View from our driveway

Towards our house (the top of the roof is just about visible)

Right. Everybody knows Lake Biel the 1^st… It's the big, arrowhead shaped one that points towards the city. A few people even know Lake Biel the 2^nd, also known as Manorsee. Even fewer, namely our neighbours and the motorists who drove through our street today, know about the 3^rd. The name of our street was hardly ever as fitting as today: Seevorstadt! The pictures both show the road coming from our house from different sides, so I was glad I had come home just as the hailstorm started.

PIzza

Lunch is near… therefore we shall take a quick detour into how to calculate volumes:

A given cylinder of radius z and height a, as shown in the photo, has a volume of

pi z z a

Eh… yes, I am a bit hungry as a matter of fact.

But still funny as f…

Just back from a coffee-break… The coffee-machine-technician has left behind the repair-log for our essence-of-life-dispenser. Had a quick browse through it and found an entry which made me laugh out loud:

Takes money, doesn't give out coffee. No mistake found.

Depends whether you're on the money-taking or the coffee-drinking side of the coin-slot, I suppose…

Thaelmann Rebuff!

Right — after a recent attempt at comment-spamming (as if I had any comment worth spamming…), I decided to put a captcha on the site. It's not just any captcha though, by using it commenters actually help digitise books. More about the principle and the technology behind it at their website.

Ignition Cap before

Ignition Cap after

Tappet Cover before

Tappet Cover after

Toolbox Sticker before

Toolbox Badge after

I made the mistake of entering “Royal Enfield” into eBay at some stage… here's some of the results:

First, we have the ignition cap. Original (on the left) looks like chrome, but it's actually only chromed plastic. What you can't see on this picture is that some of the chrome at the bottom of the cap had started to flake off as there is usually some oil in and around the ignition. The new cap (right) is polished aluminium with a dark red enamelled logo. (And yes, that is rust on the cylinder fins. Need to get a heatproof rust-covering paint…)

Next we have the tappet cover on the other side of the bike. Well… that wasn't strictly plastic (this part gets quite hot), but since the guy on eBay had a nice version matching my new ignition cap… Hey, works for me.

And finally… destickerisation of the toolbox. Well, I found out the stickers are almost impossible to remove without taking the paint off as well, so I just painted over them. Drilling holes was a bitch, as the metal used for the toolboxes was probably designed to withstand a hand-grenade going off inside and as the brass badges are… well… not exactly Swiss-standard workmanship. A lot of filing and cursing ensued, but the result is worth it, methinks.