today was spent pretty much as yesterday was; mazza carried on scrubbing away at the gluey remains of the vinyl lettering, with hammerite thinners and sandpaper - while i decimated the alien lifeforms on the side of the roof that i had spared the day before.

so not much to report really. however herman now has a roof which is spic-n-span enough to start painting on.

white enough to paint black now


about an hour after i finished scrubbing down the roof and came upstairs to put the dinner on, it started raining with the odd lonely snowflake in amongst the wet stuff

PEDANT: it’s called ‘sleet’ you idiot

ME: no it’s not. i know what feckin’ sleet looks like. this was rain with the odd snowflake in the middle of it OK?

PEDANT: oh. OK then. sorry for interrupting. please feel free to continue with your rivetting meteorological discourse

ME: dinnae worry. i will

where was i?… oh yeah. it started ‘not-sleeting’ about half an hour ago and the weather forecast has promised snow on its way. so i’m torn between hoping it stays fine, so i can get started on painting herman’s roof tomorrow and hoping it snows like mad - coz i’m such a big kid at heart, i still get really excited when it starts snowing.

this morning my super optrel solarmatic welding helmet arrived. so, assuming it works properly [not tried it in anger yet] i’m almost fully tooled up for many a forthcoming bout with herman.

abovementioned helmet arrived with postie at half bloody seven on a saturday morning! methinks the post office are running some extra shifts to cope with the backlog caused by the snows of last week - coz my drill came at about six o’clock last night.

anyway - today, after a bit of random tinkering and firing herman up and letting the engine run for about an hour to get the juices flowing. i embarked on the cleaning task i’ve been dreading; namely giving the roof a ‘brisk rubdown with a wet flannel’. i thought it looked pretty grotty seen from the distance of my upstairs baclony, but when i climbed up there [via a wheelie bin, for lack of a ladder] i found a landscape like that of an alien planet. the whole roof was covered in green lichen and dotted with mysterious round black ‘beings’ which, given a few more millenia might have evolved into sentient lifeforms.



unfortunately for this nascent civilisation, their god [in this case me] is a jealous god and lo he did smite them and with hot water, sugar soap and a pan scrubber from the kitchen, did cast them asunder. and there was much wailing and gnashing of whatever passes for teeth if you’re a lump of lichen.

and two hundred and forty minutes did the lord scrub. and three hours did he scrape and the lichen and the mysterious round black lifeforms were cast into the outer darkness and light did shine upon the face of the half of the roof that the lord could reach. and the lord looked upon that half of the roof and saw that it was good. and the lord sayeth unto himself “fuckin hell! - that was a ball-ache of a job. i’m off indoors for a spam, cheese & pepper sauce butty - and a nice bottle of ruddle’s county!”.

AMEN



meanwhile back on earth a tiny smurf was spotted, scrubbing valiently away at the gluey remnants of that fecking lettering on herman’s side - which is still not completely gone!

today, when i got home from my half day at work the sun was shining and the ground was dry [although still bitterly cold after the snows of the last couple of days] so me and marie went oot to start the tedious task of removing all the vinyl lettering from the side of herman.

the task was indeed onerous. in fact far more onerous than we’d expected. with one of us working with a hairdryer and the other a blowtorch [not held too close!] we managed to remove two or three of the big letters and a handful of small ones in about half an hour. the vinyl stuff the lettering is made from tears, cracks, crumbles, stretches and generally does anything it can to resist coming off the side of the van without a fight. so, with hands numb with the cold and a whole side and the panel above the backdoors to do, it was looking like it would take us at least a day or two to get it all off.

took us feckin’ ages to get this much done!


“sod it!” i thought and said to marie that we might as well just go to crappy B&Q and buy one of those hot air paint stripper guns to make the job easier. so off we went and bought the cheapest one they had; £19,99 and with the same spec as the £50 bosch one, apart from lacking a 50º setting, which it seems to me you’d only need if you were trying to dry your hair with it! we also nipped into the equally crappy halfords on the way home, where i picked up a 24mm socket for the steering wheel nut. when we got back we resumed our attack the accursed lettering once again.

me, brandishing the heat gun


marie brandishing the heat gun


the heat gun made all the difference and we got tore into the signwriting on the van with a vengeance and had all the side done in about a hour. at this point marie went indoors to start making the dinner while i got up on a chair and made short work of the lettering across the tops of the backdoors. that only took me about another half hour or so.

all nakeded up and ready for sanding


mañana if the rain gods spare us again we can start another tedious job; that of sanding herman down, ready to start painting.