I want to ride my bicycle....

Almost another whole month has scooted past without my putting fingers to keyboard to blog further adventures in Small Worlds. 
  
The main reason is the difficulty I find in connecting from England to the Czech Republic, and vice versa.   Over the years I have been travelling to and fro I have found that when I am in one country, I become completely disconnected from the other.   This can lead to all sorts of difficulties with things like paying bills.....

And it seems that the disconnection also extends to writing blogposts. However I did arm myself with photos before I left the CR and so I shall try to reconnect now for a little while.

When last seen, the mouse troupe were exercising their cycling skills and where there are bikes there are inevitably punctures which require the services of a rijwielhersteller.  

For those who don't know it, this is a nod in the direction of a wonderful Dutch card game called "Stap Op", in which you cycle across Holland meeting all kinds of problems en route.   (It also exists in a far more boring French form called "Milles Bornes", which involves cars.)

But I, like the mice, want to ride my bicycle.....which means that one needs a rijwielhersteller, better known in English as a bicycle repairman.

Which of course brings me to the next breadbin.   I had actually planned to make a car mechanic's workshop

but when the idea of the multiple breadbin window display came to me I realised that it would be faster and easier to make a cycle shop.    

I had a few miniature tools, mainly from a plastic mechanic's kit, but I needed a great deal more than that.   So out came one of the plastic sorting boxes - the one with all the stuff that couldn't really be identified, and I scrabbled through it, pulling out anything that to me looked vaguely mechanical.   Or could be made to look mechanical with the judicious use of black or metallic paint.

If you study the later pictures carefully you may spot some of the objects, reincarnated.  Click on the photos to get a better view.....

The mechanic was easy - he too was part of the plastic kit and I hauled him down from the roof of the thatched house, where he was trying to finish off the excellent job done by my Dutch friends, Bep and Irmel, and placed him in his proper milieu.

 














He was very happy to be back at ground level - he'd never had a good head for heights.

I had great fun painting little bits of plastic and metal which I then distributed round the breadbin.   A useless wooden fridge with a broken door, became a steel cupboard in which the rijwielhersteller keeps his most dangerous tools. 

I have no clue what many of the plastic and metal things I found were originally intended for - these things for example.   But they made useful brackets to hang tools on the wall.

My dread is that someone who really knows about these things will one day look into this breadbox and question me closely as to the purpose of many of them....

I also gathered up as many tyres as I could find in my storage boxes.....

It was easy to find wonderful vintage adverts for various makes of bicycle - life is so much easier now things can simply be downloaded from the internet and printed.   When I started in this hobby, forty or so years ago, one had to scour catalogues for tiny pictures of a usable size.   Later the reducing photocopier made a useful appearance, but one still had to reduce each picture many times to get it down to the size that was needed.

The final touch for this breadbin was to add as many bicycles as possible, without over-crowding it too much.   I leave you with a couple of close-ups of the whole thing.

Thank you for joining me again in Small Worlds.   I hope to be with you again before Christmas, with a seasonal offering, though this time not in a breadbin.   In the meantime - Happy Advent to all of you.