I went over to the Little Day In with Russell, who was volunteering, since it was a benefit for an organization that he works with. Since it was well before the show started, I pulled the Bongo in next to a grassy area and decided to put out the awning to make lunch, sit and read, as it was a hot, still afternoon. I unrolled the awning and turned around to get the tent pegs used to hold down the awning poles. Right at that moment, a gust of wind came up and lifted the awning straight up. By the time I pulled it down, one of the aluminum end brackets had broken in half.  

 

It took about an hour and a half to get it back together enough to roll the awning back in, but it was now unusable. Arnie knew a welder on the island who might have been able to weld aluminum, but we were unable to contact him.

 

On the way to Peter’s I looked up and called the company that distributes the Bongo’s Omnistor awning. They, unfortunately, told me they do not import the Bongo’s model and had no parts for it. The also told me that this model was common on Japanese import campervans--you’d think that, since they knew that they were common, they’d import parts for it.

 

After our meeting on Wednesday, Peter decided to take a look at my problem and decided that we could fix it. I took the broken part off while he rooted around in his garage shop and came up with some heavy duty aluminum bar stock (left over from something he’d taken apart) and we went about making a sort of splint for the broken pieces. Since it need to have several large holes drilled in it and cut it into an odd shape, it took a couple of hours of sawing, drilling and filing, but a bracket was formed and screwed to the broken pieces and, lo and behold, the awning works again. He even came up with an old boat fitting to fix a pivot that was always broken at the end of the back arm of the awning.