Kelly Aloha!*

I’m looking at YOU – fancy a cup of tea?

Ah, the first DIY of the new year! Our Kelly Kettle, subject of a few posts over the last couple of years (e.g. Plugging the Leaks by the snail or this one by me), needed a bit more TLC**.

Just to the left of the lighty-pokey-hole (technical term? No idea.) the metal of the base has disintegrated, for reasons that are unlikely to become clear any time soon. The problem was that now, rather more air was flowing into the fire than needed, making the kettle difficult to use. What was needed was more metal and a way of cutting it into the right shape. Cue:

DIY Fix-a-hole-in-the-base Kit

The old tin was a no-brainer if only because, to get it, I had (I mean HAD) to eat the contents. Actually, tins like this are becoming difficult to find because all the companies use plastic tubs now. Using my vast, and by vast I mean tiny, knowledge of material science, even I could spot that a strip of plastic in the base was going to suffer the same inevitable fate as a chocolate teapot (mmm…tea and chocolate).

The tool required to snip the tin is a pair of tin snips. I mention this because I was pretty sure I had made the name up (a problem of being a writer, I guess) but it turned out, rather disappointingly in one sense, that I hadn’t. And I didn’t have any, whatever they turned out to be called so I had to buy a pair, for around five quid.

I snipped tin. The resulting piece fitted the curve of the base with little manipulation so the job was done in about ten minutes. Is 2016 going to be the year of quick DIY? Yeah, right…***

Tin, snipped and in place

Not so staring-you-in-the-face now, eh?

oOo

* Kiele Aloha is a Hawaiian expression that can mean “hello”, “goodbye” and “I love you”, depending on the pronunciation. Sally Oldfield used it in her song “Mirrors” – it’s that bit in the lyric where you go “what was that again?” every single time she sings it. Now I’ve connected it to our Kelly kettle and probably ruined it for evermore. Sorry about that.

** Totally Laughable Craftsmanship

*** I always smile when I use this phrase. It reminds me of the anecdote where a lecturer in English says ” A double negative makes a positive but the same is not true of a double positive.” to which a student loudly says “Yeah, right.”