Tyre-chucking, angle-grinding and barrels

Thursday 31st July 2025

Zooming along with my car loaded with the blue barrels, I periodically reached out of the driver's window to check on the roof rack foot to see it was still attached to the door frame. I have had an incident with it before...

On the first run with the roof rack, the foot came loose. I was on the motorway and had to come off immediately to re-attach it. I got it from Amazon for 50 quid, and since they design them to fit the most car models possible, the feet don't quite fit the curvature of the door frame for my particular model (see below).

Following this and another incident, I rented an angle grinder from the Library of Things (great place - not sponsored (obviously!)) and gave the feet a hair cut. Now, as you can see from the final photo in the gallery below that they hug the curvature of the door frame, making it hard for them to slip out.

It doesn't make the rack bullet-proof, you still have to make sure things are secured, drive smoothly and keep the weight on the rack below 70kgs...

The other incident, while we're on the subject, happened when I was notified that one of the two chains on my boat had come undone / been cut. I got a call from a friend who had spotted it while she was riding past. I was in the middle of something and dropped it, jumped in the wheels and gunned it to the canal-side. I was furious, imagining that some weed-smoking hoodlum was messing with me because I wore a pink t-shirt and talked with a posh voice. I was ripping round the corners like Mickey Rourke's Marv from Sin City (2005)

thinking murderous thoughts of revenge. Ghillie suit and an air-rifle for a stake-out in the bushes. I got there and tumbled down the stairs to the boat to find out there had been no bolt cutting, it was just that posh-sounding guy with the silly pink t-shirt hadn't secured the lock properly. I remembered that when I had secured that lock I was in a rush to avoid an extortionate parking ticket and so didn't pay enough attention when I clicked the lock shut. It must not have been properly secured and the bow waves from passing boats must have bumped the boat and the impact popped the shank allowing one end of the boat to drift into the middle of the canal. It was a relief to be wrong about the imagined hoodlum. The first time the boat was moved has scarred me and made me paranoid, so it's not as if it's without reason to be wary of the drug-fuelled canal denizens.

Boat safe. However, in my fury setting off after I got notified that the boat was loose, I had overlooked that the rack had been loaded with 'above the recommended weight' of plywood. At some point during my rushed journey, I braked too hard and the foot above the driver seat came out and gouged out some of my space-ship grey paintwork. (This incident came after the modding of the feet with the angle grinder - hence the exposed gnarly metal).

Back to Upminster at 1:30pm:

Strapping the barrels to the Picasso I was so nervous, it took me about 15 minutes of tying and retying. As I was doing it, I was thinking 'These could come flying off and go bouncing into another car going at 70 mph'. They had better be fastened down really well. I kept getting flashes of realising that 'the person who is making sure these don't end up strewn across the motorway is me! Fucking me?! Ah crap.' I could see the headlines: 'POSH IDIOT KILLS FAMILY OF 4 WITH BARRELS'.

It is actually making me quite anxious thinking about it now.

Flying along the motorway, the wind and rain hitting the drums makes an eerie sound. I had also picked a rainy day to do the drive as I can't work outside with wood and electric tools. While driving, I need to listen out for any bumps or funny sounds from the roof rack so I keep the window open. Same reason I can't have any music playing on the stereo. So I'm whizzing along, staring beadily down the barrel of the road on high alert with my right elbow getting rained while this post-apocalyptic hum fills my mind. It was nervy.

Jeez, it was tiring. As you can see, though, I made it back.

Outside the studio

On the way I also picked up some free tyres recycled from a garage. The tyres were stacked high behind a wrecked silver Ford Focus and another car. To get to the them, the garage owner took the handbrake off the Ford and I had to push it to made a gap to slip through to get the tyres.

Don Smith also taught me how to get the scummy bum water out of the inner gutter of the tyres. The best way to do it was to flip them up in the air. When they hit the ground, the water is ejected out along with any old bits of errant plastic wrapping or detritus living inside the tyre.

While I was there, I asked one of the two brothers who own the garage about my dodgy car door. He offered me intellectual property freely (very kindly!) and I shared that I had been planning on using quite a drastic solution. He advised me against the sledgehammer to crack the nut and chuckled "I can see you like getting involved!", pointing to the barrels adorning my car roof and the tyres stuffed in anywhere they could go.

I drove off thinking, 'I do like getting involved, don't I'...