I have just enjoyed a bank holiday weekend down on the south coast with my dear old Mum. My untrustworthy heap of french nightmare delivered me safe and sound and in good order on Saturday afternoon.

I usually have a bunch of chores to do at my Mum's and my first task was to mow the lawn. I rolled the two stroke petrol mower out of the shed and as usual it kicked first time ... then died never to start again.

I left it for a bit just in case it had flooded but no joy.

Petrol mowers are not complicated machines so I felt i could risk a little tinkering. Regular readers will be aware that I have discovered that mechanical/engineering skills are not an inherited gene and in are fact learnt the hard way by trial and error and with a set of bigger and bigger hammers.

Still, on the basis that I should only fight the battles I figured I could win I had the spark plug out. Having never done that before I had no idea how to judge whether it was working or not. After a little fiddling I decided to just go and get a new one. It occurred to me that I could roll out Mum's volt meter to prove that the plug was faulty but on examining the meter felt a world of pain ahead of me and thus the £7.50 for new plug was the way to go. If the fault wasn't a faulty plug I was incapable of fixing it anyway! And that was Saturday. The diagnosis of the fault counts as a days work in itself.

Well if my main dealer can do it when i take my car there then so can I. I kid you not I left my car with my local main dealer (name withheld) and told them to look at the turbo as I had lost boost. 8 hours later I get a phone call saying "Did you know your turbo isn't working? and we can fix it tomorrow" blithering idiots.

Sunday morning, purchase a new plug and replaced it but still no joy. Oh bugger. Out came WD40 to make sure of electrical contact. I found out that there was electrical current to the plug the hard way. Pulled starter cord and with all he WD40 all over the place got a nice tingle in my finger tips. My reaction was a little overboard but I find that dropping electrical items giving me shocks a useful safety tip.

Having established there was current I tried again. Part of the problem was the spark plug was too big for the cap. All these technical details were soon sorted and the old fella wheezed into life and off I went round the garden minus all the bits with wild orchids in.

I had a lifetime of my father telling me the old engineering maxim that:-

"If, at first, it doesn't work - use a bigger hammer". Fine and dandy and has mostly worked for me except for trying to fix my hot water cylinder.

Now my uncle is an old sea dog and was horrified by that saying and his was and I paraphrase
"... use a bigger spanner"

The difference in approach interested me and led me to compare my Dad and Uncle's engineering backgrounds. My Dad was an aircraft engineer and my Uncle was a ships engineer. My Dad was used to a hanger filled with all the nuts and bolts he could shake a stick at and my uncle was limited to whatever he had to hand on board. I suppose one can take liberties with a structure if you know you can get on a phone and ask for someone to send some more. Being 3000 miles out to sea makes you a little more cautious about hammering things as there may be no hope of rescue should you hammer it too hard.

Such is the rich pattern of life

night night