turning wrenches

Might be time to put down the fork. Damn. 

 I got to spend this morning swapping out a 40-foot section of our small black oil hose, a  1500lb section that developed a cut in the external rubber shell. The hoses are a composite of rubber and steel wire wound round, plus a steel mesh under rubber inside, with a teflon-like liner. VERY rugged, but UV, hard use and anno domini did for this one.

 It's been so hot this week that we got up with the sun to knock this out. It was the first opportunity I've had to do some simple wrench-turning in a long while, and it went pretty quickly. We had the new hose installed, snugged up and connected to the main hose section, and emplaced in about 2 hours.

The HQ is also the only place I can still get away with wearing jorts, at least when we don't have cargo and I'm not in danger of getting burnt, scraped or hung up. During cargo ops we have to wear proper PPE, but in this case I wasn't going to get splashed with oil- that hose spent a day hanging in the air, nary a drop still in the line. Well, the important takeaway here is that I can no longer wear my jorts at home, as they are unfashionable, despite their obvious awesomeness.