Help me GOD

When I was thinking about inner tyre tubes I had no clue that cleaning them up would be such a big challenge. Once I bought a few I realized how heavy they are and it is not like a pair of jeans that you can wash with some effort. I did try to wash one tube, but I was not very successful at it. The main reason being that even a single tube is heavy and fairly tough to repeatedly pull it out of the water tub I had soaked it in for rinsing.

Soaked in water

It also takes most of the volume of the water bucket and not much room is left to use your hands to work on the tube surface. I was also worried about my wrist and I did not want to push it any further.

One tube takes up all the space

Now I am waiting for the gods to help me complete the cleaning. I know the gods can not just walk down and do it, but my plan is to open the sack of tubes on my roof top terrace on a rainy day and work on cleaning them while it is pouring.

Not much room to scrub the tube

Sharpening my skills

Lately I have been teaching pattern making and construction for the summer classes at a local polytechnic. I decided to do it because of a few combined reasons all together.

It will help me focus on getting ready for something and completing it. I have to be in front of about 30 students and teach them, everything that has to be done has to be completed in that three hour window. I have to prepare well in advance what I am going to do on a particular day or I will make a fool out of myself in front of all the students. Students these days are much sharper and some of them do know a lot more than what can be expected of someone at that level.

My understanding for the smarter and knowledgeable students is that they use the resources available to them and everything is available just as it happens. During my time all we had was the knowledge of someone who had done it in the past, few old European books and some old VHS tapes. The scope of your understanding and inspiration was limited to what you had around you, now students know what is happening in any part of the world in real time.

The students have got me to think of technology as a big classroom without any barriers or walls. They have also helped me focus more on preparing in advance, and if I take this to my daily routine I will definitely fare much better and do more than what I have done in the past few months.

My other reason for taking up the assignment was to get my worsening financial situation into something a little better. When I started out I thought I had enough money to see me through this starting up period, but now I realize that money just slips through and you do not even realize it. I also have to restrict myself on what all materials I buy and how much do I get, I have gone a little overboard in the past few months and am fully aware of it now.

Two words that will see me through this somewhat turbulent time is being; Disciplined and Frugal.

Where am I now

I have not done much lately on any new designs, except for a few new sketches and a couple of rough patterns. My plan just went a little haywire because of the injury to my wrist which set me back by about a month in terms of time but a more than a month in financial terms as a lot of my budget was eaten up by the medical costs.

When I started out a few months ago I had sat down and made a fairly elaborate business plan. At that stage I was thinking that making the plan is the biggest challenge and the rest would be easy as you just have to follow it, but following it is way tougher than it sounds. I know I should have stuck with it to the hilt but life interrupted in between and there were deviations.

I am now working on short term plans, I know it might not be the right thing to do but it seems the most logical to me at this time considering my situation and goals for the year. I just hope that I am somewhere close to where I had envisioned myself to be at the end of the year; it seems hard but it is not impossible.

Rediscovering Inner Tyre Tubes

Delhi is a fascinating place to look for anything that you think of. I had been thinking of using bike inner tubes for some of my designs as I have seen some folks in the west successfully incorporate them in there creations. I did get a few tubes from my neighbourhood cycle repair shop and tried to cut them into flat sheets, as soon as I cut them I realized that I need something much broader and bigger as joining so many pieces will require a lot of time and the round curvature of the tube does not make it very easy to make a fairly flat piece of rubber.

Space is at a premium here, so rooftops are the storage area

I started hunting for bigger tubes so that I could get fairly straight square pieces; and after running about for a bit I was able to find a few folks who just deal in old tyres and inner tubes that they source from city and state transport fleets.

Stacks of used truck tyres

Here are some more pictures from my inner tube discovery odyssey.

This experienced fellow listened to my needs and showed me the right sizes

Checking for thickness (some were amazingly thick)

The ones I selected on the top of the stash