On your knees. 3/29/2005
I waltzed into the bike shop on Saturday, expecting to get the Silver Lady fixed. And W. laughed at me, because this is race weekend. First race of the year. And I’m missing it, mainly because I got called in to work.
So I’m sitting here on a Sunday morning, waiting for the goddamned vendor to show up. We’ve been having problems with the installation of the surgical sinks, because the hoses keep bursting. Yeah, you heard right, burst hoses on a HW/CW system. Apparently the hoses are unable to take the pressure in the water system. I measured the pressure once, a few months ago, and it was sitting at about 4 bar. High, but not intolerable. Which meant that you should at least install a 10 bar hose. But 10 bar hoses are expensive.
I cut open one of the hoses, and found that the nozzle part of the fitting, where the crimping clamps on, is unevenly extruded. The nozzle wall is thinner on one side, and thicker at the other. This is the most likely cause of failure. I looked at the hose fitting, and it’s stamped “Made in Italy”. No other markings, no pressure rating, no EC stamp. Which leads me to suspect that the hoses were probably made in some cottage backyard in China. There’s going to be hell to pay tomorrow, especially when I make a visit to the vendor who supplied the hoses.
So, yesterday, when I got the call saying that hoses were bursting all over the place, I groaned, because there was really nothing much I could to to rectify the situation on a weekend. And then later in the Saturday got a message asking if I could attend to some work on site. Which basically blows my entire weekend. I wasted the Saturday because someone was being insecure, paranoid and suspicious. And I refuse to pander to that shit anymore. The Silver Lady couldn’t get fixed because the shop was busy, and anyway, Edham, the guy who supplies me my performance bits, was racing, and not picking up his fucking phone.
So this morning, I went anyway, and blasted in to work on a clear set of roads, no traffic, no nothing. Falling into corners at 160 km/h has never been so satisfying. With my knee down.