It doesn't look like much does it? Just a basic lengthening job on the sidestand fitted to my Wu Yang/Solex. However in undertaking that basic job tonight I was able to break free of a major personal block that has been haunting me for years.
When I had to take early retirement from the mental health service due to this illness I have I decided that I would spend my redundancy money on the kind of workshop equipment I'd always wanted. Finally I was going to have the time to work on old bicycles to my heart's content, and what's more I was going to have the tools to make anything I pretty much pleased.
Only I found that when I came to try and move beyond basic handtools type mechanicing I'd completely lost my nerve. I couldn't do it plain and simple. So for the past few years my lathe, welding gear and other tools of metal manipulation have sat idle. Oh I managed to do a little welding on my cyclecar frame just recently, but only because my daughter was interested and I forced myself to do it. Not very good welding either, nothing like what I used to be able to do.
At first I thought it was just because of my illness, but as it happens it was nothing like so clear cut. I was married for 15 years and my marriage partner whom I thought I would be able to loyally stay with through thick and thin suffered severely from bi-polar disorder. Having worked for the mental health service I now know my ex also suffered from periods of paranoia and psychosis. At the time though I didn't know any of this.
We had a small holding at the time on a coastal island and in addition to trying to make the property support us with what we could grow I picked up work here and there when local businesses had the need for somebody who knew one end of a spanner from the other. In a small community like that one folk had a very clear idea of who could do what and whether they were any good at it.
Of course with me being me I built things, mostly sidecar outfits, but I was building a tadpole three wheeler front wheel drive cyclecar too, but that never got finished because my marriage had well and truly broken up by then and it all came to a screeching halt. Pity really because it would have been quite a cool little car. Essentially the thing was built around a Hillman Imp engine and gearbox transaxle driving though front wheel drive components from a Morris 1100. A 1950s Skoda Octavia provided the chassis with the chassis's long spine backbone tube cut down to suit the cyclecar's shorter wheel base. Being an island everything that had ever been taken there was still about the place somewhere so most of the parts for this project cost me nothing but my time in collecting them from where they's been dumped.
When my ex was ill it was a living nightmare. Being harranged for my shortcomings and failings for hours at a stretch was only a small part of it. Mostly I made sure the children were safe and properly fed and looked after despite the madness breaking out all around them. Not being your average kind of woman made for fuel for the fire and most of the verbal abuse I endured was very cruelly barbed and very much aimed to wound. As time went on my ex was ill more often than well and eventually the Police and the local medical team were on the doorstep one morning and my ex was taken away to a psychiatric hospital.
When my ex was discharged and came home things weren't a lot better because my ex was putting meds down the toilet instead of taking them and would use all manner of cunning schemes to hide being unwell from the local community.
Then one day I looked in the mirror at myself and I knew I couldn't do it anymore.
The marriage breakup was messy and of course I blamed myself for not being able to endure it all anymore. Then when I was away from the island on a visit to the mainland my ex got the local wrecker and scrap dealer to come and clearout all my mechanical bits and pieces and projects which was a bitter blow. Among other things I had a nice collection of old engines including an Onan flat twin. Imagine what sort of a motor bicycle could be built around an Onan flat twin, but anyway it's all water under the bridge.
To get back to the sidestand I modified this job was such a major breakthrough because I used my lathe to turn down the two cut halves of the sidestand to fit the steel tubing I used to extend its length. The reason for my loss of nerve and my block with anything involving real engineering was that I was afraid that if I committed myself to building any kind of major project it would somehow be stopped and I would lose everything all over again.
Sounds silly doesn't it. You'd think that with the bits of paper I've got that say that I know what I'm doing when it comes to mental health interventions that I should have known what the problem was. But I didn't. Or at least not until tonight anyway. Pressing the switch that awoke my lathe from its long sleep served to finally banish the past and now I can get on with enjoying all my lovely tools and building whatever I want.
Just as a by the way I've found the solution to being badly fatigued by the hot and humid Summer weather which has always been a problem for me ever since I became unwell. Now I sleep during the day and I work on my bikes at night in the deliciously cool night air. And no I don't sparkle in the sunlight
When I had to take early retirement from the mental health service due to this illness I have I decided that I would spend my redundancy money on the kind of workshop equipment I'd always wanted. Finally I was going to have the time to work on old bicycles to my heart's content, and what's more I was going to have the tools to make anything I pretty much pleased.
Only I found that when I came to try and move beyond basic handtools type mechanicing I'd completely lost my nerve. I couldn't do it plain and simple. So for the past few years my lathe, welding gear and other tools of metal manipulation have sat idle. Oh I managed to do a little welding on my cyclecar frame just recently, but only because my daughter was interested and I forced myself to do it. Not very good welding either, nothing like what I used to be able to do.
At first I thought it was just because of my illness, but as it happens it was nothing like so clear cut. I was married for 15 years and my marriage partner whom I thought I would be able to loyally stay with through thick and thin suffered severely from bi-polar disorder. Having worked for the mental health service I now know my ex also suffered from periods of paranoia and psychosis. At the time though I didn't know any of this.
We had a small holding at the time on a coastal island and in addition to trying to make the property support us with what we could grow I picked up work here and there when local businesses had the need for somebody who knew one end of a spanner from the other. In a small community like that one folk had a very clear idea of who could do what and whether they were any good at it.
Of course with me being me I built things, mostly sidecar outfits, but I was building a tadpole three wheeler front wheel drive cyclecar too, but that never got finished because my marriage had well and truly broken up by then and it all came to a screeching halt. Pity really because it would have been quite a cool little car. Essentially the thing was built around a Hillman Imp engine and gearbox transaxle driving though front wheel drive components from a Morris 1100. A 1950s Skoda Octavia provided the chassis with the chassis's long spine backbone tube cut down to suit the cyclecar's shorter wheel base. Being an island everything that had ever been taken there was still about the place somewhere so most of the parts for this project cost me nothing but my time in collecting them from where they's been dumped.
When my ex was ill it was a living nightmare. Being harranged for my shortcomings and failings for hours at a stretch was only a small part of it. Mostly I made sure the children were safe and properly fed and looked after despite the madness breaking out all around them. Not being your average kind of woman made for fuel for the fire and most of the verbal abuse I endured was very cruelly barbed and very much aimed to wound. As time went on my ex was ill more often than well and eventually the Police and the local medical team were on the doorstep one morning and my ex was taken away to a psychiatric hospital.
When my ex was discharged and came home things weren't a lot better because my ex was putting meds down the toilet instead of taking them and would use all manner of cunning schemes to hide being unwell from the local community.
Then one day I looked in the mirror at myself and I knew I couldn't do it anymore.
The marriage breakup was messy and of course I blamed myself for not being able to endure it all anymore. Then when I was away from the island on a visit to the mainland my ex got the local wrecker and scrap dealer to come and clearout all my mechanical bits and pieces and projects which was a bitter blow. Among other things I had a nice collection of old engines including an Onan flat twin. Imagine what sort of a motor bicycle could be built around an Onan flat twin, but anyway it's all water under the bridge.
To get back to the sidestand I modified this job was such a major breakthrough because I used my lathe to turn down the two cut halves of the sidestand to fit the steel tubing I used to extend its length. The reason for my loss of nerve and my block with anything involving real engineering was that I was afraid that if I committed myself to building any kind of major project it would somehow be stopped and I would lose everything all over again.
Sounds silly doesn't it. You'd think that with the bits of paper I've got that say that I know what I'm doing when it comes to mental health interventions that I should have known what the problem was. But I didn't. Or at least not until tonight anyway. Pressing the switch that awoke my lathe from its long sleep served to finally banish the past and now I can get on with enjoying all my lovely tools and building whatever I want.
Just as a by the way I've found the solution to being badly fatigued by the hot and humid Summer weather which has always been a problem for me ever since I became unwell. Now I sleep during the day and I work on my bikes at night in the deliciously cool night air. And no I don't sparkle in the sunlight
