Well, not exactly, but you get the picture. If you read my last blog I was talking about the right tool for the job. How to or actually rather that you should know if, in your experience, you can identify the right tool and if not, be a bit tenacious and ask someone else and in some cases get them to both select and use the tool for you. Hey presto, less stress, job gets done properly.....result!
In that blog I mentioned make do and adapt, well guess what, only a week after writing that one, I've found myself actually needing to make a tool to do a particular job and having considered it more carefully, I am now thinking back to a number of other times when we have actually made or adapted something to do a job because the existing tool didn't quite fit.
With the varied mechanical projects (challenges) we encounter and of course our interests in all sorts of automotive and vehicle activities, including cars, boats, bikes and trailers etc. and the varying aspects of restoration, maintenance and servicing of these, we often find we need to move something (i.e. tow) which isn't running and/or perhaps can't be driven as such, but doesn't need to be loaded on to a trailer.
As you are all probably aware, the weather this year and particularly more recently has been pretty wet, or should I say very wet. This has led to a number of occasions when we have needed to pull something which has become bogged down at our Sanstec workshop, as unfortunately some areas of the site that normally have a fairly firm surface, aren't any more.
We have a number of options to do 'towing' and recovery and a number of capable vehicles to do the pulling, so it was rather annoying to discover that a car which is part of a restoration project (more details coming soon) and which needed moving, couldn't be easily connected to any of the existing towing gear because of the type of eyelet that was fitted and hidden in the front bumper.
With a solid tow bar required to move the car back and forth and no way of directly connecting our existing one (that we originally made for something else) to the tow eye, we resolved to make a bespoke one made to measure. To this end we have therefore designed a couple of parts that will adapt our existing solid tow-bar to fit this particular car. The CAD files are currently being produced and so we are nearly ready for production in the workshop.
