Digger Broke…

We thankfully managed to get everything we completed yesterday jacked and squeezed up, before the digger broke down again, somewhat spectacularly.

One of the brand new hydraulic hoses replaced when the rotating head was off only a few months ago, let go, a hole developed without any good reason – not in a location of rubbing, no sharp edges, not too near a fitting, nothing. Very frustrating and although we can probably get the hose replaced at no cost, it now requires the head to be dropped off again to gain access, it also puts a fair shadow over the quality of the other hoses replaced at the same time. That’ll now take up most of late next week.

It wasn’t a wasted day, however it has probably brought to a head that this week was the last major resleepeeing for this year, doing this work in the warm weather is just asking for trouble, so it’ll likely be next year before we resume.

We still managed to get the last of the sleepers bundled and made an excellent start on tidying up the site.

The big digger came to the rescue again, with it now cured of it’s small fuel issue – which after much investigation ended up being a small piece of plastic wrapping inside the lift/priming pump! Which was quite the job to access, deep in the guts of the engine bay, however we can certainly say we’re now intimately acquainted with both of these machines!! The general maintenance is the easy stuff, it’s all this left field stuff that just seems to be taking so much time and effort lately.

We’ll still be working on Tuesday next week. Despite it being a public holiday in some places. The task will almost certainly be related to grass mowing, last of the pre-fireseason tidy up etc… meeting at Maldon at 8am.