Maintenance

The wheels on the bus go round and round...

Another volunteer stopped for a chat with me this week at the Heron Corn Mill. “It’s surprisingly satisfying doing a repetitive job like bagging up that flour, isn’t it? Very soothing!”

I think it was volunteering envy, actually, because everybody seems to like doing the bagging up. It’s not a job to be done on piece work rates - I reckon 5 minutes to pack a bag of flour is reasonable going! But it undeniably gives you a warm feeling to have stacked the shelf with nice tidy bags of flour.

Lots of things at the mill are repetitive, and when they are going well, strangely relaxing. The water runs down the launder all day. The water turns the wheel all day. The gears turn the mill stones all day.

The flour shoots out into the sack all day. And visitors and volunteers come and go all day. But spare a thought for the miller. He can’t ever relax the way we can! One day, something will go bump and everything stops in its tracks. That little knocking that started last week suddenly gets worse, or the leak in the launder suddenly cracks wide open. A forty year old wedge that has been slowly perishing finally collapses or slips out of place. That bearing that you have been oiling every morning unexpectedly runs dry.

And all those things that just keep happening all day suddenly don’t.

This is the reality of Stuart and Steve’s job at the mill. Constantly watching, noticing, monitoring, scheduling maintenance, fixing, replacing, avoiding the avoidable and staying one step ahead of the unforeseeable.

The blocks and wedges round the axle on the water wheel have been (very!) painstakingly replaced and flour has been milled again, with Stuart on high alert for anything that doesn’t look or sound right. I’ve done some bagging up with the mill sounds in my ears again, and visitors have enjoyed watching the machinery run. But Stuart has heard a new noise, not in the wheel itself, but in a bearing somewhere far far away. And there was slight movement in the metal wedges in the wheel, which remains unexplained.

Can he sleep at night? This is the lot of the maintenance engineer, I’m afraid: hope for the best by all means, but definitely expect the unexpected.

What we don’t see when we visit the mill is that someone behind the scenes is lavishing TLC on it. I asked Stuart which job needed his attention next. I was only expecting one thing, but instead there was a long list, starting with the launder… But that’s for next time.