You have to be creative to work at a speedway track. The problems are immense and the solutions never straightforward. With funds limited, problems have to be sorted in a creative and imaginative manner. Take a look at the apparent confusion of pipes and pumps on the sprayer that they've just put together at Edinburgh as a good example. And yet, when it all comes together and works, often despite itself and acknowledged logic, it is a thing of rare beauty, an object guaranteed to reduce track staff around the world to "oooing" and aaahing". But enough ... time for Ian and another dose of life at Armadale. I give you the latest installment of Edinblog!
Greetings from a (still) dry West Lothian.
First on the list of tasks on Wednesday was straightening out a rather bent tubular fence post caused by a Swedish gentleman from Rye House. This is normally done by the use of one tractor and a length of chain - looping the chain round the offending post and pulling it vertical by means of the tractor with the large spiker attached. This however only succeeded in putting an S-bend in the post, so it had to be removed. Fortunately it was not concreted in and could be extracted without too much sweating and swearing. The new post was inserted into the same posthole whereupon we found that we did not have anything to secure it so a trip into Bathgate to Focus DIY (plug) to purchase a bag of Postcrete (another plug) was made. The new straight post was then fixed into position and concreted in. Then we had to thread several used kart tyres on to the post to give it some "bounce" and then complete building and washing the safety fence.
After a spot of fence board painting I spent a pleasant half-hour trying to drain a minor swamp which had developed near the perimeter fence where we park the water tanker. As the mud was well over ankle deep and I had stepped in it twice in two weeks some action was needed which will require greater effort than I can drum up.
Friday arrived and after the normal set-up for racing was complete we had the job of replacing the spikes on the rear of the heavy grader as they had become rather blunt. All were removed and refitted OK and the new nasty pointy things seemed to make a major difference to combing and smoothing out the track surface. We also had more plumbing adventures. Last week's crop sprayer replumbing had met with a minor snag when the operating arm for the valve slightly broke. As it was only retained by a very short self-tapping screw it was repaired with a longer one which did the trick. The operating system was also revised, the old rope being retired and a more rigid link was made up from a length of old conduit to give a straighter pull with less strain on the valve handle. A length of wire cable and some shackles completed the Doc Bridgett remote operation system. Testing on the track was a success although there was a further minor problem with water leaking from the return pipe to the tank which we know the cure for.
At that point the vans for the meeting started to arrive but thanks to the wonders of rider-replacement and van-sharing they were all parked with relative ease.
The meetings, against Berwick and Redcar seemed to run quite well and were completed well within the cut-off. The only incident of note was when Kevin Wolbert ran rather wide out of the second bend and demolished a fence board. Happily Kevin was able to walk away from what looked a nasty spill.
During a short interval to allow the home team to change tyres etc, the track was re-laid with some fresh shale and regraded.
There were two slightly odd occurrences during the Redcar meeting one when a van was showing a red light, fortunately not during a race, and also when track photographer Jack Cupido returned to the centre green after taking some shots in the pits but did not reset his camera to the action setting. This caused a red light to show before the flash fired and resulted in Robbie Kessler, in fourth place coming to a stop on the third bend. Jack's apology for this oversight was accepted by Robbie.
This has been a busy week for the team with meetings on Friday (2), Sunday at Stoke, Wednesday at Birmingham, Thursday at Sheffield, Friday (2) and Saturday at Rye House. I got quite tired just writing all that. The 4-point away wins plus 2 home wins elevated us to second in the league behind worthy winners Kings Lynn. It depends on the Brummies final two away fixtures whether we stay in that position, but as Glasgow won on Sunday and their remaining match is at KL things are looking good. We also have two finals, both against the Stars to look forward to plus play-offs.
After putting the track to bed we all plodded off home after an eventful day with more to come before the end of October.
