Fixing Buddha…
Recently, PlayaResale received a Buddha fountain into inventory, a very cool piece but it was broken when we received it. It had been handled a little roughly on the journey over from Indonesia and one of the brackets that holds the two pieces together had come loose from the fiber-glass. Over the year that it has been in Playa Del Carmen, the bracket piece became lost and the pump had been mishandled so that it only worked if you shook it a couple of times and then sat it in the correct position in the water.
The Buddha Fountain
We had a little bit of free time around PlayaResale, so we decided that the best thing to do was fix the fountain. First, we started out by sanding around the area that the old bracket had been attached to. Val and I have been playing with fiber-glass every chance we get for the last couple of years, somebody taught me how to do it a few years ago as a cheap way to fix leaks in tinacos. I have been trying to perfect the art because I have a fantasy about one day building a boat or something. Anyway, it was a pretty easy fix and we used a piece of metal we had in the useful-stuff pile to make the bracket.
We didn’t know the pump was broken until we plugged it in, it just didn’t work. Then when I picked it up to look at it it started to hum a little bit. After a good shake it actually started to sound like a pump, but it wouldn’t move any water. Val and I kind of looked at it for a while and decided that we could fix it. We couldn’t. I went this morning and purchased a little fountain pump from the pool store on 2nd and 35th for $450 pesos. I was happy enough with this price, I had looked around at other fountain pumps and they were over $1000 pesos.
The rock place in the Ejido, 95th and Constituyentes(sort of?)
I went out to a little tile place I remembered in the Ejido to get some river rock to fill up the fountain, boy that place has changed. I remember a few years ago the tile place was just a corner local on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. When I went today I got a chance to look at the massive stone-yard they have, as well as their “Casa de Muestra” which is an enormous, out-of-place building with about five different type of architecture and stone finishes everywhere. I was really impressed.
So we got the fountain running and stuck the rocks in it. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that the rocks were filthy and that filth would come out in the water. I think we are going to have to do something about that, maybe change the water, but for right now it looks good in front of PlayaResale.
