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| Satnav tended to slip off sloping dashboard |
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| ... but will now be secured by wires installed - at great personal cost - by RR |
This post, also about our anniversary, requires techno-patience.
Parenthetically “augury” is a five-dollar alternative to “omen”. Most auguries are grim (Think Macbeth/Dunsinane, Caesar/The Ides of March) but this is, I think, a happier one.
My satnav is mounted on a rubber mat which adheres to the sloping top of the car’s dashboard by ingenious friction. The mat has worked well for several years with the previous satnav, but the new satnav is heavier. Slippage has occurred.
Suppose I anchored the mat to the dashboard without damage. The dashboard is smooth and offers few anchor points. However, a long narrow vent, beyond the driver’s sight, delivers hot air for demisting. Could a wire attached at one end to the mat be threaded into the vent, under several louvres, and picked out for connection to the mat.
“Picked out” proved the source of nightmares. The windscreen slopes back shallowly and there is almost no hand room above the vent. And, obviously, no head room so one is working blind. Also the vent’s slots are so narrow the tweezers I used had to be introduced almost closed. Yet the tweezer points had to straddle the loose wire. On Monday I gave up. I resumed on Tuesday with no better luck.
I felt trapped and persecuted by this obscure corner of the car. Getting in and out laboriously to check the wire was visible. Times passed disagreeably. I wondered about glue.
Suddenly everything clicked. The tweezers gripped the wire and I pulled it into accessibility.
Definitely an augury. A good one. That the Hermitage would prove to be mature, we would pass the evening in harmony, and I would die in my sleep, dementia-free in a handful of years’ time, having been nominated for a literary Nobel.
Yeah. Happy Diamonds everyone.
I use double sided adhesive tape as employed to fix car number plates to vehicles. It is easily "undone" by slipping a length of dental floss between the surfaces and "sawing" it through. Any resultant deposit can be removed with turps.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been ideal for your purposes, without the aggro of "wire fishing".
I hope you are enjoying your Diamond in spite of Covid. We were lucky, ours was last year and we were able to have a celebratory meal at a local restaurant. It now seems like olden times!
It would have been better with black wire.
ReplyDeleteAvus: I have, of course, used gaffer tape (Who hasn't?) for crude but secure repairs where appearance is not an issue. I was unaware of the existence of double-sided tape and a further benefit with your solution is it would have been invisible to the eye. I'll take your word for the fact that any deposit could have been cleaned away with turps but I might have been reluctant nevertheless. I was particularly keen to ensure that the dashboard was not mutilated or stained in any way; in my experience of trading in old for new Skodas a very close inspection of the car's cosmetics is involved.
ReplyDeleteAs to the Diamond evening meal we did the next best things. Our favourite nearby restaurant, to which we have returned many times, is Simply Thai, small, popular, and a source of many original cooked-to-order dishes, notably a soup based on cocoanut milk. They do takeaway but not deliveries. I wasn't keen on picking up an order by car given that this would have been preceded by a Skype session with the widespread family at which VR and I intended to share a bottle of the most expensive bottle Chablis I have ever acquired (which turned out to be delicious).
I was late to the practice but the obvious answer was to order a taxi to pick up the order; cheap at just over £7. I chatted over the phone with the woman at the taxi company and found that taxis have flourished under the pandemic. Housebound people (especially the aged) use taxis to pick up all sorts of purchases and this particular company will even handle the financial side of purchasing, though they specify this has to be in cash. You may argue that this is an expensive way to go shopping but we have found cash accumulating in our joint account since The Plague, given that opportunities for impulse-buying (eg, eating out) have dropped to zero. Also, if you buy online you're usually mulcted for p&p anyway.
Sir Hugh: The white wire was the thinnest I had and thinness was a factor during installation. Now that the wire is in place it would be a simple matter to attach dark coloured wire to the white and ease it through. The clearances are reasonably generous. In any case, once the satnav is in place the wire will be hidden.