A near miss and some good stuff

NZ has had more than its share of bad weather in 2023 and the peninsula we live on has been directly in the firing line for most of the storms.  Although there has been an improvement in recent years, power cuts often occur due to trees falling on the power lines.  Outages these days typically last from as little as a few minutes to half a day or more.  We have a gas BBQ on our covered deck which is handy for cooking when we lose power and have various gas and battery lights so that we can see ok at night.

One backup power source we've used for a few years is a 12v sealed lead acid battery which is about half the size of a motorcycle battery.  We keep it in the basement garage, connected to a small solar panel fixed to the outside wall so that it's always fully charged.

Solar panel supplying power to the 12v battery

The battery is light and easily transportable with many uses.  Typically, we use it with an inflator for our vehicle and cycle tyres (don't trust gas station pump accuracy!), fish finder power on the boat, attaching to an LED panel as a handy portable light source and charging phones via an USB connection when the power is out.  Sure enough, we lost power during the last storm which coincided with me being low on mobile phone charge.

12v 7AHr replacement battery and phone charging lead with better connectors

A quick trip to the garage with a torch and connected the phone to the battery via the lead.  At that time, the battery connection was via crocodile clips.  A few minutes later, there was an odd smell and I went to investigate.  The battery was hissing and smoking, with the casing horribly buckled.  One of the crocodile clips had shifted, causing a dead short across the terminals.  A lucky break to have smelled something amiss and the outcome could have been a lot worse.

It was a salutary lesson to make more reliable connections and after buying a replacement battery, all the connections were changed to shielded bayonet types with heat shrink reinforcement.

On a more positive note, I recently mentioned the design and commissioning of more stained glass windows for our house at the end of THIS POST .  The subject was a native Tui drinking nectar from a plant in our garden that I'd taken a photo of.  We'd engaged a local craftsman to make a window in stained glass from the photo and last week, it was ready for collection.

The glass ready to install in a bedroom

It's not designed to replace the clear glass already in the window, but to nestle up to it, leaving a small air gap.  I'd made a template for the craftsman to build it on but it was still an anxious time in case it was a fraction too large.  Needn't have worried though - a perfect fit.  The only worry was teetering on a stepladder and holding it in situ whilst fixing it permanently in place.  It looks absolutely fantastic, both in sunlight and moonlight.  It's wonderful that there are still people around who practice the traditional crafts.

Safely installed with no glitches

The week concluded with a pleasant Sunday run with members of the Whitianga classic car club to a beachside restaurant for lunch.  A great bunch of people with a wide age range of cars.

A good spread of ages

Parked up for lunch

There are some clever people....

Motorcycling is a passion but as I get older, I'm becoming increasingly interested in what might be termed as "traditional skills" to make things of beauty.  It would therefore be poor form not to share and acknowledge the amazing talents of our retired friends Brian and Mary who live a few doors away from us.  Both are true "Renaissance people", supremely talented at whatever they choose to interest themselves with.  Brian is an ex-motorcyclist and breathtakingly good wood carver. Both of them are similarly outstanding with stained glass work.  Their 30 ft home-built Bristol Channel Cutter keelboat is as much a work of art as it is a beautiful yacht.

Getting to the point, our main living area has a high, sloping ceiling with two tapered windows up high on one wall.  They're a pain to clean as it involves getting the steps out of the shed downstairs and also, direct sunlight through them in the mornings is dazzling .  We were grizzling about this one day and Brian reckoned that stained glass would look great.  Furthermore, he said that he wanted a winter project and that if we'd like to come up with a design, he'd love to make a pair for us.  An incredibly generous gesture.

Top windows are a pain to clean!

Give me a technical problem to solve and I'm your man but when it comes to arty stuff, I have zero talent; sub-zero in fact.  Fortunately, Jennie has a great eye for design and colour so we both sat down at the computer with Photoshop to ponder some design basics.  We wanted a design to represent the Coromandel Peninsula where we live in NZ and Jennie's idea of a nautical theme was great.  First attempt was an impressionist one of sails and spinnakers which was pretty cool as a rectangle, but looked awful once we tried to fit the idea to the true shape of the windows.

First try and doomed to failure

Several other iterations were tried over a month or so and went nowhere (apart from mutual droopy bottom lips and silences when we couldn't agree) so eventually, we sat down with Brian and Mary to get their input.  Here's where artistic talent really shows and Mary quickly whipped up a couple of sketches with sailing boats, a rowing boat and some NZ native Clematis flowers. 

Mary's sketches

Now we were getting somewhere!  Over a bottle or three of wine, the Clematis flowers got dropped, substituting them with NZ flax in flower, a native Nikau Palm tree, and islands like those just offshore from us - we had a winner!  Delighted to say that I was at last able to make a minor contribution by scanning and scaling Mary's final sketches on the computer to get  them to full scale and to be eventually used as glass cutting patterns.

Next step was a trip to Hamilton to choose some stained glass and lead from a specialist supplier.  What a mission but great fun at the same time - every texture and colour imaginable but after a few hours, we had something which looked like it would work.  Brian couldn't wait to get started and talking with him about the method of approach, it was clear that stained glass work is incredibly complex to get it right.  What a buzz it is to learn about cool new stuff!!!

Watching the windows taking shape was an utter privilege.  Actually, watching a master craftsman at work was what was really a privilege.  Here's some shots of Brian at work on them. Sadly, the photos simply don't show the detail, colours and textures adequately but they're still pretty good. Click photos to enlarge.

Template cutting for flax flowers

Building up the small window

Brian checking soldering on rear of large window

Brilliant use of texture and colour

Amazing level of detail

After sealing all the joints and blackening the lead strip, it was time to install them.  The Health and Safety Nazis wouldn't have approved of Brian and me teetering at the top of step ladders but that gave a bit of extra pleasure!

For God's sake, don't drop them!

A perfect fit and here's the finished windows........

Texture, colour, local theme - wow!!

The windows have been in place for just a few days and we can't take our eyes off them.  As the light changes with the passage of the sun, so do the ripples in the water and sky effects.  Moonlight will be interesting too. Always something new to be discovered.

In these days of instant gratification and mass production, people with traditional skills are in decline.  May there be people in each generation who are able to give us all joy from producing something which has a bit of their soul in it.