A very instructive purchase
An aerial view of our village showing the large number of trees in our garden and the hedges surrounding our land
It was evident that due to the number of trees that we had inherited a portable cutting device would be a very useful acquisition. We had two log burners that will need wood cutting to a sensible size, hedges that required frequent maintenance and I had a teenage desire to own a chainsaw.
An electric chainsaw would not be practical. The distances from a power socket to each corner of the property were too great. Although more expensive a petrol powered chainsaw seemed our best option.
Following one of my many visits to the local recycling centre I visited a nearby Aldi store. They held weekly sales of selected household goods stacked between the rows of foreign sourced food. This particular week various items of garden equipment were on sale, including chainsaws and hedge trimmers. I ignored the principle that you get what you pay for and purchased the inexpensive petrol chainsaw and a petrol hedge trimmer.
It was not long before I regretted my purchases. After many frustrating hours in the workshop I failed to start either engine. I read several online forums and discovered this to be a regular issue with both these products. I decided to cut my loses, with a lesson learned, returning both items and collected a cash refund.
Another purchase I made this week proved to be more successful. We knew that a trailer would become a necessity as we developed our little smallholding. Before we contemplated this important purchase we required a tow-bar to be fitted to our car.
Heeding advice from Katie’s father we ordered the appropriate tow-bar kit from Towsure, the market leader in this arena. He also offered his services, in his capacity as an off-road enthusiast, to fit the tow-bar. He had been refurbishing a classic jeep for several years and had all the equipment needed to dismantle and rebuild the rear of our car.
I drove to his house in our old home town and assisted him as we fitted the tow-bar to the chassis. After an hour we had the car on a ramp and the tow-bar fixed in place. The electric connection proved to be a more difficult task to complete. We had to pass a wire from the rear of the car to the battery in the engine compartment. Several hours later the work was complete; we had threaded the wire through the upholstrery to the relay in the boot. The wiring was rudimentary, but the lighting test was successful, ignoring the warning light that now illuminated the dashboard. We saw no obvious reason for this warning and there were no malfunctioning bulbs. Therefore we packed up our tools and I headed home triumphant.