A day of Madness.

Its's Christmas time, the time of year where selflessness comes into the fore ground and people come together spreading joy and happiness. My insane parents have decided to become one of these people. My Mum being part of Dunfermline town centre management organises all the festive activities in town such as Christmas lights and fire work displays. So my Mum needed a Santa's grotto for the town centre this year. And being such considerate citizens instead of the town having to hire a grotto  my dad offered to convert what was once our summer house, then pigeon loft then shed into Santa's home for a few weekends. 

With a few weeks or so of painting, and refurbishment my dad squared up the doors at the front , fitted a (rather over sized) fire place, as well as some coasters. The idea of the coasters is to allow the shed to roll (not necessarily with ease) onto and off of our old bike trailer. All in all this makes a very nice gypsy wagon type construction. 

So the last few images are of prior to leaving the house, i wish i could have taken more pictures of the process of setting up the whole thing but my dads a bit of a stress head and doesn't like work to stop for something like picture taking. We set of from Powmill at 2pm, driving up Knockhill road toward Dunfermline , no problem at all really , the shed tows pretty well. The views were rather nice. But then as we passed Queen Ann Highschool I noticed sparks in the rear view mirror. The hitch of the trailer snapped from the main frame. You can see in the image below where there are two rectangular plates there should have been a hitch , which just snapped off , probably due to the weight but also because the trailer was pretty knackered in all honesty.

So we made our way to a blacksmiths to see if they had a welder which could be transported down to the road side to weld the hitch straight back on , but there was no generator big enough to power the welder. So I came up with the idea of burning out the existing bolts which would have gone through the hitch and into the two plates , and replacing it with new bolts and a new plate underneath. To stop the entire thing from sliding we still had the two existing plates to hold everything in place. The only problem being when we were fixing the hitch back on the chool emptied. Making for a lively session of Fife banter with a continual stream of school kids, a few of which i knew, shouting comments such as "where's yer reindeer!" or to my dad "oi santa go call your elves!" and others which are suitable for a young Fifer to shout in public but not for this blog.

 Eventually we reach the glen gates despite it taking 3 hours to travel what would normally only take 20 minutes.The shed simply rolled off of the trailer and into position, propped up on stilts using a stone henge style cantilever system with lengths of 2x4 so no children could roll away with Santa and then we left the elf's to decorate in preparation for Santa's arrival the following day.