News and stuff from Botswana
Every once in a while there comes a Saturday when I am not traveling or doing something ridiculously arduous, this weekend was one of them. Since it was school holidays I had a house full of offspring we had to find something to do, and one of them had heard about The Food Farm, an event organised by Flowetry Media House.
Little bit of DIY on the ‘roach, the squealing air-conditioning and alternator belt has been annoying me for a while so I decided to see about tensioning it.
A brief perusal with my search engine du jour wasn’t much help: it seems that air-conditioning is a bit unusual on the Nissan March/Micra K11 (and with a <1 litre engine that’s hardly surprising), the most common fitment seems to be alternator only, with the belt tension handled by an automatically adjusting idler-tensioner.
Luckily I’d seen where the guy that services the car in my absence adjusted it last time, just not which way it needed to be turned (anti-clockwise to increase tension, clockwise to decrease).
You will need a ratchet handle, long extension, universal joint, short extension and 14mm socket. I also recommend slim-fit but tough work gloves: to steady the universal joint you have to wedge your hand in a confined space with some sharp edges nearby.
The socket can just be seen lower-centre of the right hand picture on the head of the tensioner bolt, with the thread continuing diagonally down to the right.
Take care while doing this because the ratchet handle is close to parts of the braking system and it wouldn’t be good to bugger up that pipework.
Good luck.
Last week was hectic, with work meetings in Tsabong and Sowa (thankfully the company stumped up for me to fly to and from Francistown, so not entirely awful).
Now I’m back in Tsabong to do some site measurements with our South African stainless steel fabrication specialist, and true to form I only escaped Gaborone at 1400. It’s about 550km, of which the first 100km is a traffic filled road to/from hell and the remainder punctuated by livestock and potholes. The last 150km were done after sunset. Continue reading “When The Stars Come Out”
Some time ago I commented in a post about trying to post more as a way of getting variety in my life. A noble intention, but life has kept getting in the way, and I found I was tending towards angry, ranty posts due to the frustrations all around.
Suffice to say things came to a head in the last couple of months and I actually booked myself a counseling session with a psychologist.
