BEARINGS AND BARE BUMS

Well I'm finally making some real progress with getting the Jag 
fixed up myself. The parts from the UK arrived right after I got 
back from my holiday, and after much frustration with rain flooding 
the area where I work on it, I made a start last week. In return 
for sacrificing what should have been a work day, for once I could 
do the work in nice calm weather where I was neither wet nor 
constantly assulted with dusty wind blowing through the broken 
walls of the shed. Why such conditions never present themselves on 
weekends, I have no idea. It was fairly warm, so being crazy I did 
most of the work naked, compiling as I went an obscene gallery of 
photographs documenting each step for reference during reassembly.

For replacing a bearing from the diff I needed a hydraulic press, 
which necessitated a trip to my mother's house in order to use the 
one that my step father has burried deep in a shed. Unfortunately 
'burried' was even more accurate of a description than I imagined, 
and about half the job was digging out enough of his never-used 
cheap ALDI-special tools so that the press was even within reach, 
albeit still while being wedged between it and an engine block from 
a series 1 Land Rover. As usual he also insisted on being in 
absolute control of everything that went on, even though it turned 
out that he'd hurt his leg and had a lot of trouble squeezing 
around the shed, so everything went very slowly and it's highly 
debatable whether I'd have been better off just buying my own damn 
press. But the result is good and the new bearing turns much more 
quietly than the old one where the metal of the bearing surfaces 
showed significant roughness and undoubtably must have been the 
cause of at least some noise from the rear of the car.

Now I've just got to hope that I can remember enough of how things 
went together by the time I can get to fitting that part back into 
the diff. Before I set about replacing the rear shock absorbers 
using my brand new suspension spring compressor tool, which is 
hopefully good enough quality that it won't break under the force 
of a strong old Jag coil spring and fire a projectile of suspension 
components into the shed wall. Anyway it's all going well so far, 
I've barely even hurt myself! Undoing some of the nuts in the 
obligatory awkward positions tested the limits of my muscles, I 
really don't know how anyone removes the driveshaft coupling 
_without_ first taking the rear shock absorber out. But so long as 
it acheives something in the end it should be great.

I made a rare trip into a city to scout out coil spring compressor 
tools, and continuing my fresh thirst for new experiences awoken 
with my train holiday, I decided to detour on the way home and 
finally check out a nudist beach. Obviously I'm enthusiastic about 
doing things in the nude, but I won't deny that part of my deprived 
self's motivation was also to see some naked women, plus it saves 
shopping for swimwear since I don't think I own any. Driving my 
father's ute, which is 4x4, also gave me confidence to tackle the 
road that runs up to it. Except it turns out that's closed except 
in summer, so it was still a ~2Km walk, which made me a bit later 
getting home than planned for. Apparantly there's an alterate 
walking route from the other direction, but I tried to approach 
from there once before and just ended up wandering lost in deserted 
sand dunes. But this time I got there, and had a good time. It's 
the first time I've actually been in the ocean for who knows how 
long, although the waves are too rough there for swimming out 
properly without getting knocked around a lot so I just paddled 
around and got reminded of the hazards of submerged rocks. There 
were more men there, but still a few women to glance at briefly 
while trying not to be creepy and keeping my penis in an 
unoffensive orientation.

When the Jag's back in action I'll have a go at visiting another 
nudist beach that doesn't require dealing with so much busy traffic 
to get to. There's probably even more opportunity for getting lost 
trying to find that one though.

Finally, on a completely unrelated topic, I stopped in at a 
familiar antiques store in a small town on the way to my mother's 
and came out with three boxes full of old VHS tapes, along with a 
couple of luckily-found tools that came in quite handy for the 
subsequent bearing replacement job. Just when I think the used VHS 
supply is drying up, I find more. It'll be interesting to see when 
I really do stop finding significant numbers of them entirely, 
which is partly why I'm making note of this here. Or maybe, like 
vinyl records, there'll always be some old ones floating about in 
these places that nobody seems to want. Also, construction of yet 
another VHS/DVD shelf will clearly be required soon.

 - The Free Thinker