Yes, it's been a while since the last update. I think it has something to do with "Murphy's Law" and so one disaster is mostly accompanied by a few others. We didn't have internet for 9 days at the lonesome hill and because of that also missed an order for a nice creative project. However there's some good news to! We bought a new (secondhand) table saw. Yes, a secondhand one but in a higher range of quality. It comes with a real exiting extra, namely that we will personally collect it 2500 kilometers from the rural vicinity of central Portugal. For that, lot's of preparations and planning has to be done. Our old Iveco bus was kindly repaired by a friend (new driveshaft, lot's of bearings, time belt, etc. which makes it drive like on the first day we bought it 17 years ago. It was our job to make the exterior live up to it's renewed technical state. It's a big van so the sanding took some time, but hey, we didn't have internet so..
As the budget didn't leave room for a professional paint job at one of the local body shops, we decided to go old fashioned all the way with just plane brushes and some masking tape. The paint cabinet was sorted out and we found 3 buckets of "Bronze Green", 1 "hammerite red" and one "standox industrial yellow" . The only thing we bought for this project were 2 buckets of neutralisation primer, some kind of chemical substance that makes it possible to paint a surface which has different kinds of old paint. It's amazing how well this went. Because of the limited amount of paint we had to decide how to use it... well yellow for the roof it is!
After 10 days our old mint-green van looks more sophisticated in a colour that reminds a bit of "English racing green". There was even enough left in the last bucket to paint the inside of the front doors, so it looks good from the inside to. The last stripe was done in Hammerite red, the bumpers were sprayed black. It took almost 2 weeks and just 36 euro to transform that old Iveco from a sour sight to a nice traveling van again. Our first ride was to a local Artisan fair....
Now, I can hear you think. What about the purchase of a table saw? As a matter of fact, the work on the van is one of the preparations to get that table saw into the workshop. All the pieces of a complicated puzzle will come together in a few weeks. We managed to get items to be transported to the Netherlands from Dutch people over here in Portugal (and some deliveries back), which contributes to the costs of diesel and toll roads thru Spain and France. The table saw (which I bought online in Holland) is collected by a fellow woodworker in The Netherlands and stored at his workshop. This whole adventure is to special not to make some video's of for the Not Just Sawdust channel, and so I will try to film the "road trip" thru Europe on our way to collect our new table saw. Oh.. one thing I can reveal, the brand name of the saw: METABO
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