andygates

Badger's take on Ratty's line:  "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing around with gear."
I love me some fettling.  I'll admit up front that I enjoy planning and preparing and tinkering just as much - sometimes more - than actually going on adventures.  So I'm as happy as Larry going through my camp gear, getting it all back in peak performance.

The jet-propelled laser guided NAAFI is my beloved Coleman stove, an Army-green box which gives off in equal proportion roaring flames, the stink of petrol and cups of tea: "A self-contained missile capable of carrying eighty-two staff, ten NAAFI pianos, sixty thousand gallons of tea and twelve tons of buttered crumpets, being shot six thousand miles up and set fully operative at the point of impact in sixteen seconds." (So say the Goons)

It's been used and abused and the poor lad was sulking: spiders in the hinges, soot on the burners, and poor, poor performance.  This, palpably, Would Not Do.  Tonight the NAAFI got the fettling treatment, and I remembered why ten years go I bought a Coleman.  You can take it all apart with basic tools, clean every bit with wire-wool and polish (and it takes a lovely patina after heating/cooling/corrosion), and then reassemble the whole shooting match to get a clean hissing burn and a four-minute boil.  And if anything was damaged, every part can be ordered, and every part number is included in the blurb. 

Right now, after a happy hour of fettling, it's cooling, I have a cuppa (milk, two sugars: NAFFI standard issue), and the stove is full of promise - swift brews in laybys, surf road trip bacon butties on clifftop campsites, 5am double espressos before a race (mist curling off the lake in the dawn as the elites set up, almost-silent freewheels ticking as their carbon bikes ghost by), hot spicy foil-packed glop shovelled hungrily in drumming rain during downtime in the zombie apocalypse.

Now, I just need to have a look at the bikes...