Rick's b.log - entry 2025/03/22

Holiday!

What I won't be doing is busting my balls, so that's okay with me. ☺

This article is a bit scattered (even by my standards!) as I started writing it on Monday and felt too tired as night fell to finish it up for putting on my blog, so every day I thought "tomorrow I'll add a bit more then upload it". A number of tomorrows later, here it is.

Mowing

After the first five hours (give or take, probably more like four) of use, I ran the engine of my new ride-on mower for a few minutes to warm it up a bit, and then drained off the oil into a 1.5 litre water bottle. It looked like a good 1.2 litres, potentially a little more, but it's not as if I measured.

I then took the two litre bottle of oil that I had purchased and put what remained into my engine. Let's just guess it was something in the region of 750ml. And, just for the hell of it, I checked the dipstick.

Oil level as shown by the dipstick.

It's hard to see the oil level when it is clear yellow oil, but this is pretty much right on the upper level in this picture, and the dipstick hadn't been put back in all the way. So it's just a little over full.
Now, imagine what it must have been like with nearly twice as much oil sloshing around inside. Jeez.

I can't call the guy incompetent however, as online it does say (on other third party sites) that this engine takes 1.2 litres, and there was no engine manual supplied with the mower. As I mentioned, he opened up another one and... the handbook referred you to the engine manual that also wasn't supplied.
Looking up the Stiga ST530 tells you more about a mountain bike than this engine.

Now, being somewhat perturbed by this, I started the engine and let it run for thirty seconds, let the oil slosh around the valves and whatnot, that'll bring the level down.
Well, it was a good theory, but it did next to nothing to the level.

So I decided, I'd mow that strip where the picnic table usually is, and if anything seems 'off', I'll stop and check what's up.

The strip where the picnic table is.

Nothing seemed off. So to use up the rest of the petrol, I thought I'd go and give a cut to the Picnic (east) Lawn. And that reminds me, I will need to warm up the chainsaw to deal with that big-arse bit of willow that fell in the storm.

The Picnic Lawn.

I then cut through the back, taking great care to avoid the daffodils.

Sneaking in between the daffodils.

The Potager didn't need a cut, more like a general tidy-up, so I carried on through. I didn't cut through the little gateway because it meant I'd need to slaughter some inconveniently placed primroses and I wasn't okay with that.

Where the primroses put themselves.

Through the back, I cut the Southern Spot. That one has deeper ground, it's not right on rock, so the grass tends to grow quite quickly.

The Southern Spot.

I then went and cut next to Anna.

The grass by Anna.

And finally, I cut the Western Wilderness...

The strip where the picnic table is.

...taking in the Northern Passage.

The Northern Passage.

And at the end, I still had petrol in the tank! That was the horrifically expensive twenty-odd-for-five-litres petrol, but I just got two complete cuts from it. I cannot say if the mower will behave in any especially different manner just using regular from-the-pump petrol. I wouldn't imagine so, but...
...let's put it like this - Marte would have easily burned through four to five litres doing one cut. My ten litre fuel tank gave me two cuts with a little left over for the walky-mower or strimmer or whatnot, none of which is high consumption.
I've had Marte for five years (yikes, really? yes, it was given to me just before the first lockdown). If we assume petrol cost about €16 for ten litres, and I did about 12 cuts in a year (figured pulled out of my arse that 'sounds about right') and it took about five litres per cut... that's nearly €500 in petrol, or a hundred a year! If my new mower behaves the same on regular petrol as with the super-special-stuff, I can expect the average consumption to be about half what Marte used to guzzle. That... is not an insignificant saving, especially as the price of petrol is only going to go up, particularly as France seems quite gung-ho on pushing people to electric vehicles even though it doesn't make an awful lot of sense in the rural areas (plus so many charging stations are incapable of taking a bank card, you need an app and an account and really eff that ess).

The handbook, maybe taking health and safety a little bit too far into the extreme, says practically nothing about maintenance other than don't let the cuttings means clog up with bits of grass and how to change the light bulbs. Yes, it calls the blades/deck "the cutting means". I'm just guessing it's a literal translation from another language.

How to align/balance the cutting deck? Go to your dealer or service centre.
Where and what to grease/check (every 25 hours)? Go to your dealer or service centre.
What sort of petrol and how often to change the oil? Read the instructions that weren't supplied.
How to change/check the spark plug? Go to your dealer or service centre.

FFS. I drive a little toy car, I don't have a trailer. I'm not sure my dealer is qualified to service the thing (and if they did, I'd have to throw away half the oil I paid for...); and I have no idea where I'd find a service centre that's even heard of these things. Probably Paris.

So on Thursday I started undoing screws and bolts.

Here's the engine. The spark plug, a tiny little thing off to the side, has a massive metal cover, I'd imagine to prevent sparks that could in a worst case scenario ignite dry grass powder? The cover pulls off quite easily with the hood removed, as shown in this photo.

The mower's little engine.

Note, also, how much plastic there is on this engine. Plastic fins, plastic carb, and the part where the fuel inlet connects to the cylinder head? More plastic. This is because the engine gets hot because, well, combustion, but it doesn't get that hot. I used to feel the waves of heat blasting out of Marte's Tecumseh engine. Well, I guess it had to do something with all the fuel it was drinking, so contributing to global warming was the something that it picked.

Here is looking down from the midway point. There's an access panel 'between my legs'. The upper belt goes to the gearbox, the wheel on the upper-right is the clutch. When the clutch is engaged (the brake pedal pushed slightly), the wheel loosens, the belt goes slack and stops moving.
The thing with the electric wire going into it is the magnetic clutch for the cutting deck. When not energised, the clutch plate falls onto a brake to immobilise the deck. When energised, a powerful electromagnet pulls the clutch plate to catch the rotation of the crankshaft, which turns the bottom pulley, turning the blades.
The two stubby bolts are there to keep the drive belt in place when it is slack, so it doesn't fall off the pulley. There is no such arrangement for the blade belt as the clutch is that big sealed unit, so the blade belt is always under tension.

Looking at the electromagnetic clutch.

This is looking from further back, over the gearbox. I mostly took this so I could see how the belt goes, in case it breaks and I need to fit a new one. It looks "doable but a pain in the arse".

How the belts run.

Here's the gearbox. Dinky little thing, given that it is five speeds plus reverse. It can be a bit iffy about changing gears. I don't know if it's because it is new or if it's just the design, but sometimes the gear lever refuses to budge so I have to move slightly and then it will let me change gears. Probably something to do with alignment inside.

The gearbox.

Here are the throttle settings. A photo purely for reference, I don't have a tacho nor the engine handbook so I'm leaving well alone. This is in the maximum position, and the throttle valve is controlled by the lower metal rod, the one connected to the mechanism. Pushing the accelerator further won't open the valve any more, it's already fully open so the screw on the right stops it going over. It will, however, move the upper rod which controls a second valve, which is the choke. The engine also has some feedback that controls this for self-regulation.

The throttle.

Now one of Marte's big problems was the wheels. Or, rather, that it was metal rubbing on metal and given that one of the metals was quite soft (aluminium I think), the steel of the axle and gunk getting in there was quite abrasive, to the point where... well, you've seen photos of the wonky front wheels.

I would not imagine this mower is any different. This is one of the back wheels with the dust cap removed. It's the same setup for the front, except it's much harder to get the cap off.

The outer side of a rear wheel.

This is the reverse side of the front wheel axle. Unfortunately there is no nipple for inserting grease, and there doesn't seem to be anything much there to stop dust getting in, so I think once a year I'm going to have to undo the front wheels (at least), remove them, clean the axle and the wheel insides, and then give it all a good greasing before reassembly.

The inner side of a front wheel.

Equinox

This might be why Africa and Australia have large unforgiving deserts and it burns in the Aussie summer, while in the British summer the rain is marginally warmer. ☺

This is not the sun and this is not daytime.

What the hell, Mars?

This is what I paid last month, on the 6^th of February.

The price in eary February.

Almost exactly a month later, on the 7^th of March, the price had risen two centimes.

The price in early March.

And this, this is what the exact same thing cost just eleven days later on the 18^th of March, sixty six centimes more (about the price of two Mars).

This is taking the piddly.

Weren't French supermarkets supposed to be putting up labels when prices change in such a manner, in order to shame the company that's trying to pull a 19% increase in price in a month?

Yeah, yeah, I know chocolate is going to hell in a handbasket and all... but here's the thing. Cocoa futures peaked at around $12,600/tonne at the end of 2024, but given the improved weather prospects in West Africa leading to expectation of increased surplus, they're currently trading at around $7,800/tonne with a continuing downward trend, that's the lowest price in four months. Thus, it seems curious to be putting the product price up so sharply when the raw material price is coming down. And, yes, I am aware that there's milk and sugar (lots of sugar!) and electricity and wages and all. That'll be amortised into the unit price, which probably doesn't count for that much in the context of hundreds of thousands produced. Besides, "woe is chocolate!" is the excuse everybody keeps dragging out to justify such rises. Like "woe is wheat! (because Ukraine)" for pasta and bread prices going up, and "woe is everything!" in the UK because, well, one still can't mention that B-word yet, never mind point at it as a pretty good reason for self-inflicted harm. Instead, let's just jack up the retirement age, amirite?

The chuggers were fake!

The charity muggers were just thieves.

It says a lot about French law enforcement that the supermarket has put up signs saying "Don't be fooled". If some girls, who quite likely aren't deaf, are walking around trying to get money out of people supposedly for a charity, but it's all a big scam, then why aren't they being arrested for fraud? Why, in fact, isn't the shop kicking them off their property?
Like what happened with drain guy, it seems far far too often scammers can walk away without concern and everybody is like "oh well, sucks to be you".

And, of course, this will be why decent kind people will be telling legitimate charity people to get stuffed.

Ghost notes

Ghost notes.

Above is the percussion channel (#10) of the LameDemo example, with the notes from the piano channel (#1) ghosted into the screen as the grey boxes. Ghosting won't show specifics of the notes - the bar along the bottom are all individual semiquavers not one long note, but it will show where the notes are to allow for things to be lined up correctly. That is to say, it's a method of displaying one channel as you're editing another. Obviously the keypress is ^G. ☺

This uses the word in the editor array that was previously reserved for the previous channel but was never used. The word can be 0 to 15 (for channels 1 to 16), or -1 to mean "no ghost". Because the default state is 0 which is a valid channel, this is automatically set to -1 when the file is loaded.
I could have offset to have it be 1-16 with zero meaning off, but that was a lot of unnecessary maths to add, given the array starts from zero, and it's not really something one could expect to be preserved across sessions, so turning it off on load won't be an issue.

My first ever food delivery is imminent

Some of what I ordered.
(collage created using product photos from picard.fr)

So I decided, let's try it. Sure, sixty five is a lot but if I no longer have any need to go into Big Town then I won't be spending money in the Leclerc, nor the charging, nor the logistics of actually going. Since it was my first delivery order, the transportation was offered.

I'll let you know what turns up on Tuesday.

I hadn't meant to wreck my shoulders today

A bit of grass.

And after, a patch of land that's "about five by five with a corner cut off" that ought to get sun for longer in the day than the previous veg patch. If it doesn't work, I'll just turn the ground, flatten it, let the grass return. But I think part of the problem with the Potato Patch was how shady it was.

Turned ground.

While this was ball-busting (hang on, didn't I say at the top of this page that I wouldn't?!?), the noisy old four-stroke did the heavy lifting, I just had to hold on and stop it from wandering off. The motor is quirky and seems to only want to run flat out. Too much choke, it stalls. Not enough cowbell, it stalls. Run full tilt? Happy. But, of course, this means the blades are whizzing away at max speed as well. I was using the rotovator I got for €80 two years ago.

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It's not that I don't want to hear from my British friends, it's because your country makes stupid laws.
 
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C Ferrls, 23rd March 2025, 09:21

Excitement on the RO open site -/    Seems Log In auto doesn't seem to work :-(    No 'Aldershot' unless logged in Hmm

C Ferrls, 23rd March 2025, 10:10

Hmm - search in DuckDuckgo 'riscosopen Aldershot' gives results :-/

Rick, 23rd March 2025, 10:21

Yes, because it is directly linking to the forum (by number).  You can also get it to show up in Recent Posts if you include the magic value (see Andrew's post).    However, it looks like it's been 11 days now since anything happened in Aldershot, so...

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