1/12/20

Broken Weld

Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas
Adventure Date: 1-12-2020
Click a pic to enlarge it.

About ten years ago a boulder at Davis Mountains State Park in Texas reached out and slapped the Castles retractable steps. That caused a small crack in a weld of the steps. It has been slowly getting worse. Yesterday it finally broke all the way through.

 That made the steps dangerous so the OFM tried for most of the day and several trips to the hardware store to find a way to repair the area without welding. He was not having much luck. A neighbor walked up to see what was going on. When he saw the difficulty, he mentioned that Wally has a welder and could just weld.  Since the OFM was at the end of his rope, he went over to Wally’s site to beg for some welding.

Wally, the good fellow, immediately jumped into action and soon his welding equipment was over at the Castle.  A quick examination of the trouble and out came the grinder  for weld preparation.

Then the wire feed welding machine was put to work. Wally made a few passes, grinded a bit more and carefully made some more passes. A bit of banging the steps around and a touch up weld was made. Then the steps were cycled and checked for correct performance and all was good.



Then we cleaned up the tools and returned it all back to his rig.  The OFM thanked him profusely over and over. Wally says “Just a friend helping a friend.”  He and his wife have been really nice folks for the few years we have met here in the winter. they are from Wisconsin. 

That is another nice load of the OFM’s pea brain so we can travel in peace, we hope.

After squaring the Castle away the OFM decided he needed some fishing to calm down and relax, so it was a trip to the harbor.  The wind had moderated a lot from this morning but it was still cool. No fish were caught but as the sun went down it was time to call an end to the day. And it was a pretty nice end of the day.



A great day of progress toward rolling is a wonderful way of trying to have tooooo much fun.

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