Just for fun…
Most days I enjoy retic and turf but then there was Thursday last week…
It rained pretty much all day, which is never fun and from the very start of the day things didn’t go to plan. We arrived to dig some dirt out of a backyard and lay some lawn. As we arrived the tyre on the trailer was clearly going flat and needing pumped up. Bummer because we were out the back of Banksia Grove and the nearest servo was 15 minutes drive.
Anyway we weren’t going anywhere with a tyre like that and we couldn’t load up the dirt we needed to tip so I took off and got the tyre pumped back up. Half an hour gone and by the time I got back it had started to go down again… Waste of time…
I continued digging out the yard and instead of removing about a third of a cube we finished up with just over a cubic metre – a pretty big load for my trailer and technically overloaded.
I decided to change the tyre over and use the spare, so I loosened the wheel nuts on the faulty tyre and then tried to get the spare off – but it wouldn’t come easily and then it started to pour so we took shelter in the client’s carport. We chatted for a bit and realised the weather wasn’t going to change so it was decided we would drive down to Wanneroo, get a tube put in the tyre and then head down town for our city jobs before coming back to finish off.
Remember the loosened wheel nuts?
Hmmm… we didn’t… so halfway down Pinjar rd the wheel came off the trailer… Fortunately there was no major drama other than having to dump the trailer and take the wheel to the tyre shop to get a new rim, some new wheel nuts AND a tyre… This day wasn’t going well.
We managed to get a good turn around on the tyre and went back and fitted it on the trailer. Knowing we still had work to do we headed back to move the big pile of dirt. But as we arrived the rain set in again – heavy, dense, unrelenting. So… we turned the car around and again headed for the city.
It rained non stop down there and we couldn’t do two of the jobs we had driven down to do. Annoying.
So we drove back to finish off the turf laying and get that pile of dirt to the tip. The rain eased a little and we shovelled all of the dirt into the trailer. It was well loaded.
And we headed for the tip… And all was going well until we hit that bump on the way in and the axel snapped on the trailer… It was the last thing we needed… The leaf springs held the wheels in place so we managed to drag it down to the dumping area and unload in the pouring rain before calling a friend who allowed us to borrow his trailer to go back to the client’s house and get the rest of our gear.
So we dumped our trailer at the tip and ended a disaster of a day by loading up on a mate’s rig and heading for home. Its been 7 years of retic and never a day like that one…
And never again…