Many years ago, in a land far away, I used to build cars. Then I used to race them, crash them, and rebuild them again. My mechanical knowledge was based upon reading a single book. I forget the title, but given the content it was probably something like “The Boy’s Book of How Cars Work.” Heavy on providing pretty pictures, light on providing useable knowledge.
Never mind, with trusty hammer in hand and an attitude of optimism, combined with blissful ignorance, I gave birth to a variety of lethal machines which were let loose upon the roads and tracks of Scotland (small country, north of the country of England).
My most ambitious foray into the internals of a machine was the rebuilding of a gearbox. It had less than the required number of functioning gears, and I was sure I could remedy the problem. I set to work with assorted tools (mainly a hammer), a book with an exploded diagram of a gearbox (probably not the exact model I was working on), and a plentiful supply of beer; the vital lubricant in any engineering exercise.
As the hours rolled by and the stock of beer diminished, my confidence level increased and I was soon ripping the gearbox apart with no thought as to how I would put it together again. Eventually I had all the internals strewn across the garage floor and decided that now would be a good time for a little sleep (there was no more beer).
A few hours later I returned to the scene of the accident and, with my head clearing, I realised I had ripped the thing apart in a haze of alcohol, and now had no idea of what bit went where. For the next several hours, my hammer and my headache tried their best to re-assemble the mess of gears and bits into a working whole, while remembering to replace the broken parts along the way. As midnight tolled, the job was complete and, miraculously, everything was back in place.
Or so I thought. The next day I fitted the gearbox back in the car and started to clear the floor of beer cans. Under one particularly comprehensive pile of cans, I found a cog. My advanced engineering knowledge told me that this cog should be in the gearbox and not under a heap of cans. My laziness told me to start the car and see what happened. Astonishingly, it worked, with all the requisite gears, and did so for many weeks until I drove the car into a wall and demolished so much of the it that the functioning of the gearbox was no longer relevant. I still have the cog. If I ever build another gearbox, I will stuff it in there.
I was reminded of this event in my past when I received a service pack for my beloved coffee machine. I need my coffee, and I like to create it myself with a hand-operated lever machine, just like The Godfather would have used if he had not been too busy massacring his enemies.
After several years of faithful service it refused to provide coffee a week or so ago and has been on strike since. If it could, it would hold up a placard saying “service me you lazy bastard.” So I ordered a service kit and dusted off a hammer.
The kit arrived and with it a diagram which matched a gearbox chart for complexity. With the optimism of youth being gradually replaced with the realism and cynicism of old age, I had little doubt that I would screw this up. My wife added her support by saying “what will you do when you break it?”, adding, a little too slowly, “I mean if you break it.”
So with a clear head and a high level of stress, I spent this morning taking the machine to bits.
Beautifully made, it was going to be such a shame when I wrecked it. But after about four hours work, including replacing seals, descaling the inside and giving the whole thing a good polish, I fired it up and it rewarded me with the best cappuccino I have had in weeks. Suitably inspired, I think I will have a go at neutering a cat tomorrow.
Inspired by the beautiful Italian engineering I had just worked on, I wandered down to the car park to head out on an errand and discovered another beautiful piece of engineering. Owned by Audi now so not sure whether it qualifies as Italian, but I would swap my coffee machine for one and I am sure I could fix the gearbox if it went wrong.
