Marble Bar And Welding

Off out into the outback Marble Bar was our next point of interest claimed to be the hottest place in Oz, was certainly warm enough and dry which was very nice for me, not so much for my dedicated sidecar monkey who prefer cool.

Our trip was uneventful with only 70km of good nic gravel and some epic hills looking like mid Argentinian altiplano.

A few points of interest including a coolas pub to nail a G&T.

Skippy had cracked her sidecar guard and broken the bracket completely off so while at camp I asked the people if they knew where I could get a welding job done, she said follow me and takes me to a caravan …an elderly dude comes out and yells “yeah I got one just use mine”

He pulls out an awesome wee Caddy welder and some 2.5mm sticks, a brand new helmet but no gloves…he yells again “can ya do stick”, me hell yeah no worries….I think he was slightly deaf.

Job was on, I took the sidecar wheel off and got into it, some other people pulled in to the camp and the guy interested in what I am doing comes over and says, you need a gusset in there, I replied yeah I do but nothing to cut it with, within a minute he was back with a cordless grinder with 1mm cutting disc….couldn’t believe it, then the camp owner comes over to clean the kitchen where we were working and said no stress I will come back after to clean up.

So with full workshop facilities I custom built new brackets, gussets etc and made a larger long plate to spread the load a bit.

We did actually see the make believe marble which led to the towns name.

Our next mission was to go to Port Hedland to see if we could get our cooker sorta fixed.

It has been pretty good but has now failed, can’t get anything up this way but we managed to get it soldered together to work but the unintended brutalizing of one of the legs was a side effect of the success, no stress the flames go so coffee is on again.

As we ran late in the day we were forced to stay at a shithouse campground for the cost of an exquisite apartment…them’s the breaks.