A dew days ago the green plastic, steel cored washing line snapped on our rotary washing line. Green washing line which looks to have been installed about ten years ago and noticed at references 1 and 2.
A line which came in at least three pieces, involving some complicated arrangements for the joints, rather more complicated than those illustrated at reference 2.
With a bit of fiddling about I was able to put it back together again. But then decided that maybe it would look a lot neater if there was just the one piece.
Off to Wilko where they did plastic at 60m or plastic with a steel core at 20m. The plastic looked a bit puny, but at a fiver, I thought I would give it a go.
Second thoughts the next day, that is to say yesterday, so off of B&Q at Leatherhead in the margins of the Wellingtonia hunt mentioned in the last post. Same story there. We decided to see how we got on the Wilko stuff - which now, some time later, appears to be what we had before the line was replaced ten years ago.
Later that day, I stripped out the old line and put in the new one. Being very impressed by the way that 60m tightly rolled washing line can get tangled up when you unroll it. Luckily I remembered the adage from the yachting chap from whom we once hired a yacht for the day, about never untangling. Once you start threading things through other things you are done for. You just have to shake it about until it untangles of its own accord.
Not very impressed by my first attempt at getting the four poles at right angles, with the tension of the line nice and even. But overnight, the brain worked out that with the naval uncle's large square, four bamboo canes and the green string picked up somewhere on my rounds, I could fix the poles while I tensioned and then fixed the line.
Boy Scout morning. Not forgetting the all important army surplus folding knife, illustrated at reference 1. And finding that the green string, some kind of plastic raffia, might have plenty of tensile strength, but cut easily enough. Just a modest amount of tangling. And once that had been dealt with, it was just right for lashing the poles together. Good job I had the square, as I found doing it by eye most unsatisfactory.
Line now threaded and tensioned. Bamboo poles left in place while BH takes the thing out for its sea trials (as it were) and maybe stretches the line a bit.
Just one of the complicated aluminium contraptions in play now, securing the outermost loose end. Visible, if not in all its glory, bottom right in the snap above.
And just as well that I went the whole hog, using four poles rather than the three that might have sufficed, as I had to undo one of them at one point, having managed to loop the line around it.
PS 1: you might have thought that these washing lines would come with something like the bamboo poles to keep it all shipshape. I suppose they don't do that as such poles would get in the way of folding the things up, something that suburban housewives like to be able to do. Fold them out and hide them away when they have visitors. In our case, the folding up arrangements have not worked for years.
PS 2: in the course of researching this post, I was amazed to find out how often, over the years, I had used washing line for something other than its advertised purpose.
PS 3: but I have so far failed to turn up the yachting chap. Maybe that was from before I retired and took up blogging.
References
Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/hampton-court.html.
Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/02/horticultural-day.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-familiar-object.html. The sort of thing that happens when you go for renewal rather than mend.
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