Serendipity Works
We have had an incubator for hatching chook eggs for many years (Called a Hexabator, even though it is octagonal!!!) but haven’t used it for some considerable time. It has been stored in a number of places over the years, but currently resides in the garage.
Some friends of ours needed an incubator so I said that they could use ours, and removed it from its storage area (Thereby knocking another box down which hit and removed the tap from a distilled water storage container resulting in lots of water all over the garage floor, but I digress!). Having retrieved it and cleaned up the water I removed it from its box only to find the two screws that are supposed to secure the fan/heater unit to the top of the hexabator missing. They were not in the hexabator, or in its box, or on the floor, they were just gone!. This rendered the incubator useless.
While I have a large and varied collection of wood screws, my selection of nuts and bolts is not huge. I needed a couple of quite small bolts to replace the missing ones and while I came up with a couple of possibilities while searching my treasure troves, in the event none fitted. While I was searching around for something else I had that may fit, I found the end of an old terminal block, with only one terminal left in place. I looked down into the place where the bolts that secured the wires to the block were and wondered, could it be?
After a bit of hassle I was able to get a bolt out and gave it a go, it fitted perfectly! The hexabator is back in business and ready to be given over to hatch more chooks.
There is another part to the story. There was a remote thermometer that went with it that had wandered off amongst the trees years ago, that I was able to find it was a miracle by itself! However, some idiot had removed the small batteries that powered it so I had nothing to go off to find replacements. After searching around, I eventually found the bag of dead batteries (which were supposed to be recycled months ago), went through it and was able to find which batteries fitted the best. All I needed to do then was to pick up a couple of new replacements, which were easy to get from the supermarket. Now, we really are back in business!
I love it when a plan comes together - especially if it comes together completely serendipitously.
