Another good week for Edinburgh Speedway started with what must have been a record on Wednesday when everything was complete by lunchtime. We also had time to repair the crop sprayer which had suffered an accident on Friday when the return hose to the water tank came adrift when Doc was on the back straight during the meeting, depositing more aqua than was intended!. The return pipe from the three-way valve was basically a bit of a lash-up, being merely stuffed into a right-angle pipe on the top of the tank and held in place by sticky tape, which obviously had lost its grip over the years. A repair was affected by obtaining the correct connections and reducing adapter to secure the return hose permanently.
A fairly standard Friday ensued with only one miner hiatus when I went to shift the greyhound traps to allow easier access for the water tanker. The traps are lifted by an electric hoist on a large swinging arm which had given up the ghost and refused to power up. Fortunately Robert, the stadium manager was on hand and produced a new replacement motor which was rapidly bolted into place, enabling us to swing the traps clear.
It was then a case of getting as much water as possible on to a very rapidly drying track running a shuttle service with the large tanker and the sprayer alternately being filled and emptied to keep the track surface from becoming a dust bowl on what had developed into a very hot and quite breezy day.
Friday's meeting against Redcar was rather close-riun initially mainly due to home riders falls and machine problems but due to a first bend incident which cost the Bears the services of James Grieves, Monarchs were able to ease ahead win a bit more comfortably in the end.
The only other noteable incident was when Kevin Wolbert picked up drive exiting the second turn and shot out very wide, leaving Redcar's young Australian reserve Robert Branford no room at all, resulting in a nasty looking fall. Happily there was no serious damage to bike, rider or kickboards and Rob was able to take his place in the rerun.
