any length of time, you'll probably know that at the start of the year I changed jobs and began working for a company called Dorset Web...      Well, it turns out, that wasn't such a good move.   I'm not going to bad mouth the company, but after 7 months with them, I came to the conclusion that our respective ideas about project management and development scheduling were diametrically opposed, and it was never going to work out.

So, I took the decision to hand in my notice and look for a new job where I could be happy.    As luck would have it, I came across a vacancy for a PHP / Web developer with a marketing agency based in Poole.   I did a bit of research, and the company looked pretty good...  an impressive client list, including the likes of Sunseeker,  and after an informal meeting with the company's project manager, we got together for a formal interview.

I've now been with Marketing Matters for a few weeks, and I have to say that I think I did the right thing !   It's a breath of fresh air to have projects allocated sufficicent time...  to have not *every* job as an "urgent" priority, and, dare I say it...  to actually be appreciated for the work you do.

It's early days, but hopefully this will be a better career move than the last !

A few galleries added

I was going through some old files the other day and found another load of photos.

First, a gallery of photos from the Three Peaks Challenge in Ireland.  Run by Munster 4x4, this is a superb event and I'm going to get back there soon !

Click here to view the full gallery

Next up is a gallery of images from when team 'Mud-Club' entered the Mac 4x4 challenge in 2005.  This amazing event has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for Macmillan Cancer Care over the years, and was great fun to do.

Click here to view the full gallery

A visit to the Three Okefords

The Three Okefords Preservation Society holds its annual rally just down the road from us each year.  With it being such a lovely morning, we decided to go along and visit the show.

The event is always well organised, and we were soon through the gates and onto the site.

The first thing that hits you at events like this is the evocative smell of steam engines, and as we wandered around there were plenty of beautiful examples on display.

For a relatively small, local club, the TOPS always managed to bring together an impressive collection of bygone equipment.  The catalogue includes plenty of vintage tractors, classic cars and motorcycles and military trucks.  Also on display are plenty of stationary engines, miniature steam traction engines and even a full-sized steam locomotive !

Whilst all this may sound terribly dull to some people, we had a really nice day out.  James loved it, pointing out every single tractor we saw... including the highly modified tractor-pulling machines.

A few pictures can be found in the gallery.

Where is the year going ?

Well..  it's getting on towards the end of May already, and I'm not entirely sure what I've been doing all year !

This weekend, I'll be visiting the Three Okefords Preservation Society rally in Shillingstone and taking a trip to the Old Sodbury Sortout at Beaulieu..  it really doesn't seem like a year ago I was last there.

I think I must be getting old !

I'll post a new gallery of photos from both events at some point...    Cheers !

Well, it has been a while

It seems to be the story of this site and these projects...   a little flurry of work and then nothing for months.   Well, hopefully things are going to change a bit now.   For the past few years I've been working at Devon 4x4, which has been absolutely brilliant in many respects and has been thoroughly enjoyable...  in other respects it has been tough.   During the week, I barely saw my family which meant that at the only time I really had a chance to see them was the weekends.   Now clearly, I'm not moaning about this, but it did mean that workshop time was pretty much non-existent. Just before Christmas, I made the incredibly difficult decision to leave Devon 4x4 for a job a bit closer to home.  It was an emotional parting...   a massive part of me wanted to stay there, and Simon & Liz wanted me to stay, but we all knew that realistically I needed to leave before my personal situation became unsustainable.   I found a job as a full-time web developer for a Dorset-based company (Radikls).   The job is predominantly home based which suits me down to the ground. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I've started to do stuff again.   Darren's 90 is back on the ramps in the workshop and we've started to make a bit of progress on it again.  Over the past couple of weekends, we've put all new copper brakelines on the vehicle, installed all the flexi hoses and bled the brakes.  We've done a bit of repair work on the engine loom and the next job will be to get the fuel system completed so we can look at getting the engine running. I've got some more updates to do to the website to get my galleries back up, and then I'll start posting some proper pictures of the build again.   It's been a time of change, but sometimes that is what is needed.....

Woohoo ! We won !

Jake and I competed in the 4x4 Adventures 2 day challenge event last weekend... After the Decider, we had a bit of work to do on the 90.. mostly involving bending panels back into shape.  Overall though, the truck was in pretty good shape. Thankfully this one was quite local so whilst I drove the 90 up there, Jake dragged my caravan along for us to camp in.. I'm glad we took it.. it was very cold and very wet !

The first day was a mixture of punches and special stages. The recent weather had made the site slippery and driving in wooded areas always presents its own challenge. Jake hurt his back on the second special stage of the day which slowed him down a lot.

We took along with us one of the new Champion winch motors.. (it basically looks like a copy of the Warn XP motor).. we'd been given one to test. Wow... I can honestly say that I don't think I've ever used anything so bad ! Yes, it is cheap... but I wouldn't use one again... not even another free one ! Slow, poor pulling, huge power consumption... By the end of the second stage we decided to give up, go back to the camp and change the motor. Now.. by this point, things are looking a bit grim... the co-driver has done his back in, we've lost a good half hour messing around with the winch motor, and every time we see our fellow competitors they seem to be racing around picking up points everywhere.

We got back to it, knowing that we had a lot of work to do. Now the way the 4x4 adventures scoring system works is that punches which lots of people manage to reach are not worth as much as punches which only a few people get. The special stage scoring is calculated on reaching specific points and the overall time taken... (try to keep up !) Time for some tactics... we went out and hit as many of the special stages as we could. Jake and I are pretty good against the clock and we reckoned that we could make up some ground. When we'd done all we could, we turned to the punches. We knocked off a couple of easy ones to get some scores on the card, and then went looking for some tough ones, hoping that they would yield some high scores. This approach meant we had to work hard. The winch was much better with it's XP motor back in place and Jake's painkillers seemed to be working (he had this sort of dazed look most of the day). By the time 4.30pm came around on Saturday... we were glad to stop... having been seriously bogged down from around 3.45 to 4.20 in the bottom of the valley.. it was a mad dash to get back to the base in time. Losing 100 points for every 5 minutes late was not a good thing !

By the end of the day, we were 900 points ahead... the hard work had paid off. Then it was on to the night section. The night stage was a tulip diagram through the woods... and let's just say it was an absolute disaster. Out of all the teams who started, only 2 actually completed the course.. and only 1 did it within the 1 hour time. We'd been in the stage for over 1/2 an hour and took the decision to bail. Ironically, even doing this we got top points in our class for the evening !

Feeling a bit demoralised with the previous night's shenanigans, we headed into the second day with a mixture of feelings. We were determined not to let our lead slip away, but we were concerned that just one mistake on the day could leave us for dead. The Sunday was a short day, from 9am until 2pm. We were going to need to hustle. With a few retirements, and the vehicles spread over two event sites the stakes were getting even higher. The less vehicles make a given punch, the more points it scores... things could change very quickly on the leaderboard. With only two special stages on this day, Jake and I took the decision to get on with some punches. We went for a couple of tough ones early on, again to try and rack up some points. Heavy rain overnight had made the sites very much harder ! We found all the punches we thought we could achieve on the first site and moved on to the next.

The Sunday was making us think really hard. The way the punches had been set out meant that you had to plan the whole operation in advance... how to get the vehicle to the punch and more importantly how to get it out again. We looked at some stages and didn't even attempt them. Given a whole day to mess around, it might have been different... but against the clock, getting stuck in one spot for hours can cost an event. Once again, we tried to make as many tactical choices as we could. We needed as a minimum to maintain our lead, so it was a combination of trying to hit punches that other people hadn't reached, whilst ensuring that we got the punches that other people had reached. When the end of day results were read out, we breathed a big sigh of relief. Our main rivals had scored exactly the same points as us on the second day ! This meant that we took the win for the weekend !

Driving home afterwards we were both tired, cold, wet but happy. Some more silverware for the shelf and yet more repairs on the 90 :roll:

It's not all bad

Just recently, my faith in life, the universe and everything has taken a bit of a bashing. A run of 'not so good' things has left me feeling a bit beaten up. Well, over the course of the past couple of days a few things have made me think that no matter how messed up your life gets, if you have good people around you then it can't be all bad.

First off, my mate Darren... someone to whom I probably don't say thank you enough. He's generally a good sort and turned up at my place on Sunday with a bottle of wine to cheer me up :D

The lads at work... Now, even though I deal with sales in the office, I still work in a garage environment where there is plenty of banter ! Amongst the various 'barbeque' and 'homeless' jokes, I've been offered a couple of old caravans for free to tide me over and the spare room in 3 people's houses if I needed somewhere to stay. (Just to explain, I work in Devon but live in Dorset so to reduce the amount of commmuting I quite often stay on various caravan sites in North Devon... It's not a bad way to live actually !) For now, I've borrowed a little van from my in-laws, which will do just fine until I get something else sorted.

So... to anyone who has offered help and humour... thank you. And anyone who is reading this (seriously... you need to get some professional help) if you have a mate or co-worker or neighbour or just an aquantaince who has something bad going on in their life, no matter how silly or insignificant it may seem, your help and cameradery can and does help.

Be excellent to each other ! Party on dudes !

Beyond economic repair....

Well... I don't think that even I am going to be able to bring this one back !

My caravan went up in smoke on the way back up the M5 last week. It all started without much warning, I had a woman frantically waving at me as she overtook, pulled over to see what the fuss was about and 'woof' ! Up it went.

Managed to get the Discovery unhitched and out of the way, and had no choice but to sit and watch as the van and all its contents went up in smoke. The whole van was pretty much destroyed by the time the fire service arrived (only 8 minutes after the call), all they could do was put out the remains.

I have to say, the guys from Highways were great and kept everything organised as were the police, fire and paramedics. Nice to know that they are all there when we need them.... let's not forget to support them when they need us ! The remains of the van, pretty much just a chassis and a pile of ash were scraped up off the road and taken away.

Now... here is the painful part. It wasn't a hugely expensive caravan, only worth around £2500.00, so we didn't have a specific insurance policy for it. It is covered by our home insurance when at home or on a site, and by our car insurance when on the road.... or so we thought ! A quick call to Budget (the company I will no longer be using for insurance ever again) revealed that what they told us when we took out the policy wasn't in fact correct. (The moral here is not to believe what they tell you and make sure you read ALL of the small print of your policy when it arrives). Our caravan is covered when being towed... but only 3rd party ! This wasn't what we had been led to understand.. we have a full comp policy with all the bells and whistles and it doesn't even cover fire... more to the point, when towing they only cover the car third party as well... so if I had left it hooked up, I'd have lost even more.

So.. I now find myself without a van, having lost around £800 worth of contents, with no insurance payout. :( What's worse, is that as a result of this, I even had to pay for the recovery (I'm with Green Flag... for now) as it was a "specialist" job involving a winch truck.. so that's another £350.00 down the drain.

Not a happy bunny at all 

To see the whole horror... have a look at my caravan going up in flames

As if there isn't enough to do....

Well.. we like a challenge, and we certainly don't like to be bored ! As well as the numerous vehicle projects going on at home, we've started one at work as well. This one started life as a rusty old 90 county station wagon, and is destined to become a full-on challenge vehicle. As you can see from the picture, it's not in a good way and there is loads to do to make it happen.. Just to add to the pressure, Jake (one of my workmates) and I have entered a challenge event in the South West on the 26th/27th September... not much time then ! I can see a good few late nights coming on, and I'll almost certainly be rambling on here about the trials and tribulations of the build. Hopefully the end result will be worth it though. We'll see !

Link to vehicle build

6x6 Land Rover - soooo nice

We get some interesting vehicles in at work... some more interesting than others. Just recently this little gem rolled in for a little bit of work.

It's a 6x6 Land Rover, based on a Series 3 Stage 1 V8... and built by Safir engineering. Now, 6x6s are rare at the best of times, but Safir vehicles are even rarer ! It's a really nicely put together vehicle, and it probably cost a load of money to build. (Safir are known for building Formula race cars) The owner was adamant that he wouldn't sell it despite my best efforts :'( A few more pictures can be found in My Mud-Club gallery